In 1899, Wellhausen returned to this subject (Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, Sechstes Heft), and in the main declared his adop- tion of Lietzmann's conclusion that Jesus, speaking Aramaic, could not make the difference which is made in Greek between 0 ctvilpurros and 0 wo; t. iv&. : — that so far as this difference is made in the Gospels it is not authentic, but is derived from interpreters and editors. Wellhausen withdraws from the posi- tion he had formerly advocated, that Jesus did adopt ' the Man ' as a title, meaning thereby that He fulfilled the ideal of humanity. He now declares that to impute such a meaning to our Lord is not warrantable, and that in the absence of that meaning the supposed title would be wholly meaningless, and therefore it was not employed. The use of i ulos t. avS. in the Gospels is explained as due to the fact that the expressions of Dn 713 are put into the mouth of Jesus in Mk IS-**, that there- after it became the custom in all passages which refer to the Return of Jesus to avoid the pronoun, and to place instead ' the Son of Man.' Then followed the same usage in other than eschatological passages (op. cit. p. '210). Wellhausen again adduces in confirmation of the position that this self-designa- tion of Jesus is not authentic, the argumentuin ex silentio — the entire absence of the expression in other NT writings than the Gospels.
On the other hand, Dalman {Die Worte Jesu, 1898 [Eng. tr. 1902]) and Schmiedel (Protestant. Monatshefte, 1898, Hefte 7 and 8) called in question the linguistic premises of Lietzmann and Wellhausen, and contested their conclusions. They both maintain that Jesus did certainly call Himself 'the Son of Man,' using the title in a Messianic sense, and with direct reference to Dn 7^3, though both hold the primary sense of ' a son of man,' in that verse, to be collective, and not personal. Dalman adduces evidence to show that ' the Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the earlier period possessed the term B'^N for a human being, while to indicate a number of human beings it employed occasionally NB'JX "jn. The singular number VM "13 was not in use ; its appearance being due to imitation of the Hebrew text, where [apart from Ezekiel] DIN p is confined to poetry, and, moreover, uncommon in it. The case in Dn 713, where the person coming from heaven is described as U'JN "133, ' one like unto a son of man,' is just as uncongenial to the style of prose as the designation of God in the same verse as K'DV p'ny ' the advanced in days ' (op. cit. p. 237). Moreover, just as in Hebrew DlX p is never made definite, so is the definite expression NB-JN 13 ' quite unheard of in the older Jewish Aramaic litera- ture.' The common use of B':x 13 = 'man' in Jewish Galilsean and Christian Palestinian literature is to be regarded as a later innovation. That this later usage was not already in vogue in the dialect spoken by our Lord (of which no written specimen from His time is in evidence) is demonstrated by His words as reported in the Gospels. ' " Man," both in the singular and in the plural, is frequently enough the subject of remark. How is it that uli>; ocvOpurou never occurs for ' man,' and oi uUi tSiv ocvOpurav only in Mk 328? Can the Hellenistic reporters — apart from the self-appellation of Jesus— have designedly avoided it, although Jesus had on all occasions said nothing Wt "son of man" for "man"? That cannot be considered likely.' Hence, against Lietzmann and Wellhausen, Dalman holds both that 'Son of man ' was a possible expression in the Aramaic of our Lord's day, and that by its singularity it was adapted for use as a title. ' To the Jews it would be purely a Biblical word.' To the same effect Schmiedel, who sums up his view of the linguistic part of the controversy thus : the Aramaic Lexicon ' must not say barnascha means "man," and nothing more, but it must run thus : barnascha, (1) man, (2) abbreviated designation of the form " like a son of man " (i.e. " like a man ") in Dn 713, which, although, according to vv.is- --■ 27, signifying the saints of the Most High, was held to be the Messiah." We, on our part, de- clare that second meaning to be extant, and to have been so already before the time of Jesus' (I.e. 264). Reference is made below (S 5) to the replies of Dalman and Schmiedel to the argu- ment ex silentio, by which, as already stated, it has been sought to lend support to the theory that ' the Son of Man ' in the Gospels is no genuine utterance of Jesus.
In 1901, P. Fiebig published the result of a fresh and very thorough examination of the linguistic evidence on the matter at issue. The main contribution in his dissertation (Der Menschensohn) is a demonstration that CJN and KCJH were, in
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SON OF MAN
SON OF MAN
spite of their formal indefiniteness and definiteness, completely interchangeable ; and that similarly the compound expressions cj 12 and NCJ "13 were alike employed to express either of the three meanings — (1) the man, (2) a man, (3) some one. Hence, either expression might be rendered by o uios t. ocvO., or by uii; i-vil., or — since, according to Fiebig, the use of the compound expression as the precise equivalent of B'JN without ID was no relatively late introduction from the Syriac — by avOpa^o; (p. 5ti). That in the Gospels a distinction is maintained by using i uii; T. xv6., and not i xuBpa^c; alone, is due to the desire to bring out that the fuller phrase is used with direct reference to U^K 12 in Dn 713. But whether in all cases the distinction has been accurately made by the translators is matter for investiga- tion, having regard to the ambiguity of the Aramaic expression. Further, Fiebig holds, on the evidence of Enoch and Esdras, and of the Synoptics themselves, that 'the Son of Man,' or rather ' the Man,' was in our Lord's day a current title for the Messiah.