PREFACE
The titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” do not emerge in a vacuum. They are not abstract labels dropped straight out of heaven, nor are they timeless doctrinal tags awaiting eventual systematization in later creeds. Rather, they are products of history: shaped, stretched, and reconfigured across centuries of worship, trauma, political reordering, and theological imagination.
In this respect, the development of these titles belongs to the same long arc as traced in our most recent past series covering the (Mesopotamian) Evolution of Worship and Religion. Here, ancient Near Eastern religion moved from city-based polytheisms and divine councils to the exaltation of high gods; from sacral kingship to more interiorized forms of piety; from cyclical myth to linear-apocalyptic expectation. Israel did not stand apart from these currents. It participated in them for their own purposes and reasons - at times resisting religious teachings, reworking, re-imagining, or intensifying them around the evolving figure of Yahweh and the community that bore his name (sic, "Y'Israel" - "He who struggles or contends with El (God)" re Jacob's wrestling with the divine, Gen 32.24-30).
"That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two servant wives and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them over the stream, he himself went over and was alone. Then a man wrestled with him till daybreak, dislocating his hip, and renaming Jacob "Israel.""Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.""So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel ("the face of God"), saying, 'It is because I saw God face to face, and my life has been preserved.'"Significance:
- Name Change - Jacob's name changes from Jacob (supplanter) to Israel (contends with God).
- New Identity - The encounter marks a pivotal moment, revealing a new identity and relationship with God.
- Blessing - Jacob's persistence in clinging to the figure for a blessing results in divine affirmation, even after being weakened.
I.
Within that evolving landscape came the development of the titles:
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The idiom now translated “Son of Man” (ben ʾadam / bar enash) first functioned simply as a way of saying “a human being,” a mortal in distinction from the divine.
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The designation “Son of God” (ben ʾelohim) which was applied to Israel as God’s “firstborn,” and to angelic beings in God's divine council, as well as to Israel's Davidic kings as Yahweh’s adopted royal sons.
These usages are formed deeply within the cultural landscapes of the Ancient Near Eastern and Israelite traditions... and not yet part of any distant Christian teachings. The Semitic apertures draw from a world in which the gods had children, kings were divinized or semi-divinized, and the language of sonship served to mark status, favor, and vocation rather than metaphysical essence.
Over time, however, these nomenclatures began to bear more weight. In the crucible of exile, imperial domination (Babylonian, Persian, and Roman), and the rise of apocalyptic hope, older idioms were taken up into new symbolic roles. The simple “son of man” of prophetic address became, in *Daniel and related literature, a heavenly, eschatological figure who receives authority from the Ancient of Days (referring to El/God's eternal, sovereign rule). The royal “son of God” language surrounding the Davidic king was intensified and transposed onto messianic expectation, even as concrete kingship vanished and hope shifted toward a future anointed one who would finally enact God’s justice.
*The 2nd-Century Book of Daniel is an Inter-Testamental Apocalypse written during the time of the Maccabees (167-164 BCE), referring to Israel's Babylonian several exiles (609, 605, 601, 598/97, 587, 582 BCE) and written or collected during the unwanted Greek rule of Antiochus Epiphanes IV.
It is precisely into this already-layered semantic field that Jesus and the early Jesus movement come forward. The Gospels, Apostle Paul, and other early Christian writings, do not invent these titles ex nihilo; they inherit and reconfigure them in light of the conviction that God has acted definitively in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ cryptic use of “Son of Man” and the early church’s bold application of “Son of God” to him are intelligible only when read against this deep background.
II.
At the same time, this developmental story sits firmly within the concerns raised in our earlier work on biblical inerrancy and the evolving character of Scripture. An inerrantist framework typically assumes that terms such as “Son of Man” and “Son of God” carry a single, stable meaning from Genesis to Revelation - often retrofitted to the church's systematic categories of later dogmatics (e.g., “Son of Man = Christ’s humanity,” “Son of God = Christ’s divinity”). But the historical record points in a different direction. What we see instead is a layered process of theological semantic growth and re-interpretation:
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The same phrase of "Son of Man" can mean “mortal human” in one era and “heavenly eschatological figure” in another.
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And the "Son of God" title can denote both royal adoption and covenantal status in one period and yet later become an ontological claim about eternal divine Sonship in a later period.
If Scripture is approached as a living, historically embedded tradition, rather than a flat repository of timeless propositions, this evolution is not a problem to be explained away. It is, instead, evidence of the Bible’s dynamic character: communities working with inherited language and meaning to articulate newly perceived realities of God and world - even as it did with Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection. Within such a framework, development is not a betrayal of revelation but one of its primary modes.
This essay therefore proceeds on two convictions:
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That the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” must be read within the concrete historical horizons that first gave them meaning - from Ancient Near Eastern royal ideology and Israel’s prophetic literature, through exilic and post-exilic reforms, apocalyptic imagination, the Jesus tradition, and the theological debates of the early church.
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That the shifting meanings of these titles across the centuries are not mere accidents, but integral to the way divine revelation was being received and mediated: through evolving (existent) concepts, contested cultural interpretations, and ever-deepening attempts to describe the continually evolving epistemic realization of God's relationship with humanity in its periodic eras, eventuating towards the Christian confession of Jesus as God's sent/anointed Messiah.
In what follows, then, we will not treat “Son of Man” and “Son of God” as static doctrinal labels waiting to be decoded by later theology. We will instead follow these ascribed titles as historical trajectories - as relational phrases whose meanings are bent and expanded by each new historic experience, event, context, crisis, and act of theological imagination. Only against that backdrop can we understand how the early church eventually came to speak of Jesus Christ in Nicene terms of Risen God-Man, and why those later metaphysical formulations cannot simply be read back, uncritically, into Israel’s Scriptures or even into the earliest Christian texts themselves.
It is within this broader frame - the evolution of worship and religion from Mesopotamia onward, and the non-static, processual character of biblical language - that the following introduction and subsequent sections should be read.
Few christological titles have undergone such dramatic semantic transformation as “Son of Man” and “Son of God.” In popular Christian reception, these two expressions have come to serve as an early Christological binary: one supposedly expressing the humanity of Jesus, and the other the divinity of Jesus. Yet this binary is not only absent from the biblical world - it is, in fact, contradictory to the meanings these terms originally held in Ancient Israel and Second Temple Judaism.
To reconstruct the development of these titles, one must resist the temptation to impose later theological meanings onto earlier texts. Instead, each historic era confers it's own meaning upon these titles:
- Israel’s undivided monarchy,
- the Southern Kingdom's Exilic Period
- Post-Exilic Judaism
- Apocalyptic Judaism,
- the Jesus movement,
- the earliest post-Easter communities
- 2nd-3rd Century Christianity
- the Nicene period
- Post-Nicene Church eras
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“Son of Man” begins primarily as an idiom for a human being, develops in apocalyptic Judaism into a heavenly eschatological figure, and is later adopted by the Jesus tradition in enigmatic, polyvalent ways.
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“Son of God” begins in Israel as a title for the king, Israel itself, and angelic beings, develops as a relational and vocational title for the Messiah, and only later becomes a metaphysical designation expressing Jesus’ ontological divinity.
Thus, the story of these titles is not one of fixed definitions, but of historical evolution, interpretive layering, and theological recontextualization. The task of this essay is to illuminate these shifts carefully and thoroughly.
Any attempt to understand the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” must begin with the idioms and conceptual worlds of the Hebrew Bible, for it is here that these expressions first acquire meaning. Crucially, their earliest usages reflect the linguistic habits, theological commitments, and sociopolitical realities of Ancient Israel, and not the later messianic or Christological associations retroactively attributed to them by subsequent Jewish and Christian interpreters. Far from functioning as technical titles or doctrinal markers, each expression arises naturally from the narrative, poetic, and liturgical fabric of Israel’s Scriptures, bearing meanings that are at once modest, relational, and embedded in the cosmology of the Ancient Near East.
A. “Son of Man” in Ancient Israel
The phrase “son of man” (Hebrew ben ʾadam) belongs to the sphere of human anthropology in the biblical imagination. It is neither a titular designation nor an honorific, but rather an idiomatic way of referring to a mortal human being. The idiom parallels the broader ANE linguistic contrast between divine beings, who possess permanence or transcendence, and human beings, who are characterized by frailty, finitude, and dependency. In Mesopotamian and Egyptian literature alike, humans are regularly described in terms that highlight their limited lifespan, their creatureliness, and their subordination to the gods. Israel participates in this tradition but reframes it around the singular sovereignty of Yahweh and the covenantal relationship binding God and people.
This anthropological usage is seen most clearly in the prophetic literature, especially the book of Ezekiel, where the prophet addresses himself (or is addressed by) nearly one hundred times as the “son of man.” The expression serves not as a title of elevation but as a reminder of Ezekiel’s mortal status over against the majesty and agency of Yahweh. The repeated address underscores the asymmetry between human messenger and divine speaker, emphasizing that the prophet’s authority derives wholly from the God who commissions him.
Ezekiel, where God repeatedly calls the prophet “son of man” (more than 90 times). Here, ben ʾadam emphasizes the prophet’s mortality and creatureliness in contrast to the divine voice addressing him.
In wisdom and poetic texts, the idiom preserves this meaning. Psalm 8.4, for example, sets “man” and “son of man” in parallel as designations for humanity as a whole, evoking its insignificance in the cosmic scale and its surprising dignity in being remembered by God. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible does ben ʾadam function as a messianic or eschatological title; nor does it bear any of the later theological freight connected to Jesus’ human nature. Its meaning is humble, descriptive, and rooted in a contrast between divine transcendence and human finitude.
Wisdom literature and various poetic texts (e.g., Ps 8:4), where “son of man” stands parallel to terms meaning human, mortal, or frail creature. In other words, the Old Testament usage is overwhelmingly anthropological, not messianic, and certainly not metaphysical. The idiom functions as a way of saying: “You, human creature - are finite, mortal, vulnerable.”
There is no hint, in Israel’s earliest traditions, of “Son of Man” as a divine figure, an eschatological figure, or a title referring to the Messiah. No Jewish interpreter prior to the post-exilic period seems to have understood the phrase in any extraordinary or exalted sense.
B. “Son of God” in Ancient Israel
Israel
In dramatic contrast, the expression “son of God” (ben ʾelohim, benê ʾelohim) operates in an entirely different conceptual register. Unlike “son of man,” which denotes creaturely limitation, “son of God” evokes divine status, relationship, and vocation. Its earliest and most significant usage is collective, not individual:
In Exodus 4.22, Israel is designated as Yahweh’s “firstborn son,” a metaphor articulating the nation’s chosen status and covenantal intimacy.
Hosea 11.1 reiterates this motif by recalling God’s deliverance of “my son” from Egypt. Here sonship expresses belonging, divine favor, and covenant identity, not metaphysical sonhood nor any humanized-ontological participation in divinity.
Divine Councils, Angels
A second major usage appears in the divine council traditions, where the “sons of God” refer to the heavenly beings who surround Yahweh and execute his purposes. This usage is encountered in: Job 1-2 and echoed in certain psalms (Ps 89), derives from a wider ANE cosmology in which high gods preside over assemblies of subordinate deities or celestial messengers. Israel’s monotheizing tendencies gradually transform this imagery, subordinating the “sons of God” as angelic servants, rather than divine peers, yet the terminology persists as a vestige of earlier mythic structures.
Kings
A third, and most consequential usage for later developments, is the royal usage. Within Ancient Near Eastern royal ideology, kings were regularly described as sons of a deity, whether by divine birth, adoption, or election. Israel adopts this political theology but adapts it to its unique covenantal monotheism.
In passages such as 2 Samuel 7.14 and Psalm 2.7, the Davidic king is named God’s “son” at his enthronement, an act of symbolically adopting the king as Yahweh’s representative on earth. This sonship is legal and relational, rooted in covenantal commitment and royal obligation. The king is not divine; he is chosen. He is not begotten from eternity; he is “begotten” on the day of coronation, meaning installed, affirmed, and empowered to rule as Yahweh’s vicegerent:
Psalm 2:7 proclaims: “You are my son; today I have begotten you.”
2 Sam 7:14 says of the Davidic king: “I will be his father, and he shall be my son.”
This is royal, adoptive language. The king is “begotten” on the day of enthronement, not from eternity. The title expresses legitimacy, vocation, God's paternal favor, the covenant with David.
Summary
Thus in Israel:
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“Son of Man” = human being
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“Son of God” = king, angels, or Israel itself; conveys role, relationship, or status
Neither title functions as a metaphysical category (ontological identity).
Nor does either title anticipate Nicene Christology.
It is essential to underscore what these usages do not mean. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible does “son of God” indicate ontological divinity, metaphysical preexistence, or participation in a Trinitarian relation. Such meanings arise only in the theological imagination of later Christian centuries.
Likewise, “son of man” never denotes a heavenly redeemer, messiah, or divine-human figure; it signifies only humanity, often with emphasis on its limitations or vulnerability.
Thus, by the close of the monarchic and early exilic periods, the semantic landscape is unambiguous. “Son of Man” refers to a mortal human, typically in contrast to divine sovereignty. “Son of God” refers either to Israel as God’s covenant partner, the Davidic king as God’s anointed representative, or the members of the divine council.
Neither term points forward in any direct sense to the Christological interpretations later associated with Jesus; neither anticipates Nicene metaphysics or Chalcedonian formulations. Instead, each expression reflects the lived religious world of Ancient Israel - one shaped by covenant, kingship, prophetic call, and an evolving monotheism that continued to negotiate its relationship with the sacred heritage of the broader Near East.
These early meanings constitute the baseline from which all later reinterpretations proceed. Only by grasping their original semantic fields can we appreciate the dramatic transformations they undergo in the exilic, post-exilic, and apocalyptic eras, and the even more radical reconfigurations they eventually receive within the Jesus movement and the emergent theology of the early church.
III. THE EXILIC & POST-EXILIC TRANSITION: SHIFTING COSMOLOGIES, RISING APOCALYPTICISM (586-150 BCE)
The collapse of the Davidic monarchy, the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and the subsequent exile to Babylon constitute one of the most decisive theological ruptures in the history of Israel. Under the weight of imperial domination and the loss of national sovereignty, Israel’s inherited religious vocabulary - rooted in covenantal promises, royal ideology, and temple-centered worship - was compelled to undergo a profound process of reconfiguration. This period marks the transition from the older monarchic worldview to the imaginative landscape that would eventually generate Jewish apocalypticism, and it is within this crucible of crisis and renewal that the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” begin their first major semantic transformations.
Exile exposed the limits of Israel’s received theological structures. The royal ideology that had once proclaimed Davidic kings as God’s “son” now seemed bankrupt in the absence of any king at all. The promises of divine protection appeared shattered. In response, Israel began to reimagine its future not through the restoration of earlier political structures, but through visions of cosmic judgment, eschatological reversal, and divine intervention that would transcend historical kingship altogether. If monarchy failed, Yahweh’s sovereignty would need to be expressed in new forms; if earthly institutions collapsed, hope would migrate into a more expansive and mythic horizon.
Son of Man
Within this evolving worldview, the phrase “son of man” - previously an idiom of mortality - began to acquire symbolic elasticity. In prophetic writings composed or edited during the exile, the anthropological meaning remained intact, yet the contrast between human frailty and divine transcendence took on heightened urgency. Human beings appeared increasingly powerless before imperial powers; only Yahweh could redeem. Yet it is not until the post-exilic period, particularly in the book of Daniel, in the 2nd Century BCE, that the old idiom is finally reconfigured into something qualitatively new. The shift is not abrupt but evolutionary in its symbolic visionary language, emerging from the interplay of older prophetic themes, the renewed reflections on divine sovereignty, and the influence of broader ANE and Persian cosmological motifs.
Son of God
The expression “son of God” likewise underwent pressure and transformation in this transitional period. The royal formula, once attached to the Davidic throne, could no longer function in its earlier sense. Without a reigning king to embody God’s rule, Israel’s hope for divine sonship began to shift toward future expectation: sonship no longer described a present monarch but was redeployed into the category of messianic anticipation, though still expressed in relational and vocational terms rather than metaphysical ones. Israel itself, long named God’s “firstborn,” increasingly interpreted its corporate suffering and restoration in filial imagery. God as father, Israel as child - this relational framework now bore the tension of exile and the hope for return.
New Language and Hope
The post-exilic world also exposed Israel to new cultural and religious currents. Under Persian rule, ideas about cosmic dualism, eschatological judgment, angelic mediation, and the final defeat of evil were more widely diffused. While Jewish religion maintained its distinctiveness, it nonetheless absorbed aspects of this wider religious imagination of Babylon and Persia. The figure of the heavenly intermediary - variously depicted in Persian, Babylonian, and later Hellenistic traditions - entered Jewish conceptual vocabulary and provided new possibilities for interpreting older linguistic forms. Thus when the book of Daniel finally introduces “one like a son of man” appearing on the clouds, it draws upon both Israel’s prophetic heritage and the expanding symbolic repertoire of the ancient world. The idiom is transformed from a designation of human mortality into an apocalyptic figure who participates in divine authority and receives an everlasting kingdom.
Similarly, conceptions of the heavenly council - in which “sons of God” served as divine attendants to God's Self - began to merge with Israel’s reflections on angelic beings, watchers, and mediating powers. “Son of God” did not yet become a messianic title, but the association between divine sonship and heavenly authority strengthened, laying groundwork for later developments. What had once been confined to royal enthronement or communal identity began, in embryonic form, to serve as a symbol of future divine action that would transcend the boundaries of ordinary kingship.
Summary
The theological landscape of this period is therefore marked by a notable dialectic:
- on one hand, a deepening sense of human limitation and historical vulnerability;
- on the other, a widening horizon of divine possibility expressed in increasingly mythic and cosmic terms.
The very categories that had once belonged to political theology - kingship, sonship, royal dominion - were now projected into eschatological expectation. Israel’s hope for restoration was no longer merely national but cosmic; not merely political but apocalyptic.
This transition also demonstrates how profoundly Israel’s language could evolve while still remaining continuous with its earlier traditions. The old idiom ben ʾadam retains its anthropological roots even as it becomes a vehicle for eschatological imagination. The royal formula “son of God” preserves its covenantal background even as its horizon shifts from present monarchy to future redemption. These semantic transformations reflect an underlying theological process: Israel learning to articulate divine agency in a world where familiar institutions had collapsed, and where new interpretive frameworks were required to sustain hope.
By the close of the post-exilic era, the conceptual seeds had been planted for the full emergence of Jewish apocalypticism. Titles that once operated within modest anthropological and royal domains were now ready to bear cosmic significance. They had not yet become messianic in the explicit sense that later Judaism and early Christianity would develop, but they were available, adaptable, and poised for reinterpretation. It is within this dynamic and transitional environment that the more dramatic developments of Apocalyptic Judaism take shape, transforming “Son of Man” and “Son of God” into figures capable of bearing the eschatological weight they would assume in the generations preceding Jesus.
IV. LATE SECOND TEMPLE APOCALYPTICISM (150 BCE-70 CE): EXPANDING THE COSMIC DRAMA
By the second century BCE, the fragmentary beginnings of apocalyptic imagination, already discernible in late prophetic and exilic literature, had coalesced into a distinct and vibrant theological worldview. The trauma of foreign domination, the intensification of eschatological longing, and an increasingly elaborate angelology shaped the contours of a new religious imagination - one that relocated divine action from the predictable rhythms of Israel's national history into the vast and mythically charged canvas of cosmic warfare, heavenly realms, and eschatological judgment. Within this expanding symbolic world, the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” acquired new layers of meaning far beyond the semantic boundaries that had defined them in earlier biblical literature.
I.
The book of Daniel stands at the watershed of this development. Written during the *Seleucid persecutions, Daniel fuses older prophetic motifs with the visionary idioms characteristic of apocalyptic thought. Most famously, Daniel 7 introduces a figure described as “one like a son of man,” who appears before the Ancient of Days and receives everlasting dominion and kingdom. The phrase, retaining its linguistic sense of “one resembling a human being,” is now deployed within a visionary, symbolic framework in which it no longer designates ordinary humanity but instead functions as a divine representative, heavenly, or transcendent figure. The contrast between the monstrous, beastly empires and the human-like figure underscores a moral and spiritual polarity: earthly regimes are dehumanizing, chaotic, and violent, whereas the figure “like a son of man” embodies the restored order, justice, and divine authority that will characterize the eschatological world of the future.
*Seleucid persecutions, primarily under Antiochus Epiphanes IV (175-164 BCE), involved brutal attempts to Hellenize Judea, forcing Greek culture and pagan worship, culminating in the desecration of the Jerusalem Temple with Zeus, banning Jewish practices like circumcision, and executing Jews for observing their faith, sparking the famous Maccabean Revolt (167-160 BCE) and leading to an independent Jewish kingdom.
Key Aspects of the Persecution
- Forced Hellenization: Antiochus IV aimed to unify his diverse empire by imposing Greek culture, language, and religion, but this clashed directly with Jewish monotheism.
- Religious Suppression: He banned core Jewish practices like Sabbath observance, Torah study, and circumcision, making them capital offenses.
- Temple Desecration: The ultimate offense was turning the Second Temple in Jerusalem into a shrine for Zeus, sacrificing pigs on its altar, and renaming the city "Antioch in Judaea".
- Internal Jewish Conflict: The persecution was partly triggered by an internal struggle for the High Priesthood, with Hellenized Jews seeking more Greek influence.
The Maccabean Revolt
- Spark: A Jewish priest, Mattathias, and his sons (the Maccabees) in Modin refused to comply with Antiochus's decrees, leading to a rebellion.
- Outcome: The Maccabees, using guerrilla tactics, fought the Seleucid army, eventually rededicating the Temple and establishing the Hasmonean Dynasty (an independent Jewish kingdom from 141-37 BCE).
Significance
- The persecutions are a central story in Hanukkah, commemorating the rededication of the Temple.
- They represent one of history's first recorded religious persecutions, highlighting a clash between enforced cultural assimilation and religious identity.
II.
Interpreters debate whether Daniel intended this figure to be:
- i) purely symbolic of the faithful people (sic, a faithful remnant or remnant figure),
- ii) a collective representation of Israel, or
- iii) whether he envisioned a literal heavenly intermediary invested with divine prerogatives.
What is clear, however, is that the phrase undergoes a radical recontextualization. What had once merely marked human mortality becomes, in Daniel, the vehicle for depicting an exalted eschatological agent whose authority derives from God’s own throne. The transformation is conceptual rather than lexical: the term itself remains the familiar idiom for “human one,” but its function now shifts dramatically as it participates in the visionary grammar of apocalyptic revelation.
This Danielic reconfiguration proved extraordinarily regenerative. In the centuries that followed, Jewish apocalyptic literature elaborated upon this new eschatological “Son of Man,” particularly in the Similitudes of 1 Enoch (also known as 1 Enoch 37–71, dated between 40 BCE - 70 CE), which present one of the most detailed portraits of a heavenly, preexistent, and messianic Son of Man figure. Here the Son of Man is not merely symbolic but a distinct, personal agent who executes divine judgment, reveals heavenly mysteries, vindicates the righteous, and serves as the mediator of God’s eschatological triumph. The Similitudes also attribute preexistence to this figure and describe him in close association with personified Wisdom, thereby deepening the conceptual resources available for later Christological appropriation. Though scholarly debate continues regarding the precise dating and provenance of this section of 1 Enoch, most agree that it reflects ideas circulating in at least a segment of Judaism during the late Second Temple period.
Parallel developments appear in 4 Ezra (90-100 CE) and 2 Baruch (post-70 CE to the early 2nd Century), texts written in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. These writings, responding to yet another catastrophic rupture, recast hope in terms of a divinely empowered messianic figure who will overturn oppressive empires and inaugurate the age to come. While each text navigates the tension between divine sovereignty and human agency differently, both affirm the expectation of an eschatological redeemer whom God will empower to judge the nations and restore Israel. In 4 Ezra, this redeemer is described with imagery that clearly echoes Daniel’s “son of man,” further demonstrating the deepening entrenchment of this category within Jewish apocalyptic eschatology.
III.
During the same period, the title “Son of God” also began to expand within certain strands of Jewish thought, though in ways more restrained than the dramatic evolution of “Son of Man.” The older royal and covenantal usages persisted, but in apocalyptic texts the expectation of a coming anointed leader - a messiah - took on more sharply defined contours. While these texts do not attribute metaphysical divinity to the messiah, they do assign him unparalleled authority, righteousness, and a unique relationship with God. In this sense, the messianic son of God is not divine in nature but is God’s chosen agent of eschatological restoration, the one through whom divine justice will be enacted and Israel’s hope realized.
Angelology and divine council traditions also continued to inform Jewish speculation about heavenly beings, some of whom were described in terms associated with divine sonship. This angelological backdrop is important not because it anticipates later Trinitarian reflection, but because it provided the symbolic scaffolding by which early Christians could reinterpret the relationship between God and Jesus using familiar Jewish categories of heavenly mediation, divine commission, and exalted authority.
Summary
Apocalyptic Judaism therefore represents the decisive period in which the conceptual range of both titles expands dramatically. “Son of Man” evolves from a simple idiom for mortal humanity into a richly elaborated eschatological figure endowed with dominion, judgment, and heavenly origin. “Son of God,” though less radically transformed, acquires stronger messianic resonance and becomes increasingly associated with God’s decisive future intervention. The former lifts up a human agent while the latter expands ties to God's Self. These developments are not uniform across all Jewish groups, but they collectively contribute to a symbolic repertoire that was readily available to Jesus, his followers, and the early Christian communities.
It is crucial to emphasize that these reinterpretations remain thoroughly Jewish and rooted in the historical and theological conditions of late Second Temple religion. They do not yet anticipate Christian doctrines of incarnation, ontological divinity, or eternal sonship. Instead, they reflect Judaism’s attempt to articulate faithfulness and hope amid imperial oppression, to imagine a future in which God’s justice would triumph over the apparent chaos of history. In this setting, apocalyptic language served as both resistance and assurance: resistance against the dehumanizing reality of empire, and assurance that God’s ultimate purposes would prevail through a figure endowed with divine authority.
Thus, by the time Jesus of Nazareth emerged within the Galilean countryside, the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” were already charged with eschatological significance, ready to be invoked, reinterpreted, and transformed once more in light of new experiences and theological claims. The symbolic field had been prepared; the theological vocabulary had been enriched. It is within this apocalyptic matrix that the Jesus movement would appropriate, expand, and ultimately redefine these titles in ways that neither the Hebrew Bible nor apocalyptic Judaism had foreseen.
V. JESUS AND THE EARLIEST GOSPELS: THE TITLES TRANSFORMED
When the Jesus movement first took shape in early first-century Palestine, it did so within a symbolic world already furnished with the apocalyptic resources developed in the previous generations. Concepts of divine judgment, heavenly intermediaries, eschatological vindication, and messianic expectation circulated with varying intensity throughout Jewish communities under Roman occupation. The titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God,” by this time enriched with apocalyptic meanings, formed part of the imaginative lexicon available to teachers, prophets, and would-be messiahs operating within this landscape. Yet it is a distinctive feature of the Jesus tradition that these titles are not simply inherited or repeated; they are refracted through the life, ministry, and self-understanding of Jesus in ways that subtly - and sometimes dramatically—shift their contours. The Gospels preserve these refracted meanings, though often in layered and enigmatic forms.
Among the two titles, “Son of Man” occupies a uniquely prominent place in Jesus’ recorded speech. The Synoptic Gospels routinely depict Jesus referring to himself as “the Son of Man” - a practice unparalleled in Second Temple Judaism. Whether this usage reflects Jesus’ own idiom or the interpretive memory of the early church remains debated among scholars, but what can be said with confidence is that the Gospels integrate this title into Jesus’ ministry along three principal lines. First, there are statements in which “Son of Man” simply functions as a self-reference, describing Jesus’ present activity: the Son of Man heals, forgives, teaches, eats, and wanders without a place to lay his head. In these contexts, the term carries no apocalyptic force and resembles the idiomatic sense of “human one,” though now with the distinct resonance of a chosen vocation.
A second group of sayings depicts the suffering Son of Man, predicting rejection, betrayal, death, and subsequent vindication. These logia mark a significant adaptation of apocalyptic idiom. Whereas Daniel’s “one like a son of man” is a triumphant figure arriving at the end of history, Jesus associates the title with humiliation and apparent defeat. The juxtaposition of suffering and exaltation introduces a paradoxical structure into the title itself: the one who will ultimately receive divine authority and judge the nations is at the same time the one who must be handed over and executed. This inversion becomes a hallmark of the Gospel tradition and a key to its theological logic. If the apocalyptic Son of Man is the bringer of God’s justice, then in Jesus he is also the one through whom God’s justice is enacted by embracing human suffering and death.
A third set of sayings reintroduces the Danielic son of man in its eschatological grandeur, speaking of the Son of Man who will come on the clouds, who will gather the nations, who will judge the living and the dead. In these passages, Jesus (or the Gospel writers) draw explicitly upon the imagery of Daniel 7, presenting the Son of Man as the agent of divine judgment and final consummation. The remarkable feature of the Gospel usage is not merely the appropriation of apocalyptic imagery but its fusion with the earthly and suffering motifs. That is, the Gospels present the same figure, Jesus,both as the one who must be crucified and as the one who will return in glory. The title thus spans the full narrative arc of Jesus’ ministry: his life, passion, resurrection, and anticipated eschatological role. This polyvalence is unparalleled in Jewish literature and sets the stage for its later Christological interpretation.
The title “Son of God” appears in the Gospels with a different set of emphases. Unlike “Son of Man,” which Jesus uses self-referentially, “Son of God” is more often spoken about Jesus by others - by heavenly voices at his baptism and transfiguration, by demons confronting his authority, by disciples who come to recognize him, and by opponents who take offense at what they perceive as implicit claims to divine prerogative. In the Synoptic Gospels, the title operates within its established Jewish range: it signifies divine favor, messianic identity, and extraordinary authority. When a voice from heaven declares, “You are my beloved son,” it evokes Psalm 2 and the theology of royal adoption; when demons cry out, “You are the Son of God,” they acknowledge his power as one uniquely authorized by God. None of these usages yet suggest metaphysical divinity; they remain relational and vocational, highlighting Jesus’ unique commissioning and his intimate alignment with God’s will.
Nevertheless, even within this Jewish framework, the Gospel narratives subtly extend the meaning of “Son of God.” Jesus is portrayed not merely as a royal messiah awaiting enthronement but as one whose authority transcends the boundaries of human kingship. He forgives sins, commands nature, speaks with a quasi-divine immediacy, and embodies the very presence of God among the people. The narrative logic increasingly links Jesus’ identity as Son of God with divine activity, not simply divine approval. This development is especially pronounced in the Gospel of John, where the title is woven into an explicitly theological narrative of preexistence, incarnation, and revelatory union between Jesus and the Father. Even so, Johannine reflection remains rooted in the symbolic world of Jewish Wisdom literature and theophanic tradition, not yet in the metaphysical categories defined by the later creeds.
The Gospel usage of both titles is marked by deliberate ambiguity, an ambiguity that reflects the fluidity of the earliest Christian experience. For the disciples who followed Jesus, and for the communities that preserved their memories, the attempt to articulate who Jesus was required stretching the linguistic and symbolic resources inherited from Judaism. “Son of Man” and “Son of God” became vehicles for expressing Jesus’ authority, intimacy with God, vocation to suffer, and anticipated eschatological role. These titles, charged with apocalyptic resonance, were adapted to the narrative contours of Jesus’ life and death and reinterpreted in light of his resurrection.
It is important to recognize that the Gospels do not yet resolve the theological tensions embedded in these titles. They simply witness to them, preserving strands of tradition that testify both to continuity with Jewish expectations and to surprising innovations precipitated by Jesus’ ministry. The titles remain polyvalent, layered, and open-ended. Their later metaphysical precision belongs to a different historical moment, one shaped not by the immediacy of Jesus’ earthly ministry but by decades of theological reflection within the early Christian communities.
By situating the Gospel usage within its historical and literary context, one can see how the titles serve as bridges between Jewish apocalyptic hope and the emerging Christian confession of Jesus’ significance. They provide the conceptual scaffolding for understanding Jesus as both the suffering servant and the eschatological judge, both God’s chosen messiah and the one uniquely aligned with God’s presence and purposes. This dynamic interplay of continuity and innovation sets the stage for the next phase of development, in which post-Easter convictions about Jesus’ resurrection and exaltation propel these titles into new and more pronounced theological trajectories.
The period immediately following Jesus’ death marks a decisive turning point in the evolution of the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God.” While the Gospels preserve layers of tradition that reflect both Jesus’ own idiom and the interpretive activity of the communities that revered him, it is in the earliest post-Easter decades - before the composition of the Gospels, before theological reflection achieved systematic form - that the deep reconfiguration of these titles takes place. The resurrection experience, which the earliest disciples interpreted as God’s vindication of Jesus, reshaped the symbolic universe within which they understood his identity and mission. The titles inherited from Israel’s Scriptures and Jewish apocalypticism were now pressed into the service of articulating a transformed understanding of divine action in history.
In this earliest period, the title “Son of Man” begins to recede from prominence. While it appears frequently in the Gospel traditions, it is almost entirely absent from the letters of Paul and the rest of the pre-70 CE writings. This decline is not evidence against its historical usage by Jesus but underscores a shift in the interpretive priorities of the early communities. For the first generation of believers, the decisive fact was not Jesus’ use of apocalyptic self-designations but the conviction that God had raised him from the dead and exalted him to a position of heavenly authority. The resurrection became the lens through which Jesus’ entire life was reread, and it was within this rereading that other titles - particularly “Lord,” “Christ,” and “Son of God” - rose to prominence.
The relative disappearance of “Son of Man” during this period can be explained in part by its cultural embeddedness. The idiom, rich with Semitic nuance and dependent on the symbolic grammar of Jewish apocalypticism, did not easily translate into the broader Greco-Roman environment in which the early Christian mission rapidly expanded. Pauline communities, composed largely of Gentile converts, did not inhabit the symbolic world in which Danielic visions or Enochic mediators carried immediate resonance. As a result, the idiom circulated primarily within Palestinian tradition and was preserved most vividly in the Gospel tradition rather than the apostolic proclamation directed toward the broader Mediterranean world.
By contrast, the title “Son of God” flourished during this period, though with meanings that remain firmly rooted in Jewish categories rather than later metaphysical speculation. For the earliest believers, Jesus’ resurrection signified that God had appointed, vindicated, or enthroned him as the messianic agent of divine rule. Early creedal formulas embedded in the New Testament letters reflect this logic: Romans 1:3-4, for example, describes Jesus as “descended from David according to the flesh” and “appointed Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.” The language here is not concerned with eternal generation or metaphysical sonship but with eschatological installation. Jesus becomes Son of God in the sense that his resurrection marks him as the one through whom God’s dominion will be established.
Similar patterns appear in the speeches of Acts, which repeatedly proclaim that God has made Jesus “both Lord and Christ,” exalted him “to his right hand,” or “raised him up” as leader and savior. These formulations reflect a dynamic, relational understanding of Jesus’ sonship. His identity as God’s Son emerges not from ontological categories but from the drama of divine action: God raises, exalts, enthrones, and sends Jesus; Jesus obeys, suffers, and is vindicated. The earliest Christian confession thus collapses the old distinction between royal enthronement and eschatological hope. The resurrection becomes a form of enthronement, and enthronement becomes a prelude to eschatological consummation.
This understanding coexists with another trajectory that emerges especially in Pauline communities: the belief that Jesus shares in a preexistent role within God’s creative and redemptive activity. Passages such as Philippians 2:6-11 and 2 Corinthians 8:9 speak of Christ’s pre-incarnate status in terms drawn from Jewish Wisdom traditions, suggesting that he existed “in the form of God” or as one who “became poor” for the sake of humanity. These hymnic or creedal fragments are not yet expressions of Nicene metaphysics; rather, they employ the symbolic grammar of Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic literature to articulate Jesus’ cosmic significance. Christ is portrayed as the mediator of God’s purposes, the one through whom divine wisdom and redemptive intention are enacted. The title “Son of God” in this context bears the weight of divine agency, mission, and obedience, not the philosophical categories of substance, nature, or coequality.
Within this expanding theological landscape, “Son of God” thus functions along several overlapping registers. It retains its Jewish association with the messianic king, now reinterpreted through the resurrection; it participates in apocalyptic imagery that links Jesus with the divine judgment and vindication anticipated at the end of days; and in certain communities it absorbs the symbolic world of preexistent wisdom or heavenly mediation, suggesting that Jesus’ role in God’s redemptive plan transcends temporal boundaries. Yet even in its most exalted early expressions, the title does not collapse the distinction between Jesus and God. Rather, it expresses a dynamic partnership, a unique relational intimacy through which God’s purposes are enacted in history.
The early Christian usage of “Son of God” also acquires a polemic dimension in the Greco-Roman world. Roman emperors regularly bore the title Divi Filius, “son of the divine,” a political-theological designation claiming cosmic sanction for imperial authority. The early Christian proclamation that Jesus, not Caesar, is the true “Son of God” subtly but profoundly subverts imperial ideology. Here again, the title’s meaning is relational and political rather than metaphysical: it asserts the supremacy of God’s reign over the dominion of empire, locating ultimate authority in the risen Christ rather than in Rome’s rulers.
It is within this complex matrix of eschatological expectation, resurrection faith, Wisdom speculation, and imperial resistance that the earliest Christian communities forged the foundations of Christology. The titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” do not yet possess the metaphysical precision they would later acquire. Their meanings remain fluid, relational, and responsive to the needs and experiences of the communities that invoked them. Yet the fundamental trajectory is already clear: the earliest confession that God has raised Jesus from the dead compels a reimagining of divine agency, human destiny, and the shape of eschatological hope. The titles serve as interpretive touchstones in this ongoing process, anchoring the emerging Christian imagination in the symbolic world of Judaism while propelling it toward new theological horizons.
This formative period does not complete the Christological development but initiates it. The titles carry within them possibilities that will be explored, debated, and refined in the generations that follow. As the movement grows, encounters new philosophical environments, and reflects more deeply on the implications of Jesus’ resurrection and exaltation, these titles will undergo further transformation. It is to these next stages—the second- and third-century Christian engagement with Hellenistic thought—that we now turn.
One of the striking developments of this period is the virtual disappearance of “Son of Man” as a meaningful Christological category. Outside of the preservation of Gospel tradition and occasional liturgical echoes, the title scarcely appears in second-century writings. Its deeply Semitic idiom, contingent upon Jewish apocalyptic symbolism, lacked both intelligibility and persuasive power in the Hellenistic milieu. As Christianity increasingly defined itself over against Judaism—whether through the Marcionite rupture, the controversies with synagogue communities, or the gradual loss of Jewish-Christian groups—its symbolic vocabulary shifted accordingly. “Son of Man” had been central to the Jesus tradition, but its resonance depended upon a conceptual world no longer accessible to many Gentile Christians. In its place, titles more readily adaptable to philosophical and metaphysical elaboration - “Logos,” “Lord,” “Only-begotten,” “Image of God,” and especially “Son of God” - rose to prominence.
The title “Son of God” became increasingly central as Christian thinkers grappled with questions of Christ’s origin, status, and relationship to God. The early apologists - figures such as Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch - drew upon the philosophical vocabulary of middle Platonism to articulate Jesus’ divine identity. For these thinkers, Jesus was not merely God’s agent of eschatological judgment (as in apocalyptic Judaism) or God’s adoptively installed messiah (as in early Christian proclamation), but the preexistent Logos through whom God had created and ordered the world. This identification of Christ with the divine Word constituted the first major metaphysical expansion of the title “Son of God.” No longer confined to relational or vocational categories, divine sonship was now embedded within the eternal structure of God’s own being.
Yet it is important to note that this shift toward metaphysical reasoning did not immediately produce theological uniformity. Early Logos Christology simultaneously affirmed Christ’s distinction from the Father and his closeness to the divine identity. The result was a spectrum of views, ranging from those that emphasized Christ’s subordination to the Father (as in some strands of Justin and in Origen’s later writings) to those that stressed his divine status in more robust ways. The title “Son of God” was capable of bearing both emphases, which is why it became the preeminent site of theological negotiation in this period. It served as the conceptual hinge between Jewish monotheism and the developing Christian conviction that Jesus participated uniquely in divine identity.
During this period, other titles and images coalesced around “Son of God,” further shaping its meaning. The Wisdom tradition, already active in the New Testament, deepened as texts such as Proverbs 8 and Wisdom of Solomon informed Christian reflection. Christ was depicted not only as God’s Son but as God’s Wisdom, eternally present and active in creation. The imagery of light, image, and emanation from Hellenistic Jewish and Platonic sources enriched the conceptual vocabulary with which Christian thinkers described Christ’s relationship to the Father. These developments allowed “Son of God” to operate not merely within the register of messianic expectation but as a metaphysical descriptor of Christ’s eternal origin from God.
The second and third centuries also witnessed the rise of Gnostic movements, whose elaborate cosmologies and emanational theologies introduced new challenges to Christian self-definition. Gnostic speculation often employed terms like “Son” and “Logos,” but did so within frameworks that diminished the salvific significance of the historical Jesus or divided Christ from the man Jesus. In response, proto-orthodox thinkers such as Irenaeus articulated a more integrated and historical Christology, insisting that the one who is God’s eternal Son is the same one who lived, suffered, and died in human flesh. Here, the title “Son of God” was marshaled not only to express Christ’s divinity but also to secure doctrinal continuity between God’s eternal purpose and the historical Jesus. It is in this polemical context that the title begins to take on its later stability: the Son is eternally from the Father, uniquely reveals God, and has become incarnate for the sake of human redemption.
As theological reflection expanded, so too did concern for safeguarding monotheism. The more Christians attributed divine functions—creation, judgment, revelation, providence—to Christ, the more they needed conceptual frameworks capable of distinguishing Father and Son without compromising the unity of God. Here, too, the title “Son of God” served as a flexible and productive category. It allowed early theologians to speak of Christ as from the Father - sharing in the divine being, emanating from divine wisdom, or generated from the divine substance - while preserving the Father’s priority. Origen, perhaps the most influential theologian before Nicaea, employed the language of eternal generation, arguing that the Father is eternally Father and the Son eternally Son, and therefore that the Son is eternally generated from the Father’s being. Origen’s formulation was not yet Nicene, and retained subordinating elements, but it decisively moved the title “Son of God” out of the temporal realm of enthronement and into the eternal relations within the Godhead.
Throughout these centuries, then, the title “Son of God” evolved from a relational and vocational designation rooted in Jewish Scripture into a metaphysical category essential for articulating Christian monotheism in conversation with Hellenistic philosophy. Meanwhile, “Son of Man,” lacking the conceptual flexibility required to engage philosophical discourse, remained largely confined to scriptural interpretation and liturgical memory. The theological center of gravity had shifted decisively. Early Christian thinkers sought to express the mystery of Jesus’ identity not primarily by appealing to apocalyptic imagery, but by integrating him into the metaphysical and theological frameworks that defined God’s relationship to the world.
This period thus marks the conceptual transition that makes the Nicene debates both possible and inevitable. By moving “Son of God” into the sphere of eternal divine relations, and by allowing “Son of Man” to fade from active theological usage, second- and third-century Christianity created the conditions in which later councils would be compelled to clarify the nature of Christ’s divinity, his relationship to the Father, and the coherence of Christian monotheism. The groundwork for Nicene theology was laid not by a single figure or controversy but by the cumulative intellectual labor of Christian communities seeking to interpret their experience of Jesus through the categories available to them.
It is against this background of creative but contested theological development that the Nicene period enters the stage, bringing the semantic evolution of these titles to its first dogmatic culmination. To that turning point we now proceed.
IX. POST-NICENE CHURCH ERAS: CONSOLIDATION, EXPANSION, AND THE LONG SHADOW OF NICAEA
The fourth century marks a watershed in the history of Christian thought. What earlier generations had expressed through prayer, worship, scriptural interpretation, and philosophical speculation now required formal doctrinal articulation as the Christian movement moved from marginal sect to imperial religion. The controversies that culminated in the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and were refined in the subsequent decades did not arise in an intellectual vacuum; they were the inevitable consequence of the preceding century’s theological developments, wherein the title “Son of God” had migrated from relational and vocational categories into the arena of metaphysical identity. The Nicene period is best understood not as the imposition of a new theology upon an earlier age, but as the moment in which earlier trajectories reached a point of conceptual crisis.
The immediate catalyst for the Nicene controversy was the teaching of Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, who sought to preserve the monarchy of God by asserting that the Son, though exalted above all creation, was nevertheless a created being. For Arius, the Father alone was eternal and unbegotten, whereas the Son had a beginning and derived his existence from the Father’s will. This framework was not without precedent. Elements of subordinationism could be found in certain strands of second-century Logos Christology and even in the writings of Origen. Arius’ position therefore represented not a theological aberration but one logical outcome of the attempts to articulate Christ’s identity in terms of divine emanation, preexistence, and relational hierarchy. Yet for many of his contemporaries, particularly Alexander of Alexandria and his deacon Athanasius, Arius’ teaching threatened the coherence of Christian worship. If Christ were not fully divine, they argued, then the church’s prayers, hymns, and confessions risked directing worship toward a creature rather than the Creator.
It was in this context that the title “Son of God” became the focal point of doctrinal debate. Earlier Christian usage had allowed for nuanced interpretations of Christ’s sonship - sometimes emphasizing his distinction from the Father, at other times his intimate unity with the divine. The Nicene crisis forced a choice: to preserve monotheism while affirming the full divinity of Christ, “Son of God” had to be defined in a manner that excluded any possibility of createdness or inferiority. The bishops gathered at Nicaea therefore adopted the term homoousios (“of the same substance”) to describe the relationship between Father and Son. This was not a biblical term, nor was it part of traditional Christian vocabulary. Its purpose was doctrinally strategic: to rule out the Arian claim that the Son was a lesser divine being. To confess the Son as “begotten, not made, of one substance with the Father” was to assert that the divine sonship is not an act of adoption or election, nor even a metaphysical emanation in the Platonic sense, but an eternal and internal relation within the very being of God.
The Nicene formula transformed the meaning of “Son of God” with a definitiveness unmatched in earlier centuries. No longer could the title be understood in the flexible, multifaceted ways characteristic of Second Temple Judaism or early Christian proclamation. The royal theology of the Psalms, the eschatological language of apocalyptic literature, and the Wisdom idiom of Paul and John were now subsumed under a metaphysical framework in which “Son” indicated an eternal mode of divine existence. Sonship ceased to describe a relationship of obedience, mission, or divine appointment and became instead the foundational descriptor of the Son’s divine identity. The title was ontologized, its semantic field narrowed and stabilized in service of doctrinal clarity.
The Nicene transformation had a parallel effect on the title “Son of Man,” though by a different mechanism. Because the controversy centered on the nature of the Son’s divinity, “Son of Man” was not a direct participant in the debates. Yet indirectly, Nicene theology altered its interpretive significance. As “Son of God” became the fixed marker of Jesus’ divine nature, “Son of Man” was increasingly interpreted as the corresponding marker of his human nature. This reading, though foreign to Second Temple Judaism and largely absent from the New Testament, now made sense within the emerging two-natures framework that would culminate in the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE). “Son of Man,” which in the Gospels bore eschatological and symbolic weight, was now pressed into service as a christological counterbalance, signifying the full humanity of the one who was also fully divine. The original Jewish and apocalyptic resonances of the term faded, eclipsed by its function within a metaphysical system that required distinct yet unified descriptors of Jesus’ divine and human natures.
The Nicene period also refined the metaphysical grammar used to articulate these realities. The Cappadocian Fathers - Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus - introduced a conceptual distinction between ousia (essence or substance) and hypostasis (individual reality or person). This allowed Christian theologians to affirm that the Father, Son, and Spirit share one divine essence while existing as three distinct hypostases. In this refined Trinitarian grammar, the eternal begetting of the Son became the definitive expression of his divine identity, grounding the title “Son of God” not in historical events such as baptism, resurrection, or enthronement, but in an eternal relation of origin that distinguishes him from the Father while maintaining divine unity.
In this new framework, “Son of God” now pointed inward - into the eternal life of God - rather than outward to Israel’s history or the eschatological horizon. The historical and apocalyptic dimensions of the title, though preserved in scriptural exegesis, were no longer central to its doctrinal function. Instead, the title became a metaphysical name, identifying the second person of the Trinity. Meanwhile, “Son of Man” became a doctrinal placeholder for Christ’s humanity, stripped of its apocalyptic richness and repurposed to support the emerging doctrine of the hypostatic union.
Thus the Nicene era represents the moment in which the semantic evolution of these titles reached a dogmatic threshold. What had been fluid became fixed; what had been relational became ontological; what had carried symbolic and narrative force now served metaphysical clarity. This was not a betrayal of earlier traditions but a transformation necessitated by the theological and ecclesial challenges of the fourth century. The titles continued to be read in Scripture, preached in sermons, and invoked in liturgy, but their doctrinal function had irreversibly shifted. They would henceforth live within the conceptual architecture established by the councils, shaping and being shaped by the doctrinal commitments of the imperial church.
This reconfiguration, however, did not exhaust their interpretive possibilities. In the centuries that followed, Christian theologians across diverse regions and traditions revisited and reinterpreted these titles within new philosophical, devotional, and cultural contexts. To these post-Nicene developments we now turn.
The emergence of modern historical consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries marked a profound turning point in the understanding of the biblical titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God.” For nearly 1,500 years, Christian theology had interpreted these terms primarily through the metaphysical and doctrinal frameworks established in the fourth and fifth centuries. Their scriptural origins were acknowledged, yet their primary meanings were shaped by the Nicene and Chalcedonian traditions, which treated the titles as metaphysical indicators of Christ’s divine and human natures. With the rise of historical-critical scholarship, however, the inherited certainty of these dogmatic meanings began to erode. Scholars increasingly sought to understand the titles on their own historical terms—within the linguistic, cultural, and theological world of ancient Judaism—rather than through the retrospective lens of conciliar orthodoxy.
This shift produced the first major disentanglement of the terms from their traditional meanings. Beginning with scholars such as Eichhorn and Paulus, and developing significantly through the works of Strauss, Ritschl, Wrede, and Bousset, biblical scholarship gradually recovered the Jewish and apocalyptic contexts in which Jesus lived. The realization that “Son of Man” and “Son of God” were originally Jewish titles—embedded in Israel’s Scriptures and Second Temple apocalyptic expectations—challenged the assumption that these titles were inherently metaphysical or unique to Christianity. For many scholars, “Son of God” signified messianic vocation rather than metaphysical divinity, while “Son of Man” was interpreted either as a self-referential circumlocution used by Jesus or as an allusion to the Danielic heavenly figure emerging from apocalyptic Judaism.
Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) intensified this interpretive shift by arguing that Jesus must be understood as an apocalyptic prophet whose proclamation of the kingdom of God drew directly upon the symbolic world of texts like Daniel, 1 Enoch, and 4 Ezra. Within this apocalyptic matrix, Jesus’ use of “Son of Man” - particularly in the Synoptic Gospels - appeared not as a metaphysical descriptor but as an eschatological self-designation tied to themes of suffering, vindication, and divine judgment. Likewise “Son of God,” far from signifying ontological deity, expressed Jesus’ unique calling and authority within Israel’s narrative of covenantal expectation. This retrieval did not negate later doctrinal developments but challenged their status as original or inherent to the biblical witness.
By the mid-twentieth century, the distinction between historical usage and dogmatic meaning had become a central feature of critical scholarship. Figures like Raymond Brown, James D. G. Dunn, Geza Vermes, and E. P. Sanders clarified the semantic fields of these titles with increasing precision. Vermes, for instance, demonstrated that “Son of God” was a known Jewish appellation for kings, prophets, angelic beings, and righteous individuals, not a unique or inherently divine title. Dunn highlighted the emergent “Christological monotheism” of the New Testament, in which Jesus participates in divine prerogatives while retaining a Jewish monotheistic framework. Brown and others traced the progressive reinterpretation of the titles across successive layers of the Gospel tradition, showing how the terms accrue meaning over time.
Alongside this historical recovery, modern Jewish studies made significant contributions to the reevaluation of these titles. As Jewish scholars reexamined the texts of Daniel, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, it became clear that the symbolic universe of Second Temple Judaism provided the conceptual vocabulary that Jesus and his earliest followers naturally inhabited. The “one like a son of man” in Daniel was understood as a symbolic representation of Israel, a heavenly figure, or both. The Similitudes of 1 Enoch presented a preexistent messianic figure, richly embroidered with heavenly authority and eschatological judgment, long before Christian writers developed comparable themes. In this context, “Son of Man” ceased to be viewed as a cryptic or mysterious Christian invention and instead appeared as a natural extension of Jewish apocalyptic imagination.
Parallel work on Greco-Roman religion clarified the broader cultural environment in which the early church navigated questions of divine mediation, incarnational language, and the attribution of divine honors. Studies in imperial cult, Hellenistic Judaism, middle Platonism, and the cultic veneration of heroes and rulers offered fresh insight into how early Christians adapted and reconfigured existing categories to express the significance of Jesus. None of these influences negated the Jewish origins of Christian titles, but they helped to explain how and why “Son of God” underwent ontological expansion as Christianity moved into the Gentile world.
In the twentieth century, a new wave of theological reinterpretation emerged, seeking to reconcile the historical-critical recovery of these titles with the doctrinal commitments of the Christian tradition. Scholars such as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Jürgen Moltmann argued that historical recovery need not undermine theological meaning but could instead clarify its foundations. Bultmann interpreted “Son of Man” existentially, as a symbol of authentic human existence disclosed in Jesus. Barth recast “Son of God” in relational terms emphasizing divine initiative and revelation. Pannenberg and Moltmann interpreted the resurrection as the decisive moment in which Jesus’ divine sonship is disclosed, thereby rooting Christology not in metaphysical speculation but in historical eschatology. These reinterpretations did not return the titles to their biblical meanings but rather sought to align doctrinal tradition with the best historical understanding available.
The final decades of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century saw even greater diversification. Postliberal, feminist, liberation, contextual, and postcolonial theologians each engaged these titles in distinctive ways, sometimes retrieving their Jewish roots, sometimes contesting their patriarchal or imperial connotations, and sometimes reimagining them through new relational, symbolic, or communal frameworks. Meanwhile, Jewish-Christian dialogue advanced in ways that encouraged Christians to appreciate the Jewishness of Jesus without collapsing Jewish and Christian interpretations. The rediscovery of early Jewish monotheism, the reexamination of divine agency in Second Temple literature, and renewed attention to the eschatological horizon of Jesus’ preaching all contributed to a more nuanced understanding of christological titles.
In contemporary biblical scholarship, the consensus is clear: neither “Son of Man” nor “Son of God” originated as metaphysical descriptors. Both titles were historically flexible, contextually embedded, and subject to ongoing reinterpretation across the centuries. “Son of Man” is now typically understood as either a self-referential idiom used by Jesus or an apocalyptic title drawn from Daniel and Enoch; “Son of God” is recognized as a relational and vocational designation within Judaism that only later assumed ontological significance. Modern scholarship, in short, has liberated these terms from the metaphysical constraints imposed by centuries of doctrinal sedimentation, revealing their original dynamism and polyvalence.
In contemporary constructive theology - including process theology, open and relational theology, and metamodern biblical interpretation - the recovery of these earlier meanings has opened new pathways for understanding Jesus’ identity and significance. Rather than grounding divine sonship in static metaphysics, process theologians interpret it as the relational embodiment of divine purpose, a symbol of God’s co-suffering presence, and an expression of Christ’s unparalleled attunement to the lure of divine love. The “Son of Man,” in turn, becomes a symbol not of metaphysical humanity but of eschatological possibility, a marker of the human vocation to participate in divine creativity, justice, and transformation. These contemporary reinterpretations, while distinct from traditional formulations, remain faithful to the historical and symbolic worlds in which the titles first emerged.
Thus, the modern period does not abolish the theological tradition but recontextualizes it. It invites Christians to read Scripture historically and theologically at once, recognizing that both the biblical and the doctrinal meanings of these titles represent genuine - though distinct - moments in the long unfolding of Christian thought. The titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God,” far from being fixed, have always been dynamic, evolving in conversation with changing communities, cultures, and cosmologies. Their modern reinterpretation is therefore not a rupture but a continuation of the very process through which they first emerged: a process of interpretive layering, cultural adaptation, and theological creativity.
This final stage thus completes the arc begun in ancient Israel, demonstrating how a pair of simple Hebrew expressions could become - and continue to become - central markers of Christian faith, even as their meanings shift across time, tradition, and context.
XI. CONCLUSION: A LONG ARC OF MEANING - FROM SEMITIC IDIOMS TO THEOLOGICAL SYMBOLS
The history of the titles “Son of Man” and “Son of God” is, in many ways, a microcosm of the history of biblical interpretation itself: a story of linguistic evolution, cultural adaptation, theological expansion, and ongoing reinterpretation across vastly different eras of thought. Each period—ancient Israel, post-exilic Judaism, Second Temple apocalypticism, the Jesus movement, the earliest Christian communities, the Nicene debates, medieval scholasticism, Reformation exegesis, and modern critical scholarship—has received these titles and invested them with new significance. Their meanings have never been static. They have always been relational, contextual, and historically textured, shaped by the symbolic universes and theological needs of the communities that used them.
This study began with the recognition that in the Hebrew Bible, “Son of Man” simply denoted a mortal human being, often used in contrast to divine transcendence, while “Son of God” referred variously to Israel, the Davidic king, or angelic beings - each expressing relational closeness to God rather than metaphysical identity. These earliest usages were thoroughly grounded in Israel’s covenantal theology, royal ideology, and mythic inheritance. The titles belonged not to systematic theology but to the lived world of prophetic address, psalmic praise, and communal hope.
As Israel’s symbolic imagination evolved - most dramatically in the exilic and post-exilic periods - these titles began to stretch. “Son of Man” acquired new eschatological dimensions in Daniel 7, where it denoted a figure representing the triumph of divine justice over oppressive empires. “Son of God,” while retaining its covenantal roots, became increasingly available for messianic interpretation as the longing for restoration intensified. The rise of apocalyptic Judaism further elaborated these ideas, especially in the Enochic and post-70 CE writings. The “Son of Man” emerged in some traditions as a preexistent heavenly redeemer; “Son of God” absorbed regal and eschatological dimensions. The symbolic field expanded, setting the stage for the seismic reinterpretations within the early Jesus movement.
In the Gospels, these titles are woven into the narrative of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection in ways that both preserve continuity with Jewish tradition and inaugurate striking innovation. Jesus uses “Son of Man” in polyvalent ways - sometimes as a simple self-reference, sometimes as a descriptor of suffering, and sometimes in explicit reference to the Danielic figure of eschatological judgment. “Son of God,” meanwhile, appears in the mouths of disciples, crowds, and heavenly voices, signifying divine favor, messianic identity, and unique authority. The Gospels do not harmonize these usages; rather, they preserve their tensions, inviting readers into a multilayered understanding of who Jesus is.
The earliest Christian communities responded to the resurrection by placing new weight on “Son of God,” interpreting Jesus’ vindication and exaltation as a divine appointment to messianic and eschatological lordship. Paul and others expanded this by incorporating elements of Jewish Wisdom theology, portraying Jesus as the one through whom God created and redeemed. “Son of Man” receded from prominence outside the Gospel tradition, while “Son of God” became increasingly central to christological confession.
In the second and third centuries, as Christianity spread into the Hellenistic world, “Son of God” underwent a decisive transformation into a metaphysical category, shaped by middle Platonism, Logos speculation, and debates with Gnostic thinkers. The title became a marker of Christ’s eternal preexistence and divine identity. “Son of Man,” lacking conceptual traction outside Judaism, faded from active theological usage.
The Nicene and post-Nicene periods completed this transformation by formalizing “Son of God” as a descriptor of Christ’s ontological unity with the Father and by assigning “Son of Man” the complementary role of signifying Christ’s true humanity. These decisions created the conceptual architecture in which both titles would operate for more than a millennium. Medieval, Byzantine, and scholastic theologians elaborated on these metaphysical frameworks, embedding the titles deeply within the doctrinal and devotional life of the church.
However, the rise of historical-critical scholarship in the modern era reopened the question of meaning by recovering the Jewish origins and early Christian usage of these titles. Scholars demonstrated that the metaphysical meanings inherited from the councils were not the original meanings of the titles but later theological developments. This recovery allowed theologians to distinguish between historical significance and dogmatic interpretation, freeing contemporary theology to engage Scripture more critically and creatively.
Today, in the work of biblical scholars, theologians, and constructive thinkers—including those within process theology, open and relational theology, liberation theology, and postcolonial theology—these titles are being reinterpreted once again. “Son of Man” may be read as a symbol of human vulnerability, eschatological hope, or divine-human solidarity. “Son of God” may be interpreted not as a metaphysical category but as a relational one, expressing Jesus’ unique responsiveness to God’s call, his embodiment of divine love, or his exemplary participation in the divine life. Contemporary theology, thus, stands not at the end of this evolution but within it - another chapter in a long history of interpretive creativity.
Far from being fixed descriptors handed down unchanged through history, “Son of Man” and “Son of God” are dynamic theological symbols that trace the shifting contours of Jewish and Christian self-understanding. Their evolution reveals as much about the cultures and theologies that shaped them as it does about Jesus himself.
Thus, to study these titles historically is not to undermine their theological significance but to liberate it. By recovering their earliest meanings, discerning their transformations through time, and engaging them with contemporary concerns, one can appreciate the remarkable adaptability and richness of these symbols. They continue to invite theological reflection—not as relics of a static dogma but as living markers of a tradition that has always sought to articulate the mystery of divine presence, human calling, and eschatological hope.
its capacity to evolve, to absorb new insights, to respond to new historical conditions, and to express, across eras and centuries, humanity’s ongoing attempt to understand its relationship to the divine.
- Part I - Foundations: The Birth of the Sacred
- Essay 1 - Animism and the Living Cosmos
- Essay 2 - From Tribe to Totem
- Part II - The Age of Gods
- Essay 3 - The Mesopotamian Fertile Crescent
- Essay 4 - Egypt, Indus, and Minoa Sacred Cultures
- Essay 5 - From Polytheism to Henotheism
- Part III - Axial Awakenings
- Essay 6 - Ancient Israel, Persia, and Monotheism
- Essay 7 - India
- Essay 8 - Greece and the Birth of Reason
- Part IV - The Sacred Made Universal
- Essay 9 - The Age of Universal Religions
- Essay 10 - Modernity and the Eclipse of the Sacred
- Essay 11 - The Rebirth of the Sacred
- Part V - Supplementary Materials
- I - The Ancient History of Mesopotamia
- II - The History of Language in Ancient Mesopotamia
- III - The Ancient History of the Hebrew Language
- IV(A-C) How the Ancient Near East Gave Shape to Israel's God
- Why the ANE is Essential for Israel's Received Theology (I-II)
- Affecting Cultic Syncretism Across the Ancient Near East (III-V)
- Cultural Identity Formation & the Rejection of Syncretism (VI-IX)
- V (A-C) The History & Compilation of the Hebrew Bible
- From Oral Memory to Proto-Canon (I-II)
- Exile, Redaction, and the Birth of Scripture (III)
- Second Temple Scribalization to Canonization (IV-V)
- VI - The Unhelpful Oxymorons of "Biblical Authority" & "Inerrancy"
- VII - The Evolution of Inerrancy: From Ancient Plurality to Modern Certainty
- VIII - A Historical-Theological Study of "Son of Man" vs "Son of God"
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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The Hebrew Bible (Masoretic Text); Septuagint (LXX).
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Dead Sea Scrolls (1QSa, 1QH, 4Q521, 4Q246).
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1 Enoch (especially the Similitudes, 1 Enoch 37–71).
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4 Ezra and 2 Baruch.
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Josephus, Antiquities; War.
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Philo of Alexandria, On the Logos, On Dreams, Who is the Heir?
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Apostolic Fathers: Ignatius, Didache, Barnabas.
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Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, First Apology.
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Irenaeus, Against Heresies.
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Origen, On First Principles.
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Athanasius, Orations Against the Arians.
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Nicene Creed (325), Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed (381).
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Acts of the Ecumenical Councils, esp. Council of Chalcedon (451).
Modern Scholarship: Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Judaism, Apocalypticism
Hebrew Bible / Ancient Israel
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Collins, John J. Introduction to the Hebrew Bible.
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von Rad, Gerhard. Old Testament Theology.
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Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament.
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Mettinger, Tryggve. The King as Son of God.
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Sommer, Benjamin. The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel.
Second Temple Judaism & Apocalyptic Literature
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Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination.
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Collins, John J. Daniel: A Commentary (Hermeneia).
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Stone, Michael. Fourth Ezra: A Commentary.
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Nickelsburg, George. 1 Enoch: A Commentary.
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Sacchi, Paolo. Jewish Apocalyptic and Its History.
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Bauckham, Richard. The Jewish World Around the New Testament.
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Scholem, Gershom. Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition.
Jesus, the Gospels, and Early Christology
Historical Jesus & Gospel Studies
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Vermes, Geza. Jesus the Jew.
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Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism.
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Dunn, James D. G. Jesus Remembered.
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Allison, Dale. Constructing Jesus.
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Wright, N. T. Jesus and the Victory of God.
Christological Titles in the Gospels
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Casey, Maurice. The Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of Daniel 7.
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Hare, Douglas. The Son of Man Tradition.
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Wright, Nicholas T. The Resurrection of the Son of God.
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Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the God of Israel.
Earliest Christianity & Pauline Studies
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Dunn, James D. G. Christology in the Making.
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Hurtado, Larry. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity.
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Martin, Ralph. Carmen Christi (Phil 2:6–11).
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Fee, Gordon. Pauline Christology.
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Wright, Nicholas T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God.
Patristic, Nicene, and Post-Nicene Theology
Patristic Christology
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Grillmeier, Aloys. Christ in Christian Tradition (multi-volume).
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Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines.
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Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy.
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Anatolios, Khaled. Retrieving Nicaea.
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Behr, John. The Nicene Faith (2 vols).
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Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition (Vols. 1–2).
Medieval, Reformation, and Post-Reformation Theology
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Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (esp. III, qq. 1–59).
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Anselm, Cur Deus Homo.
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Luther, Sermons on John; The Bondage of the Will.
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Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion.
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McGrath, Alister. Reformation Thought: An Introduction.
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Oberman, Heiko. The Harvest of Medieval Theology.
Modern Biblical Criticism & Contemporary Christology
Historical-Critical Scholarship
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Brown, Raymond. The Birth of the Messiah; The Death of the Messiah; An Introduction to New Testament Christology.
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Bousset, Wilhelm. Kyrios Christos.
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Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus.
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Sanders, E. P. The Historical Figure of Jesus.
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Dunn, James D. G. The Partings of the Ways.
Contemporary Christological Reflections
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Moltmann, Jürgen. The Way of Jesus Christ.
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Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Jesus—God and Man.
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Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics II/1, II/2, IV/1.
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Schillebeeckx, Edward. Jesus: An Experiment in Christology.
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Johnson, Elizabeth A. Consider Jesus.
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Sobrino, Jon. Christology at the Crossroads.
Jewish-Christian Dialogue & Second Temple Context
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Boyarin, Daniel. The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ.
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Segal, Alan. Two Powers in Heaven.
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Levine, Amy-Jill. The Misunderstood Jew.
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Neusner, Jacob. Judaism When Christianity Began.
Constructive and Process-Oriented Theologies
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Cobb, John B. Jesus’ Abba: The God Who Has Not Failed.
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Cobb & Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition.
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Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible.
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Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. God, Christ, Church.
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Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality.
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Hartshorne, Charles. The Divine Relativity.
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Clayton, Philip. The Predicament of Belief.
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Bracken, Joseph. The One in the Many.
