For Advent this year, the children’s ministry at my church, The Falls Church Anglican, had the brilliant idea to create Advent calendars with names of Jesus for each day of the month. When my oldest daughter, who is six, read the name for day 21, she came running to me. “Mommy, what does ‘Son of Man’ mean?” You see, she thought Jesus was the Son of God, so how could he also be the Son of Man? I explained that he was both: the Son of God, by virtue of his father, and the Son of Humanity, by virtue of his mother.
Jesus, Son of Mary
Jesus is unlike any human ever born in that his human nature is derived soley from his mother. Yet we still call him “Son of Man,” a throwback to the past when “man” was understood to mean humanity. (In contemporary English, man most often means man, or male, woman continues to mean woman, or female, and humanity means humanity. Seems like an improvement on multiple levels.)
I explained that history to my daughter too, in simple terms. Did I go overboard? Maybe. But since Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man more than 80 times, it’s probably important to understand what he’s talking about.
If we want to better appreciate what this difficult term means, let’s start by correcting the English. Jesus isn’t really the Son of Man (with man understood by most children and many adults to be masculine) but the Son of Humanity.
Going Beyond (English) Words
“Son of Humanity” in the original Greek is ho huios tou anthrōpou, or literally, the Son of the Human. Unfortunately, the Greek text analysis in BibleHub renders anthropou as “man,” as do most English Bible translations, but what is meant is humankind. As I’ve noted before, the ancient language here is ironically more gender inclusive.
Digging still deeper, when Jesus spoke of himself as the Son of Humanity, he actually wouldn’t have been speaking Greek, but Aramaic. So it’s hard to know for sure exactly what he said. Some scholars have speculated that the original Aramaic would have been bar (e)nash(a) or the Hebrew equivalent, ben adam.
An important side note: in English as well as in Hebrew, we associate adam with Adam, the first man. But as William G. Witt notes, the word adam in Hebrew has no gender; it simply means person. It literally means earth, and some scholars have translated the term in Genesis as earthling, or earth creature, to accurately capture both the origin of the word and its lack of gender specificity. It is only when Eve is created that Adam the man emerges, with his name being a play on words. More on that here.
We lose these important nuances in newer English translations of the Bible, such as the ESV, that trade accurate translations of gender for translations promoting male dominance, and in older English translations, which do not reflect contemporary English. David Horrell, Professor of New Testament Studies at University of Exeter, summarizes this problem succinctly in his essay on translating the Bible:
…translating anthrōpos and `ādām with non gender-specific terms such as ‘person’, ‘human being’, and so on…simply mark in English a distinction already made in Hebrew and Greek [my emphasis]. Indeed, there is no translation-based reason, aside from conventional attachment to certain labels, why phrases like ‘the son of man’ (ho huios tou anthrōpou) should not be rendered ‘the son of the human’, or similar, though even recent inclusive versions avoid such steps (cf. NRSV; NIVI). To object… is simply to utter a reactionary call to preserve what are becoming (and for good reason) archaisms in our language. Language is always evolving, and there is no more reason to preserve the ‘generic’ use of the term ‘man’ than to preserve King James archaisms like ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. But this current evolution, enmeshed as it is with political interests and commitments, is unsurprisingly contested: the generic use of the term ‘man’ both reflects and supports a social system in which the male gender is definitive, visible, preeminent; to change the language is to disrupt the system, with all its established relations of power and social organisation [my emphasis].
Son of Humanity or the Human One?
Interestingly, accordingly to Bible translator Joel Hoffman, neither ben in Hebrew nor uios in Greek necessarily indicates “son” but can mean “child” or “member of.” In other words, the English translation “Son of Man” is problematic because it is “doubly gendered” in a way that the Greek and Hebrew are not. Moreover, the English phrase “son of” may be too literal an interpretation of ben. For example, in Matthew 9:15, Hoffman states that the words we translate to “wedding guests” would literally be sons of the weddinghall. Yet “wedding guests” is clearly the most appropriate English translation.
In sum, in view of the original languages, the English phrase “Son of Man” not only invokes gender in a questionable way but potentially complicates the meaning, as an overly literal translation.
Hoffman notes that the Common English Bible (CEB) translation addresses these issues by rendering Son of Man, or Son of Humanity, as “the Human One.”
Jesus’ Humanity
Regardless of the original language (Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew), the English translation “Son of Man” doesn’t seem adequate because it emphasizes masculinity (Jesus’ and ours) over humanity. This is also the opposite of how Paul characterizes Jesus. Witt points out in Icons of Christ that Paul stresses the humanity of Jesus in redeeming fallen humanity – not Jesus the man redeeming Adam the man. For example, in Romans, Paul writes: “Just as sin came into the world through the one human being (anthrōpos) Adam, so God’s grace has come through the one human being (anthrōpos) Jesus Christ” (5:12). Paul continues: “…the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one human (anthropos) Jesus Christ abounded for many (Rm 5:15).” If Paul had instead wanted to stress Jesus’ masculinity, he could have used the Greek word aner, which means man, but he did not. He didn’t even use aner for Adam! Why? In telling the story of human redemption in this way, what Paul illustrates is that Adam and Christ are representative of humanity not because they are male but because they are human.
Unfortunately, most English translations of the Bible do not note the distinction in Greek here between human and man. Thus the original sense of anthropos is lost, and the word that Paul avoided, man, is used instead.
Our Son
The term “Son of Humanity” or “the Human One” better captures who Jesus is and how he was actually described by Paul, who expounded on the new humanity that Jesus calls into being. Of course, Jesus was a man, but first and foremost: he was human.
But what does Son of Humanity / the Human One actually mean?
I told my daughter that Jesus, as Mary’s son, represents the entire human race before God, although he is God. In that representational role, Jesus takes on our sin, suffers what we ought to suffer, and redeems our fallen humanity – both before God and as God – with his perfected humanity.
I personally prefer “Son of Humanity” vs. “the Human One.” The former title retains Jesus’ nature as Son, as one eternally begotten of the Father, while at the same time reminding us that Jesus is one of us relationally – not just “one of us” in the sense of being a member of the human race but actually born of humans: Mary’s son.
Jesus, the Son of Humanity, is not just God’s son. He is OUR son!
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