John 1:51

Ver. 51. “ Jesus answered and said to him: Because I said unto thee that I saw thee under the fig-tree, thou believest; thou shalt see greater things than these. ”

Since Chrysostom, most interpreters (Lucke, Meyer, etc.), editors and translators (Tischendorf, Rilliet), give to the words: Thou believest, an interrogative sense. They put into this question either the tone of surprise (Meyer) because of a faith so readily formed, or even that of reproach (de Wette), as if Nathanael had believed before he had sufficient grounds for it. I think, notwithstanding the observations of Weiss and Keil, that there is a more serene dignity in the answer of Jesus, if it is taken as an affirmation. He recognizes and approves the nascent faith of Nathanael; He congratulates him upon it; but He promises him a succession of increasing miraculous manifestations, of which he and his fellow-disciples will be witnesses, and which from this moment onward will develop their nascent faith. This expression proves that from that day Nathanael remained with Jesus. Up to this point, Jesus had spoken to Nathanael alone: “ Thou believest...thou shalt see. ” What He now declares, although also promised to him, concerns, nevertheless, all the persons present.

Ver. 52. “ And he says to him: Verily, verily, I say unto you, From this time onward you shall see the heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. ”

We meet for the first time the formula amen, amen, which is found twenty-five times in John (Meyer), and nowhere else in the New Testament. Matthew says amen (not repeated) thirty times. This expression amen, serving as an introduction to a declaration which is about to follow, is found nowhere either in the Old Testament, or in the Rabbinical writings. It belongs exclusively to the language of Jesus. Hence is the fact more easily explained that Jesus is Himself called the Amen in the Apocalypse (John 3:14). This word (coming from the Hebrew aman, firmum fuit) is properly a verbal adjective, firm, worthy of faith; it is used as a substantive in Isaiah 65:16: Elohe8 amen, “the God of truth. ” It also becomes an adverb in a large number of passages in the Old Testament, to signify: that remains sure; or: let it be realized! This adverb is doubled, as in St. John, in the two following passages: Numbers 5:22: “ Then the woman (accused of adultery) answered: Amen, amen; Nehemiah 8:6: All the people answered: Amen, amen. ” This doubling implies a doubt to be overcome in the hearer's mind. The supposed doubt arises sometimes, as here, from the greatness of the thing promised, sometimes from a prejudice against which the truth affirmed has to contend (for example, John 3:3; John 3:5).

The words ἀπ᾿ ἄρτι, from now on, are rejected by three of the ancient Alexandrian authorities; they were, in general, adopted by the moderns, and by Tischendorf himself who said in 1859 (7th ed.): cur omissum sit, facile dictu; cur additum, vix dixeris. But the omission in the Sinaitic MS. has caused him to change his opinion (8th ed.). The rejection can be easily understood, as the Gospel history does not contain any appearance of an angel in the period which followed these first days. It would be very difficult, on the contrary, to account for the addition. Weiss and Keil allege the words of Matthew 26:64. But there is no resemblance either in situation or thought between that passage and this one, which can explain such an importation; and I persist in thinking, with the Tischendorf of 1859, that the rejection is much more easily explained than the addition. Jesus means to say that heaven, which was opened at the time of His baptism, is not closed. The communication re- established between heaven and earth continues, and the two regions form for the future only one, so that the inhabitants of the one communicate with those of the other; comp. Ephesians 1:10 and Colossians 1:20. The expression ascend and descend is a very clear allusion to the vision of Jacob (Gen 28:12-13).

There it represented the continual protection of divine providence, and of its invisible agents assured to the patriarch. What the disciples are about to behold from now on will be a higher realization of the truth represented by that ancient symbol. Jesus certainly does not mean to speak of certain appearances of angels which occurred at the close of His life. The question is of a phenomenon which from this moment is to continue uninterruptedly. Most moderns, putting themselves at the opposite spiritualistic extreme to the literal interpretation, see here only an emblem of the heavenly and holy character of the daily activity of Jesus and, as Lucke and Meyer say, of the living communion between God and His organ, in which the divine forces and revelations are concentrated. Reuss says, with the same meaning: “Angels are the divine perfections common to the two persons...,” together with this observation: “The literal explanation would here be as poor as it is absurd.” Luthardt (following Hofmann): “the (personified) forces of the Divine Spirit.” If the explanation of the Fathers was too narrow, that of the moderns is too broad. There is no passage where the spiritual activity of Jesus is referred, even symbolically, to the ministry of angels. It is derived from the Spirit (John 1:32; John 3:34), or, still more commonly, from the Father dwelling and acting in Jesus (John 6:57). Angels are the instruments of the divine force in the domain of nature (see the angel of the waters, Revelation 16:5; of the fire, Rev 14:18).

This expression refers, therefore, to phenomena, which, while taking place in the domain of nature, are due to a causality superior to the laws of nature. Could Jesus characterize His miracles more clearly without naming them? It is also the only sense which connects itself with what has just passed, even at this moment, between Nathanael and Himself: “Thou believest because of this wonder of omniscience; this is only the prelude of more remarkable signs of the same kind.” By this Jesus means the works of power of which the event that follows, the miracle of Cana, will be the first example (from now on). This explanation is confirmed, moreover, by the remarkable parallel, Matthew 8:9-10. It is difficult to explain why the angels who ascend are placed before those who descend. Is it simply owing to a reminiscence of Genesis? But there, there was a special reason: Jacob must understand that the angels were already near him at the moment when he was receiving that revelation.

According to Meyer and Lucke, Jesus would here also mean that, at the moment when the “ you shall see ” shall take place, this relation with heaven shall be already in full activity. I think, rather, that the angels are here presented by Jesus as an army grouped around their chief, the Son of man, who says to one, Go, and to another, Do this. These servants ascend first, to seek power in the presence of God; afterwards, they descend again to accomplish the work.

Were not these two allusions, one to the name of Israel (John 1:48), the other to the dream of Jacob, suggested by the sight of the very localities through which Jesus was, at this moment, passing? He was going from Judea to Galilee, either by the valley of the Jordan or by one of the two plateaus which extend along that valley on the east and the west. Now Bethel was on the eastern plateau, the very locality in which Jacob's dream had occurred, and whose name perpetuated the remembrance of that event; on the eastern plateau Mahanaim was situated (the double camp of angels) and the ford of Jabbok, two places which equally recalled appearances of angels (Genesis 32:1-2; Genesis 32:24 ff.). It is possible that, in passing through these places which were classic for every Israelitish heart, Jesus conversed with His disciples concerning those scenes precisely which they recalled, and that this circumstance was the occasion of the figure which He makes use of at this moment.

What are the purpose and meaning of the expression: Son of man, by which Jesus here describes Himself? We examine this question here only in its relation to the context (see the following appendix). It is manifest that this title has a relation to the two titles which Nathanael has just given to Jesus. This is intended to make His disciples sensible of the fact that, besides His particular relation to God and to Israel, He sustains a third no less essential one, His relation to the whole of humanity. It is to this last that this third title refers. By making this designation His habitual title and by avoiding the use of the title of Christ, which had a very marked political and particularistic hue, Jesus wished from the first to establish His ministry on its true and broad foundation, already laid by that saying of His forerunner: “who takes away the sin of the world. ” His task was not, as Nathanael imagined, to found the Israelitish monarchy: it was to save the world. He did not come to complete the theocratic drama, but to bring to its consummation the history of man.

This title, thus, completes the two others; the three relations of Jesus to God, to men, and to the people of Israel exhaust, indeed, His life and His history.

The Son of Man.

Jesus designates Himself here, for the first time, by the name Son of man, and it is quite probable that this occasion was really the first on which He assumed this title. We find it thirty-nine times in the Synoptics (by connecting the parallels: most frequently in Matt. and Luke); ten times in John (John 1:51; John 3:13-14; John 5:27 (without the article); John 6:27; John 6:53; John 6:62; John 8:28; John 12:23; John 12:34; John 13:31). Three very different opinions prevail respecting the meaning, the origin and the purpose of this designation. We can, however, arrange these in two principal classes.

I. Some think that Jesus here borrows from the Old Testament a title in some measure technical, which was adapted to designate Him either as prophet there would thus be an illusion to the name son of man by which God often designates Ezekiel, when addressing His word to him or as Messiah, in allusion to Daniel 7:13: “And I saw one like unto a son of man coming on the clouds of heaven.” This Messianic prophecy had become popular in Israel, to such an extent that the Messiah had received the name Anani, א, the man of the clouds. It would thus be natural to suppose that Jesus made choice of this term as in a popular way designating his Messianic function; the more so, as there exists a saying of Jesus, in which He solemnly recalls this description of Daniel, applying it to Himself, Matthew 26:64: “Henceforth ye shall see the Son of man seated at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Of these two alleged allusions, the first cannot be sustained. For it is not as a prophet that God calls Ezekiel son of man, but as a creature completely powerless to perform the divine work of which he is inviting him to become the agent thus, as a man. Would it not be contrary to all logic to maintain that, because God on one occasion has called a prophet son of man, it follows that this name is the equivalent of the title prophet.

The allusion to Daniel, as the foundation of this peculiar name of Jesus, is admitted by almost all modern interpreters, Lucke, Bleek, Ewald, Hilgenfeld, Renan, Strauss, Meyer, Keil, Weiss, etc. This is also, apparently, the opinion of M. Wabnitz.

If the question were this: Did Jesus, in designating Himself thus, bring together in His own mind this name and the: as a son of man, of Daniel? it would seem difficult to deny it, at least as to the time when He proclaimed Himself the Messiah in reply to the high-priest before the Sanhedrim. But this is not the question. The point in hand is to determine whether, in choosing this title as His habitual name, as His title by predilection, Jesus meant to say: “I am the Messiah announced by Daniel.” As for myself, I think that this name is rather an immediate creation of His own heart, with which He was inspired by the profound feeling of what He was for humanity. The following are the reasons which impel me to reject the first view; and to prefer the second to it:

1. The borrowings of Jesus from the O. T. have, in general, a character of formal accommodation rather than that of a real imitation. The idea always springs up as perfectly original from His heart and mind; and if He connects it with some saying of Scripture, it is that He may give it support with His hearers, rather than that He may cite it as a source. How, then, could the name of which Jesus, by preference, makes use to designate His relation to humanity be the product of a servile imitation? If anything must have come forth from the depths of His own consciousness, it is this name.

2. Throughout the whole course of the Gospel of John, Jesus, as we shall see, carefully avoids proclaiming Himself as the Messiah, Χριστός, before the people, because He knows too well the political meaning commonly attached to this term, and that the least misunderstanding on this point would have been immediately fatal to His work. He makes use, therefore, of all kinds of circumlocutions to avoid designating Himself as the Messiah: comp. John 8:24-25; John 10:24-25, etc. Comp. also, in the Synoptics, Luke 4:41; Luke 9:21, where he forbids the demons and His disciples to declare Him to be the Christ. And in direct contradiction to this procedure, He would have chosen, for His habitual name, a designation to which the popular opinion had attached this sense of Messiah!

3. Two passages in John prove, moreover, that the name Son of man was not generally applied to the Messiah: John 12:34, where the people ask Jesus who this personage is whom He designates by the name Son of man (see the exegesis); and John 5:27, where Jesus says that the Father has committed the judgment to Him because He is Son of man. Certainly, if this expression had here meant: the Messiah, the article the could not have been wanting It was necessary, in that case, since the question was of a personage well-known and designated under this name. Without the article, there is here a mere indication of quality: God makes Him judge of men as having the quality of man. Besides, let us not forget that in Daniel judgment is exercised, not, as Renan wrongly says, by the Son of man, but by Jehovah Himself; and it is only after this act is wholly finished, that the Son of man, to whom the title is given, appears on the clouds.

4. In the Synoptics, also, there are passages where the meaning Messiah does not suit the term Son of man. It is sufficient to cite Matthew 16:13; Matthew 16:15, where Jesus asks His disciples: “Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?...And you, who do you say that I am?” Had this term been equivalent to Messiah, would not the first question contain an intolerable tautology, and would not Holtzmann have ground for asking how Jesus, after having designated Himself a hundred times as Son of Man, could still propose to His disciples this question, “Whom do you take me to be?”

5. The appearance of the Son of man in the prophecy of Daniel has an exclusively eschatological bearing. The question is of the glorious establishment of the final kingdom. Now one cannot comprehend how from such a representation, especially, Jesus could have derived the title of which He makes use to designate His person during the period of His earthly abasement. But one can easily understand that, when this title had once been adopted by Him for other reasons, He should have made express allusion to this term employed by Daniel, at the solemn moment when, before the Sanhedrim, He wished to affirm His glorious return and His character as judge of His judges. Let us add, finally, that Daniel had not said: I saw the Son of man, or even a Son of man, but vaguely: like [the figure of] a son of man; and could Jesus have derived from such a vague expression His title of Son of man?

6. If we believe the common exegesis, the term Son of God had the sense of Messiah. Now, according to the same exegesis, this also is the meaning of the term Son of man, and it would follow from this that these two titles, which are evidently antithetic, would both have the same sense a thing which is impossible. They do not, either the one or the other, properly designate the office of the Messiah, but rather two aspects of the Messianic personage, which are complementary of each other.

II. We are led thus to the second class of interpretations, that which finds in this title a spontaneous expression of the consciousness which Jesus had of Himself some finding the feeling of His greatness expressed in it, and others, the feeling of His humiliation.

1. There is no longer any need of refuting the explanation of Paulus and Fritzsche, according to which Jesus simply meant to say: This individual whom you see before you homo ille quem bene nostis. Jesus would not, by so exceptional a term, have paraphrased more than fifty times the simple pronoun of the first person.

2. Chrysostom, Tholuck and others explain this title by a deliberate antithesis to the feeling which Jesus had of His own essential sonship to God. To choose, as His characteristic name, the title of descendant of the human race, He must feel Himself a stranger by nature to that race. This explanation is ingenious: but only too much so for the simplicity of the feeling of Jesus.

3. Keerl thought that Jesus meant to designate Himself thereby as the eternal man, pre-existent in God, of whom the Rabbis spoke, the Messiah differing from that heavenly man only through the flesh and blood with which He clothed Himself when He came to the earth. But no others than the Scribes could have attached such a sense to this title which Jesus habitually used, and nothing in His teaching indicates that He Himself shared in that Rabbinical opinion. Moreover, the term Son of man would be very ill adapted to a heavenly man.

4. Gess expresses an analogous idea, but less extra-Biblical. According to him, Jesus wished to express thereby the idea of “the divine majesty as having appeared in the form of human life.” He rests upon the passages in which divine functions are ascribed to the Son of man, as such; thus the pardon of sins (Matthew 9:6, and parallels), lordship over the angels (Matthew 13:41), judgment (Matthew 16:27; Matthew 25:31, John 5:27). But, if the destiny of man is to be exalted even to participate in the functions and works of God, there is nothing in the acts cited which surpasses that sublime destiny, and consequently the limits of the human life when it has reached the summit of its perfection. Besides, is the idea of the Kenosis, which Gess adopts, compatible with that of the divine majesty realized in Jesus in Jesus in the form of the human life?

5. De Wette and others think, on the contrary, that by this name Jesus meant to make prominent the weakness of His earthly state. It seems to us that the words of John 5:27 are altogether opposed to this sense. It is not because of the meanness of His earthly state, that the judgment is committed to Christ.

6. Only one explanation remains for us, in itself the most simple and natural one, which in various forms has been given by Bohme, Neander, Ebrard, Olshausen, Beyschlag, Holtzmann, Wittichen, Hofmann, Westcott, Schaff, etc., which we have already set forth in the first edition of this work, aud which we continue to defend. Jesus meant to designate by this title, in the first place, His complete participation in our human nature. A son of man is not the son of such or such a man, but an offspring of the human race of which He presents an example; a legitimate representative. It is in this sense that this expression is used in Psalms 8:5: “What is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?” The same is true in the frequent addresses of the Lord to Ezekiel. It is also the same in Daniel 7:13, where the being who appeared like a Son of man represents the human, gentle, holy character of the Messianic kingdom, just as the wild beasts, which preceded him, were figures of the violent, harsh, despotic character of earthly empires. Jesus, therefore, above all, obeyed the instinct of His love in adopting this designation of His person, which expressed the feeling of His perfect homogeneousness with the human family of which He had made Himself a member.

This name was, as it were, the theme of which those words of John: “ the Word was made flesh,” are the paraphrase. But Jesus does not merely name Himself: a son of man; a true man; He names Himself the Son of man; He declares Himself, thereby, the true man, the only normal representative of the human type. Even in affirming, therefore, His equality with us, He affirms, by means of the article, the, His superiority over all the other members of the human family, who are simply sons of men; comp. Mark 3:28; Ephesians 3:5. To designate Himself thus was, indeed, to affirm, yet only implicitly, His dignity as Messiah. He expressed the idea, while yet avoiding the word whose meaning was falsified. Without saying: “I am the Christ,” He said to every man: “Look on me, and thou shalt see what thou oughtest to have been, and what, through me, thou mayest yet become.” He succeeded thus in attaining two equally important ends: to inaugurate the pure Messianism separated from all political alloy, and to present Himself as the chief of a kingdom of God, comprehending, not only Israel, but all the human race. This is what has led Bohme to say (Versuch das Geheimniss des Menschensohns zu enthullen, 1839), that the design of Jesus in choosing this designation was to de-judaize the idea of the Messiah.

We see with what admirable wisdom Jesus acted in the choice of this designation, the creation of His own consciousness and of His inner life. It was His love which guided Him wonderfully in this matter, as it did in everything. Perhaps His inward tact was directed in this choice by the recollection of the most ancient of all the prophecies the one which was the germ of the tree of the Messianic revelations: “The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head.” As the term ἄνθρωπος, man, refers equally to the two sexes, and as the woman represents the human nature, rather than the human individuality, the term Son of man is not far removed from the term seed of the woman. Jesus would designate Himself, thus, as the normal man, charged with accomplishing the victory of humanity over its own enemy and the enemy of God.