Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [258]
Paul’s argument was made on the basis of analogy from Adam. Just as death came from Adam, so eternal life comes from Christ. But Christ is the first, then those who belong to Christ. At the end, Christ will hand over the kingdom of God to the father, after he has destroyed every power. Paul was making clear reference to the “Son of Man” passage in Daniel 7:13 when he said that Christ must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. There are other enthronement passages in the Hebrew Bible but none others in which the reign of justice is made dependent upon the enthroned figure. Together with the transformation, Paul posited an apocalyptic end; the two are deeply connected.
Why Paul never actually used the term “Son of Man” is something of a mystery. It may be because he knew Hebrew and Aramaic too well. “Son of Man” is not a proper title or even a good translation for the original phrase. Whereas Mark 10:45 writes “The Son of Man came … to give his life as a ransom for many,” Galatians 2:20 paraphrases the saying with “Son of God.” Similar, possible paraphrases in the later Deutero-Pauline literature are translated with Greek word anthropos (human being), Jesus Christ (1 Tim 2:5-6) or “the Son of the Man” (Eph 5:2, Titus 2:13-14). This is important evidence suggesting that Paul intended to refer to the vision in Daniel 7:13-14 in his own writing, but that he did not recognize the phrase “Son of Man” as a title for the figure in heaven in Daniel. Although Paul never used the term “Son of Man” he clearly identified the Christ with the “Son of Man” figure on the throne in Daniel 7:13. Paul showed the antiquity of that position, without affirming to us that “Son of Man” was a title. In this, he seems rather to have been working in a Jewish context in which any Scripture can be read as prophecy, without relying on any preexistent titles for Jesus.
Heavenly man traditions are crucial to the development of the Christian meaning of Jesus’ earthly mission.52 They inform all the New Testament discussions of the “Son of Man” in ways that have been infrequently discussed by the leading scholars studying the term.53 While it is quite likely that some of Jesus’ followers thought of him as a messiah or a messianic candidate during his own lifetime, they were disabused of that idea by his arrest, trial, and death on the cross as “The King of the Jews,” for no pre-Christian view of the messiah conceived of the possibility of the failure of the Messianic mission and his demise at the hands of the Romans.54
Instead, the disciples’ experience of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God confirmed the originally discarded Messianic title retrospectively in a new, dynamic, and ironic way. Resurrection and ascension had already entered Jewish thought in the century previous to Jesus, as a reward for the righteous martyrs of the Maccabean wars. Thus, while Christianity represents a purely Jewish reaction to a tragic series of events in Jesus’ life, the reaction was at the same time absolutely novel. The process should be of special interest to Jewish scholars as well as students of Christology, because it is the clearest evidence we have from the first century on as to how new religious groups were founded on historical events understood as fulfillment of Scripture. It shows how Jewish expectations derived from Biblical texts intersected with historical events, even quite anomalous historical events. The events were given meaning by creative interplay between the facts and