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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
The evangelists obviously assume that Jesus was a human being. What is less clear is what would be entailed by that assumption. There is very little in the New Testament that we would immediately recognise as an explicit exploration of the significance of Jesus’ humanity. It is often assumed that this is because the authors of the New Testament were philosophically naive and so did not have a developed conception of what it meant to be a human being, but maybe it is because we pose the question in the context of a discipline called Christology which predisposes us to accept as valid only certain ways of thinking.
Cornelius Ernst O P, in a provocative article called “Thinking about Jesus”, said, “the ‘ology termination (of Christology) does presuppose a certain kind of abstraction, a certain kind of theoretical approach, a certain conception of what constitutes reasonableness, and in fact what is meaning at all, what constitutes thinking. I think one of the problems we have to face today is just what does constitute rationality, what is thinking, what are the appropriate categories, not only for thinking about Jesus Christ, but about anything else”. The assumption within Christology has generally been that to claim that Jesus is a human being is to say what he is, to identify him as belonging to a particular class of beings, a species. And one’s membership of this species is defined by the possession of a mind, a certain sort of inferiority. To be properly human is having certain sorts of things going on in one’s head. That’s what it means to have a human soul. To be a human being is to have a mind that has thoughts which are then communicated to others, who are assumed to have similar minds, by means of language.
1 Cornelius Ernst O P, “Thinking about Jesus”, New Blackfriars, May 1980, p 209.
2 Aldrich, Virgil C., “On What it is Like to be a Man”, Inquiry, Winter 1973, vol 16, p 362.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Fergus Kerr O P, “Wittgenstein and Theological Studies”, New Blackfriars, December 1982, p 507.
4 Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. by G. Johannes Botterick & Helmer Ringgren, Michigan, 1974, Vol 1, p 78.Google Scholar
5 Bowker, John, “The Son of Man”, The Journal of Theological Studies, April 1977, Vol xxviii, p 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
6 The translation is from R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Oxford, 1913.
7 M. 'Avot iii, 14, quoted in Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages, their concepts and beliefs, Jerusalem, 1979, Vol 1, p 217.Google Scholar
8 De Opif. Mundi 134 and Leg. Alleg. 1. 31.
9 M. San. iv. 5, quoted by Urbach, op. cit. p 217.
10 Käsemann, Ernst, Commentary on Romans, London, 1980, p 196Google Scholar.
11 Moloney, Dr F. J., “The Re‐interpretation of Psalm VIII and the Son of Man Debate”, New Testament Studies, October 1981, Vol 27, pp 656–671.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 Urbach, op. cit. pp 155 ‐ 157.
13 cf. the useful little study by Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in Crisis, ch. 9.
14 Rob van der Hart, The Theology of Angels and Devils, in Theology Today Series, number 36, Cork, 1972.
15 Schillebeeckx, Edward O P, Christ, The Christian Experience in the Modern World, London, 1980, p 255Google Scholar.
16 Urbach, op. cit. p 221.
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