shortly, ' The Christ of God.' And it lies In the evi- dence not only that this was the underlying conception of our Lord as reported In this Gospel but also that it was — however dimly — apprehended by those He ad- dressed. There is perhaps no single passage in Mark so clear to this effect as John i z^'*, where the multitude are represented as puzzled by our Lord's teaching that the " Son of Man must be lifted up," in view of their conviction that " the Christ abldeth forever." " We have heard out of the law," they say, " that the Christ abldeth forever: and how sayest thou that the Son of Man must be lifted up ? Who Is this Son of Man? " This Is as much as to say that that ' Son of Man ' who is the Messiah Is known to them and Is known to them as the eternal King : but no other ' Son of Man ' is known to them — who is to be " lifted up " from the earth that He may draw all men unto Him. The same implication is latent, however. In the instances reported by Mark, the conversations recorded in which would have been unintelligible had there not been in the hear- ers' minds some Intelligence of the phrase ' Son of Man ' as a Messianic title, although It was apparently not a Messianic title either In such current use that It came naturally to their lips or so unambiguous as to be easily comprehended by them in all the implications which our Lord compressed into It.
The difficulty created by our Lord's use of this phrase seems, indeed, as represented by Mark, not so
much to have lain In apprehending * Son of ^j^^j. -^ Involved a claim to Mes- Man' ..... . 11-1
sianic dignity, as in comprenending the
character of the Messianic conception which He ex- pressed by it. The constant employment of this des-
l6 The Designations of Our Lord
ignatlon of Himself by our Lord*^ in preference to the more current ones, such as, say, ' Son of David ' or ' King of Israel,' appears to mark in effect an attempt on our Lord's part, in claiming for Himself the Mes- sianic dignity, at the same time to fill the conception itself with a new import. The nature of the revolution which He would work, in the Messianic ideal current among the people, in other words, is signalized by His avoidance of the current designations of the Mes- siah and His choice for His constant use of a more or less unwonted one which would direct their atten- tion to a different region of Old Testament prophecy. He says, in effect. In the conception you are cherishing of the Messianic king, you are neglecting whole re- gions of prophecy, and are forming most mistaken expectations regarding Him : it is from the Son of Man of Daniel rather than from the Son of David of the Psalms and Samuel that you should take your starting point. No single title, of course, sums up the entirety of our Lord's conception of the Messianic function: there are elements of it adumbrated in very different sections of Old Testament prediction. But
^- Cf. Dalman, tVords, p. 259 : " As for the evangelists themselves they take the view that Jesus called Himself the 'Son of Man' at all times and before any company." Nevertheless Dalman himself sup- poses He probably did not actually use the title before Peter's confes- sion (Mk 8^^) ; and Bousset {Jesus, 194) is sure that it was only towards the close of His life as death loomed before Him that He applied the Danielic prophecy of the Son of Man to Himself, and that He never adopted the title in Its full content, including the ideas of preexistence and of His own judgeship of the world — the ascription of these to Him by the evangelists being only an instance of the faith of the community working on the tradition ("it is inconceivable that Jesus should have arrogated to Himself the judgeship of the world in place of God," pp. 203-5).
The Designations in Mark 27
He elected, apparently, to point to the picture which Daniel draws of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth as furnishing a starting point for a revision of the Messianic ideal current among those to whom His preaching was in the first instance ad- dressed.