3-

THE JACKALS AND THE SON OF MAN

(MATT. 8.20 // LUKE 9.58)

Maurice Casey
Dept. of Theology, University of Nottingham
University Park, Nottingham, England

The Son of man problem continues to undermine scholarly efforts to

perceive the Jesus of history as he originally was. Some years ago, the
present author suggested that a group of Son of Man sayings in the
synoptic Gospels are translations of authentic sayings of the historical
Jesus in which he used the Aramaic term wiN 7r in a particular
idiom, an idiom whereby an Aramaic speaker could use a general
statement in order to say something about himself.l The purpose of
this article2 is to update and refine this hypothesis, and to discuss, as
a first fully worked example of it, a saying which has survived in
Greek in a single verbally identical form in Matthew and Luke: ai
6[k(~TTF-KEq II~Wh£00( 9)(OU(YtV xai rd TIE-CEtVd iou oupavou Kara-
GKQVdlG£1(, 6 8t V16( Tou av0pc~rrov OÙK exet flob tfiV KE<t>aÀT1v
KÀiV{1 (Matt. 8.20 // Luke 9.58).
Some aspects of the use of the term wiN 12 in Aramaic must be
dealt with first. In describing this particular idiom, I accepted the
usual view that v3m 13 had been shown to be a normal Aramaic term
for ’man’. This view was well illustrated by Dr Vermes in his
fundamental paper on the different usages of v3 7r, but it has now
been challenged by Dr Kearns:3 this very learned challenge to the
accepted view would have so fundamental an effect on our under-
standing of possibly authentic Son of man sayings that the reasons
for rejecting it must be outlined. Dr Kearns’s work has defects of
method, and it is unconvincing in its treatment of individual passages.
He argues that W38 7r had several meanings, including, for example,
’Vasall’ (vassal), ’Bürger’ (citizen), ’Kleinbauer’ (smallholder) and

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
4

’Herr’ (Lord), and it is obvious that the meaning ’Lord’ would be of

especially fundamental importance for the interpretation of Son of
Man sayings in the teaching of Jesus, if it could be established.
However, passages in which vassals, citizens, smallholders, lords and
so on are referred to as wiN 12 cannotfunction as evidence of these
meanings because, insociety where all such people were men, any
a
one of them might equally well be referred to as a man. Furthermore,
the number of specialized meanings that Kearns seeks to find for
wiN 7r is too great for the expression to function without additional

qualification. Thirdly, even if the usual etymology of wiN 12 as a

combination of two Aramaic words 7r (’son’) and wiN (’man’) were
shown to be a secondary development and the term itself to have
originally been a single loanword from Ugaritic, the effect of the
usual etymology may not be ignored. Kearns agrees that wiN 12 was
understood as a combination of these two separate words in the
Aramaic of our period; this etymology must therefore be taken into
account in interpreting Aramaic texts from any environment where
such an etymology was perceptible. Fourthly, Kearns’s unconvincing
treatment of individual passages is well illustrated by the important
lQApGen XXI. 13. Kearns~ finds this passage problematical because
he wants vi3N 12 here to mean ’smallholder’ rather than ’man’. The
context concerns God’s promise to Abraham, whose seed is to be like
the dust of the earth which no man can number. The promise is given
in Hebrew in Gen. 13.16, where the word for ’man’ is ~~N. The
author of the Genesis Apocryphon represented w’N with wiiN 7r, a
fact which shows clearly that wiN 7r was already a normal term for
’man’. But for Kearns, the author has to be supposed to have God
declaring that Abraham’s seed will be like the dust of the earth which
no smallholder can number. Kearns does not explain why the

hyperbole ’no man can number’ should be rendered so peculiarly ’no

smallholder can number’, when v3N and 7ri were readily available to
the midrashic author; the only reason that Kearns supposes it was, is
his idea that wiN 12 does not normally mean ’man’. There are several
other passages where Kearns’s interpretation seems to me to be
equally forced. His use of the Syriac versions is at times especially
unsatisfactory. For example, he discusses the meaning of r71r in the
Christian Palestinian Syriac of Luke 19.12 without giving any weight
to the fact, which he recognizes, that it is a translation of äv8pWTTOÇ;
this indicates that it means ’man’, a meaning which fits the context
perfectly.s We must therefore conclude that Kearns’s challenge has

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 5

not been successful, and the now conventional view most clearly
stated by Vermes, that wiN 7r was a normal term for ’man’, should
continue to be maintained.
Some further general matters must be dealt with before we can
work through a detailed example from the teaching of Jesus. In the
first place, I shall assume that there was no Son of Man concept in
Judaism. This opinion remains controversial, but I have discussed it
elsewhere.6 Next, in sayings such as Matt. 8.20 // Luke 9.58,
(t-C)~Jt-C 7r cannot be seen as a reference to Dan. 7.13, for the
following reasons. First, the term v;t4 13 could hardly carry such a
reference on its own, because it was a normal term for ’man’. This is
partly a result of supposing that there was no Son of Man concept in
Judaism; but not entirely so, as the reason operating here, that
wiN 13 was a normal term for ’man’, is also one of the reasons for not
believing that there was a Son of Man concept in Judaism. This is a
major reason why the Aramaic wiN 13 could not be used in the way
that 6 v16q rou åv8pWTTOU is used in many Gospel sayings; the fact
that wit4 13 was a normal term for ’man’ would make many sentences
confused, and its lack of referring power will have been exacerbated
by the declining force of the Aramaic equivalent of the definite
article. Theoretically, v~t4 7r might have taken on specific overtones
in a restricted social sub-group. If the absence of a Son of Man
concept in Judaism means that the specific sub-group was not a
previously existing sector of the Jewish nation, Jesus might have
given specific teaching to his own disciples on this subject. But there
is no sign of such teaching; on the contrary, the meaning of ‘Son of
Man’ is nowhere explained, and yet is nowhere found difficult.’ This
shows that wiN 7r was used in a normal way, and this was not as a
term which could of itself provide reference to Dan. 7.13.~ Moreover,
if Jesus had given special teaching about Dan. 7.13, wiN 7r would
have been a quite inadequate term to extrapolate from this text.
Rather, he would need several terms or a direct reference to this
passage. However, in this example, as in so many, there are not
sufficient markers in the context to enable such a reference to be
picked up by Jesus’ audience. The mere fact of animals in both
contexts is not sufficient for this purpose; not only would reference to
jackals and birds be a useless way of trying to direct one’s audience to
the quite different animals of Dan. 7.4-8, but also this would not
cause the term wiN 13 to lose its generality as a term for ’man’ and
become a reference to a single biblical text.9 These reasons should be

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
6

regarded as decisive on their own, based as they are in the language

which Jesus spoke; but there is a further reason which applies, not to
this saying in particular, but to a whole group of sayings of which this
is one: if too many Son of Man sayings in the Gospels are seen as
dependent on Dan. 7.13, a whole series of technical problems arise
which do not appear to be soluble on this hypothesis.l° We must
therefore conclude that wiN 12 in Matt. 8.20 // Luke 9.58 is not a
reference to Dan. 7.13 and does not owe its origin to the use of this
text.
This result should not be regarded as in any way unsatisfactory,
since areconstruction of Matt. 8.20 // Luke 9.58 shows it to be an
example of an idiomatic use of wiN 12 which I have previously
described as follows: ’in Aramaic a speaker could use a general
statement, in which the expression for &dquo;man&dquo; was wiN ur, in order to
say something about himself’.11 For the existence of this idiom, I
was dependent on the evidence collected by Vermes; I also accepted
from him ’general statement&dquo; as a description of what examples of
this idiom seem to me to be, and seem to him not to be, as this is a
reasonable description of propositions about people in general,
whether or not they have to be perceived as true of all people on
earth. Linguists however usually refer in these circumstances to
generic terms, and generic sentences, and this has been taken up by
Lindars in his description of the Aramaic evidence.l3 This is perhaps
equally satisfactory. In either case, our assessment of Aramaic
reconstructions of sayings of Jesus must be controlled by our
understanding of the primary Aramaic sources, rather than by the
terms which we use to describe them. The important fact here is that
in all examples of this idiom, (t4)v: 7r refers to man in general rather
than to the speaker alone: there are no known examples of the
indirect application of (t4)v3(m) 7r to the speaker alone, a form of
indirect self-reference for which the Aramaic speaker had the
alternative expression M123 Ninn. As well as the description ’general
statement’, I also accepted Vermes’s description of the circumstances
in which this idiom was used: ’In most instances the sentence
contains an allusion to humiliation, danger or death, but there are
also examples where reference to the self in the third person is
dictated by humility or modesty’. This stress on the situational
context of this idiom is fundamental, and it explains why so few
examples of the idiom have been found in our literary sources. Few of
these have appropriate contexts for this idiom; few of them even

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 7

attempt toimitate the natural discourse which is the real home of so

indirect a mode of speech, controlled as it usually is by human
feelings rather than by the sort of abstract grammatical rules with
which linguists have usually worked.
There is however one further respect in which Vermes’s description
of this idiom is not perhaps the most useful one. Vermes regards the
idiom as ambiguous: he describes it as a circumlocution, and defines
this as ’roundabout and evasive speech’, ’expected to entail ambi-
guity’.14 Some definition of what is meant by ’ambiguity’ is necessary
at this point. If I thought that general statements applied by a speaker
to himself were ambiguous, I would mean that when a speaker used
such a sentence, his audience would normally be in some doubt as to
what he meant, and might even be mistaken as to what he meant, and
I would regard this situation as inherent in the use of the idiom. 15
Given this definition of the term ’ambiguous’, the idiom should not
be described as ambiguous, since the application to the speaker is
normally clear. For example, when Simeon ben Yohai ended his
thirteen years in a cave, he is reported to have declared:
wi 131 vt3 1r,:):J’ inD fit ~~~n·t~ t~5 N’nw ’ir’’’30 71D’3 ’A bird is not

caught without the will of heaven; how much less the soul of a son of
man’ (Gen. R. 79,6). In this example, it is clear that R. Simeon
intended this general statement to include himself. The idiom is not,
therefore, best regarded as ambiguous.
With these points in mind, I turn to the interpretation of Matt.
8.20 // Luke 9.58. A possible Aramaic substratum may be recon-
structed as follows:l6

There has been a long tradition of interpreting this saying as a

general statement, but this view has equally been rejected on the
ground that the saying would then be untrue, and this same objection
has been brought against my interpretation of it, most notably by
Professor Hooker.17 Hooker gives ’a man has nowhere to lay his
head’, understood as a general statement about mankind which
applies to Jesus in particular, as an example of a saying which is
’manifestly untrue’. It is however to be noted that in presenting this
criticism Hooker removes the saying from its context, and further
removes half the saying itself. The result of this process is natural

enough: we respond to the insufficiency of data from the context by

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
8

interpreting what is left of the saying in the simplest possible way in

the light of our own background assumptions. So ’a man has nowhere
to lay his head’ means, well, perhaps not that he has no pillow-that
might be too literal-more possibly that he has no bed or, better still,
no home, and that is ’manifestly untrue’. To understand the original

saying, we must restore its other half, and reconstruct both the
linguistic and situational context.&dquo;
t-C~’3.’n includes jackals as well as foxes.~~ 1~i1n means any sort of
hole,20 and its meaning should not be restricted to the dens in which
foxes usually dwell for that part of the year when they mate and have
their cubs. Both animals hunt at night, and take cover during the
day; they are said to use all sorts of caves, thickets and crannies for
this purpose. When they do mate and have their young, both are said
to frequently take over burrows of other animals. i’71n are thus
largely provided by nature, or as one should say in this context, by
God, and they are provided for ~t~5vn when they are on the move.
Kaia6Xrwc~amS cannot render 7,3p the Aramaic word for ’nests’,
because any reasonable translator would have translated 1~Ji’ as
voamaS, using the Greek word for ’nest’. To produce Ka-ra&eth;K1lvw&eth;EtÇ,
the translator must have been faced with a word which meant
something like ’places to stay’: 1~J:J~C is such a word, and it was
evidently in use in the Aramaic of Jesus’ time.21 The majority of
birds seen in Palestine were migratory, stopping to rest on their way
over; in any case, birds do not live in nests most of the time-they
build them to rear their young, and then leave them. Among the
many species native to Palestine, Cansdale notes the Lesser Kestrel,
which ’travels in large flocks and roosts in hundreds, in such
conspicuous places as the trees round Capernaum’.22 Here again,
what the birds have got was provided by God in the ordinary course
of nature, and it was provided for them as they moved about the
countryside. All this will have been a matter of common observation
to the Jews of Jesus’ time, and it is this which provides the situational
background against which we can see both the general level of
meaning of the saying and the application of it to his migratory
ministry. At the general level, the provision of resting-places for
foxes/jackals and birds is contrasted with the lack of such provision
for people, who have to build houses to have anywhere to stay.
A similar perspective on the divine provision for animals is found
in a saying attributed to R Simeon son of Eleazar at M. Kidd. 4.14:
‘R Simeon son of Eleazar says, Have you ever seen a wild animal or

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 9

a birdpractising a craft-yet they sustained without care, and

are
were they not created for no other purpose than to serve me? But I
was created to serve my maker. How much more then ought I to be
sustained without care? But I have done evil, and forfeited my
sustenance.’ In the expanded version of bKidd. 82b, R. Simeon
declares that he has never seen a w~t~ (jackal/fox) as a shopkeeper.
The common element here is to be found in the view that animals are
directly provided for by God, whereas in some respects men are
not-they have to provide for themselves. The function of the
general statement in the teaching of Jesus is however different from
that of the abstract reflection of R Simeon. Jesus was not concerned
with the theological problem which could be seen here-indeed on
another occasion he felt able to illustrate God’s overall care of people
by means of analogy with his care for the natural world (Matt. 6.25ff.
// Luke 12.12ff). Jesus was not even making an assertion about
animals and man, for in this idiom the general level of meaning is
functional rather than substantive. Hence there is a certain tendency
for the general statements used in this idiom to be obvious, as this
one should perhaps be seen to be from the perspective of people who

lived in Galilee. The more obvious the general level of meaning, the
greater the probability that the audience will accept the truth of the
statement, including its application to the speaker.23
The choice of jackals and birds for this general level of meaning is
natural enough: birds were as obvious a large class of animate beings
then as now, and a good deal more ubiquitous-hence their use in R.
Simeon’s saying, as elsewhere. They were especially suitable here
because they were so migrant. The choice of t-C~’1.’n cannot be
described as inevitable; any vigorous teacher has available a genuine
choice of imagery when he wants to make a point. They were
however a sound choice because they were notorious, unclean and
noisy animals which evidently moved in and out of areas of human
habitation, always finding somewhere to lay up as they moved about.
Some of these factors also account for the selection of wtt~ in the
expanded verion of R. Simeon’s saying in bKidd 82b. While this
explains the use of these particular items in this particular sentence,
the appropriateness of the idiom is due to the humble situation in
which Jesus found himself of having no accommodation for either
himself or his disciples. It is not however ambiguous, for in the
context of the migratory ministry during which he said it, it will
evidently have applied to himself. It may also have functioned as a

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
10

warning prospective disciple that proper commitment would

to a
result in hardships, since this setting is common to both Matthew
(where ~i5 ypappar£6q, congenial enough to Matthew, declares
6i6daKaX£, dKoXov0fiaw aot ÖTTOU t6tv 6tntpXi ,,l) and Luke (where
unvarnished riq makes the same declaration, minus the form of
address). The setting is certainly suitable, though it could possibly be
secondary: we cannot deduce it from the reconstruction of Matt. 8.20
// Luke 9.58, since our idiom permits but does not demand that the
general statement used refer to others in the audience as well as the
speaker. If the setting is genuine, the saying will clearly have referred
to the whole company of disciples who were accompanying Jesus,
and the prospective adherent will soon have learnt that the overriding
need to announce the coming of the kingdom of God might result in
the more drastic hardships dramatically illustrated in other sayings
(cf. e.g. Mark 8.34ff).
Understood as expressing a contrast between the direct divine
provision for animals and for man, the saying has a level at which it
can be perceived as true of all men. However, this perception is not

inevitable, not least because all men are not usually on the move; to
understand how this saying will have functioned in its original
context and during its transmission in the early community, it is
therefore important to observe that general statements in many
languages do not in fact have to be true of everyone in order to
function in conversation, and to apply this insight to the meagre
evidence of the functioning of this idiom in Aramaic. The limited
scope of some general statements in American English was clearly
revealed by Harvey Sacks in his essay ’Everyone has to lie’.24 Among
his more relevant examples of the use of ’everyone’ is the following
exchange:
A. Why do you want to kill yourself? ° ’

B. For the same reason everyone does.

A. What’s that?
B. You just want to know if anyone cares.
If interpret everyone in its apparent literal meaning of all
we

people, it is evident that everyone does not in fact wish to commit

suicide at all, but that does not prevent the term from being used in
this way. From this and other examples, Sacks argues that ’everyone’
means ’anyone in such a situation as I’, or ’anyone in such a situation
where what that situation is is characterizable’. He comments,

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 11

’There are uses of &dquo;everyone&dquo; that seem to be noting that the people
so identified are sufficiently identified if the situation they are in is
stated. That is, for whomever is in that situation, the specification of
that situation constitutes a sufficient account of what they may be
expected to do, how they may be expected to feel, or how they may be
expected to behave.’ 25
Of the general terms used by English speakers in general statements
which they apply to themselves, ’everyone’ appears from its surface
logic to be the most general of all, and it does enable us to see with
particular clarity that, when a general term is used in an idiom of this
kind, it does not have to cease to be a general term simply because the
sentence in which it is used clearly applies to an individual. Among
other terms whose usage is relevant to the understanding of this
Aramaic idiom are the English ’one’, ’a man’, ’we’ and ’you’, the
French ’on’ and the German ’man’. In a recent study directed
primarily at the English ’one’, Wales correctly observed, ’It must be
stressed that for pronouns, the boundary between &dquo;specific&dquo; and
&dquo;homophoric&dquo; references is frequently hard to distinguish: you, we,
and one all exhibit varying degrees of generalization’;26 this, with the
availability of a fund of natural language further illuminated by
means of elicitation tests, simply indicates that the boundaries of
such usages are formed by the approximate regularities of human
speakers, who vary according to social class, personal feelings and
idiolect.
When we endeavour to apply insights like this to the use of W)m 13
in Aramaic, we find that there is too little evidence to permit a
sophisticated analysis. We simply do not have conversations available
to us in Aramaic as Sacks and Wales had in English when they
studied the use of’everyone’, ’one’ and other expressions of this kind.
It is therefore all the more important to note that one or two of
Vermes’s examples do not appear to be true of all men, and that this
neither undermines the contention that they are general statements
nor reduces their effectiveness in conversation. Thus at pBer 2.8.5b
we have the saying of R. Hiyya bar Adda, adduced to explain why he
left his valuables to R. Levi: i1~i:J:J i1~’V 2~n Nwi 131 ’7’nbn, ’The
disciple of a son of man is as dear to him as his son’. Most sons of men
do not have disciples and some do not have sons, but that is not
relevant to the effectiveness of the saying in its context. Since wiN 7r
is also a term for any individual man, and therefore might appear
more readily adaptable than terms like ’everyone’ to general statements

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
12

which are trueonly of a restricted group, we should not reject

possible examples of this idiom on the ground that the general
statement which is used is not as a matter of fact true of all men, still
less on the ground that the general statement is not true of all men at
all times and in all circumstances.
It is of course essential to be clear about the methods being
employed when Aramaic usage is illuminated by means of the idioms
’of modern languages. The study of’everyone’, ’one’, ’a man’, ’we’ and
’you’ in English, together with the French ’on’ and the German
’man’, cannot control the usage of Aramaic speakers 2,000 years ago;
it can however disprove incorrect general assumptions held, if not
always explicitly stated, by modem observers. Two such assumptions
have been important in recent debate on the Son of Man problem. In
his original article on this idiomatic usage, Vermes appears to have
assumed that, if he could show that examples of v3 7r statements
referred to the speaker, he had shown also that they were no longer
general statements, and that V; 12 was simply a substitute for the
first person pronoun t-CJK 27 Work on pragmatically equivalent modem
idioms shows that this assumption is false. Furthermore, once this
assumption is dropped, it is no longer possible to put forward any
valid argument in favour of his original view, and this can give the
misleading impression that Aramaic usage is being held to depend on
work on modem languages. A second assumption, implicit in the
comments of Hooker and others, 28 is that general statements should
be true of all people to function as such. Here too, work on modem
languages shows that this assumption is false, and indeed we can see
that this idiom functions in a way analogous to that of similar idioms
in other languages. Thus, where modem evidence is abundant, it can
help the modem observer to interpret correctly the meagre ancient
evidence by deducing the correct overall patterns of usage; in this
case it is important that we do have some Aramaic evidence of

general statements with (N)wi 13 functioning when they are not true
of everyone, and the modern evidence should allow us to be confident
that we are not dealing with a mere aberration, but with the
pragmatic factors involved in the use of this idiom.
With these points also in mind, we may return to the interpretation
of Matt. 8.20 // Luke 9.58 and discuss its authenticity. At one level,
we have here a general statement, in which the divine provision of

resting-places for jackals and birds is contrasted with the lack of such
provision for men. This general level of meaning was however

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 13

functional rather than substantive. In accordance with normal

Aramaic idiom, Jesus used this assertion with particular reference to
himself, thereby declaring that he, in the course of his migratory
ministry, had nowhere to go. The effectiveness of this saying in its
original context was in no way affected by the fact that people are not
usually on the move, and consequently the lack of divine provision of
resting-places for them is not usually relevant to their needs. The
immediate situational context will have made this fact temporarily
irrelevant, and the idiom would still function even if some of the
audience and transmitters of the saying did not believe that it was
universally true. The situational context is indirectly confirmed by
other evidence that Jesus moved about in his ministry, and some of
his sharp sayings about discipleship are especially relevant to this
condition (Matt. 8.22 // Luke 9.60; Luke 9.62). This particular saying
will also have served as a warning to potential disciples about the
conditions to be met in the near future, when the overriding need to
announce the kingdom of God might also result in the more drastic

hardships illustrated in other sayings. This may have been of

immediate relevance when the saying was originally delivered, and it
should not be regarded as alien to the nature of this idiom, which
functions whether or not there are other people present to whom the
general level of meaning is especially applicable. This saying has a
very sound Sitz im Leben in the ministry of Jesus. It is sufficiently
dramatic to have been remembered, though it does not have a Sitz im
Leben in the early church in the strong sense, that is, it can hardly
have been a community product. The suggestion that it was a
proverb secondarily attributed to Jesus has never been supported by
the production of satisfactory empirical evidence of the existence of
such a proverb.29 Furthermore, while this saying functions perfectly
well in its context, it is precisely when it is removed from that context
and treated as being sufficiently general in meaning to be a proverb
that its meaning becomes unconvincing: the fact that most people
had houses in first-century Galilee would prevent it from being a
proverb. If it was not a proverb, the church will have had no reason
to produce it at all. Still less would it have had any reason for using so
indirect an idiom in a saying which it attributed to Jesus. 30
The translation process will have been largely straightforward.
dX<6n£K£q is the obvious equivalent of t-C~~1.’n, <t>WÀEüÚÇ equally clear
for 1~im, and EXoumv is no more than idiomatic for 1’’’’’ ~n~M;
similarly, za nereivo. rou üùpavoü is an obvious rendering of

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
14

N’nw ’7ti 1~J:J~r,:) may have been a bit of a problem, but we have seen
that KCL-[Ct(YKYIVWC5EI~ is a good solution, and the translator may not
have needed long to think of it. In Greek, as in Aramaic, there is no
need to repeat ~youcytv. The next expression is the major difficulty,
namely the rendering of the idiomatic use of wiN 12. The problem
appears to be constituted by the absence, as far as I am aware, of any
Greek idiom so close to the Aramaic that it could be used straight-
forwardly as a translation of it. The translator therefore rendered
literally, ’’2 with u16q and wiN with åv8pù.mou (thus far, following the
usual habit of the LXX). However, the original may have read mc,3m
rather than v3K, and in either case the state of (N)wiN did not tell the
translator whether to use the articles with u16q dv9p(jonou, because
the force of the definite state had begun to break down in the
Aramaic of this period, and on analytical grounds we can see that this
idiom uses precisely the sort of expression in which the definite state
would first be ineffective, because its presence or absence cannot
affect the meaning. The translator was therefore almost bound to use
the articles, to ensure that the reference to Jesus remained clear. In
Greek, he could continue to read the articles as generic. The waw
was correctly rendered with 6t placed after the first article. Nb was

obviously OO(K), EXEI for n5 ,r,t4 is the same straightforward idea as

in the previous line; TTOÜ is straightforward enough for’ 1K KE<t>aÀi¡v
is inevitable for i1~~i, I is a sound rendering of 11r,:)O~ and i1:J
should be omitted because it is redundant in Greek.
When our translator looked over his version, he will have been well
satisfied for reasons which must be evaluated from the perspective of
a person who was properly bilingual in Aramaic and Greek. First, he

could not have done better.31 Secondly, when he read over his
version, he could still see the idiom of the Aramaic which he had
translated. If, as is probably on the most general of grounds, he was
either an Aramaic speaker who leamt Greek as his second language
or a person who learnt both languages as he grew up, he would read
the idiom as one which he knew in his native language. The other
important factor here is that he could in any case continue to read the
Greek article as generic, for the generic article in Greek is so normal
that general remarks about mankind could be made using av6pwrroS
with the article (e.g. Thucydides 1.140; Rom. 7.1; and in translation
Greek Deut. 8.3 LXX; Mark 2.27) as well as without it. Consequently,
a bilingual person must have been able to read the articles in 6 uioS

roo åv8pWTTOU in the same sense.

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 15

How far this was known to the evangelists is a great deal more
difficult to determine.3’ Certainly the term 6 u16g rou àv8pcímou can
be read as a title in Greek, and must be so read in many Gospel
sayings which cannot be interpreted as examples of the idiom under
consideration. The barbarity of the term should not be exaggerated.
While it is a Semitism, and was never likely to occur in natural
Greek, it can be read as a feasible Greek title, and could be so read
especially in communities which were already familiar with the LXX.
What then will it have meant? To some extent this depends on the
customary reference of its constituent parts in the communities
where the Gospels were read, but the most important factors appear
to be the following. The Semitic idiomatic uses of ui6~ were already
common in the LXX, and some aspects of Semitic usage were partially

parallelled in native Greek expressions such as ul£g ’Axat<Dv. If

therefore the Christian met 6 ui6~ rou åv8pcímou as a description of
his Lord and Messiah Jesus, he was almost bound to read it as
referring to the most distinguished man of all, since this is what he
already believed Jesus to be. Ifuios be taken in a generally Semitic
way, the whole expression effectively means ’the man’; if it is not, the
son of mankind is evidently more important than a son of a city or a

people.33 Once ’son of God’ was established in the tradition as a title

of Jesus, the patristic interpretation of’son of man’ as referring to his
human nature became almost inevitable, and may well have been
held by the author of the Gospel attributed to St John.34
The following conclusions may therefore by drawn. Matt. 8.20 //I
Luke 9.58 is a genuine saying of Jesus. Its meaning can be recovered
only by the reconstruction of the original Aramaic, which enables us
to see that it is an example of a normal Aramaic idiom, in which the

speaker used a general statement containing the term wiN 12 to refer

to himself. At this level, the saying asserts the divine provision of

ample places for animals and birds to go, and contrasts the lack of
such provision for men. This level of meaning is however functional
rather than substantive. Jesus used it to assert that he himself had
nowhere to go, and since he was the leader of a group of disciples, this
will also have implied that he was not in a position to make any
satisfactory provision for their everyday needs. The saying fits well
into the context of his migratory preaching of the imminent coming
of the kingdom of God, and the demands which he is otherwise
known to have made on his disciples.

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
16

NOTES

1. P.M. Casey, ‘The Son of Man Problem’, ZNW 67 (1976), 147-54; more
recently, P.M. Casey, Son of Man: The Interpretation and Influence of
Daniel 7 (London: SPCK, 1980), ch. 9.
2. This is a revised version of a short paper read at the S.N.T.S. meeting
in Leuven, in August 1982. This was itself part of a paper originally read to
the Christology seminar at the meeting of the British branch of S.N.T.S. in
September, 1981, and to the Nottingham University postgraduate New
Testament seminar in November, 1981. I am grateful to those who have
discussed with me the issues raised here, especially Professor C.K. Barrett,
Dr D.R. Catchpole, Professor J.D.G. Dunn, Professor D.R.A. Hare and
Professor B. Lindars; none of them is responsible for any of my comments.
3. G. Vermes, ’The use of in Jewish Aramaic’, Appendix
E in M. Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Oxford: OUP,
1967), pp. 310-28: R. Kearns, Vorfragen zur Christologie. Morphologische
3
und semasiologische Studie zur Vorgeschichte eines christologischen Hoheitstitels
(T&uuml;bingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1978).
4. Op. cit., p. 135 n. 181 from p. 134.
5. Op. cit., p. 139 n. 202. In general, cf. W.G. Kummel, ThR 45 (1980),
61-63; idem, 47 (1982), 376-77.
6. P.M. Casey, ’The Use of the Term "Son of Man" in the Similitudes of
Enoch’, JSJ 7 (1976), pp. 11-29; Casey, Son of Man, chs. 2 and 5.I have not
been impressed by criticisms of this view, nor by recent attempts to derive a
Son of Man figure from less conventional Jewish sources, but these problems
cannot be dealt with here; cf. J. Lust, ‘Daniel 7.13 and the Septuagint’, EThL
54 (1978), pp. 62-69: B. McNeil, ’The Son of Man and the Messiah: A
Footnote’, NTS 25 (1979-80), pp. 419-21; J.J. Collins, ’The Heavenly
Representative: The "Son of Man" in the Similitudes of Enoch, in G.W.E.
Nickelsburg and J.J. Collins (eds.), Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism (Chico:
Scholars Press, 1980), pp. 111-33: R. Kearns, Vorfragen zur Christologie. II.
&Uuml;berlieferungsgeschichtliche und Rezeptionsgeschichtliche Studie zur Vorges-
chichte eines christologischen Hoheitstitels (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1980):
F.J. Moloney, The Downside Review 98 (1980), pp. 284-86; idem, ‘The Re-
interpretation of Psalm VIII and the Son of Man Debate’, NTS 27 (1980-81),
pp. 656-72; J. Coppens, ’Le fils d’homme dans les traditions juives postbibliques
hormis du livre des paraboles de l’H&eacute;noch &eacute;thiopiens’, EThL 57 (1981),
pp. 58-82; D.W. Suter, ’Weighed in the Balance: The Similitudes of Enoch
in Recent Discussion’, Rel Stud Rev 7 (1981), pp. 217-21.
7. J. Wellhausen, Skizzen und Vorarbeiten, VI (Berlin, 1899), p. 197,
quoted by G. Vermes in Black, op. cit., p. 310; G. Vermes, Jesus the Jew
(London: Collins, 1973), pp. 161-62; Casey, Son of Man, pp. 210, 212-13.
8. Tuckett has recently suggested ’the war’ as a comparable example of a
phenomenon which he summarizes as ’every culture has its accepted

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 17

shorthand ways of speaking and writing’ (JSNT 14 [1982], p. 73 n. 14 from

p. 72). But after the second world war, British people had just been through
the completely shattering experience of the biggest war there had ever been;
in these circumstances one war could be described as ’the War’ without
further qualification. Further, ’war’, general term though it may appear to
be, is not nearly as general as ’man’; Jesus will not have been able to avoid
specimens of every time he walked down a Capernaum street, and he
could hardly have refrained from using the term himself in passages like
Luke 10.30 where the translation process has ensured that we can no longer
verify the individual example. Considerations of this kind make it unlikely
that Jesus would want to use the term as a title; the reasons
summarized in the text above are needed in addition to show that he did not
in fact take this generally improbable step. Cf. further Casey, loc. cit. (n. 7).
9. Reference to Dan. 7.13 has been the commonest alternative view
expressed by scholars who have heard earlier versions of this paper. For
suggested reconstructions of Son of Man sayings which might be seen as
having sufficient markers in the context for the reference to Dan. 7.13 to be
feasible in Aramaic, see Casey, Son of Man, pp. 165 (Mark 13.26), 178 (Mark
14.62). There are other reasons for arguing that neither is a genuine saying of
Jesus, but there are difficulties in arguing that either of them is inadequate as
Aramaic.
10. Casey, Son of Man, pp. 201-202, 207-13. Here lies the answer to a
point evidently felt by some reviewers, and stated with clarity by W.O.
Walker, JBL 100 (1981), p. 645: ’Is much of Casey’s argumentation really
circular in nature in that his criteria for identifying Danielic influence are so
restrictive as to predetermine his conclusion that such influence is not
extensive?’ The argument is not circular partly because so much of it is
analytic, but partly also because the results from the apparently strict
application of criteria of judgment for determining the possible influence
from Daniel 7 are in general confirmed by this quite different set of criteria,
which show that the group of Son of Man sayings deriving from this source
cannot have been much larger. These criteria are thus different from those

applicable in investigating most cases of possible influence of an OT text in

the sayings of Jesus and/or the work of the evangelists.
11. ZNW 67 (1976), p. 147; Son of Man, p. 226.
12. Op. cit., p. 323; cf p. 321.
13. B. Lindars, BJRL 63 (1981), p. 439 et aliter; idem, ExpT 93 (1982),
p. 294. Likewise, but intermittently, Vermes, Jesus the Jew, p. 325, referring
to in the generic sense’, and myself, Son of Man, p. 227, noting ’that
the generic use of was in operation before the time of Jesus’.

Unfortunately students of language in general have not found any more

useful way of describing idioms of this kind, partly at least because of the
lack of appreciation of the importance of pragmatic factors in their use, and
this is no doubt one reason why my original description of the idiom has not

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
18

always been correctly understood; cf supra, pp. 7f., 12, on M.D. Hooker et
al., supposing that general statements used in this idiom should be true of
everyone; W.G. Kummel, ThR 47 (1982), p. 374, supposing that the general
level of meaning (at Mark 14.21 and Matt. 11.19) is being declared ’primar’,
when in fact it is the means by which a speaker says something about
himself, Moloney, Downside Review 98 (1980), pp. 282-83, 288, deducing
from the general nature of the statements used that Jesus was making no
special claims for himself (and correctly thinking otherwise).
14. JJS 29 (1978), p. 125.
15. It should be possible to turn to experts in ’ambiguity research’ to
clarify a point like this, but it seems best to use a definition which is useful
for present purposes and which corresponds approximately to popular usage,
rather than that conventional among psycholinguists, who generally define
any linguistic item as ambiguous if it can have more than one meaning in
any circumstances at all. Ambiguity research has so far been of limited value
for the understanding of natural language (though it has cast some light on
the way we process linguistic items), because it has consisted largely of
laboratory experiments, most of which have not taken sufficient notice of the
linguistic and situational contexts in which linguistic items normally occur.
For an understanding and critical overview, see J.F. Kess and R.A. Hoppe,
’On Psycholinguistic Experiments in Ambiguity’, Lingua 45 (1978), pp. 125-
40 ; for a more recent survey of the area, with suggestions for future research,
J.F. Kess and R.A. Hoppe, Ambiguity in Psycholinguistics (Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 1981). In a basically similar way of dealing with a set of idioms
which many scholars classify as ambiguous, J.R. Searle has denied the
ambiguity of indirect speech acts such as ’You’re standing on my foot’,
which may not usefully be regarded as ambiguous on the ground that it
might be interpreted literally as only a statement of fact, rather than as a
request to get off my foot; cf. J.R. Searle, ’Indirect Speech Acts’, in Syntax
and Semantics. 3. Speech acts, ed. P. Cole and J.L. Morgan (London/New
York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 59-82, esp. 67-68. Cf further infra, n. 18.
16. It is possible that we should add at the end of the saying following
Gospel of Thomas, logion 86, as this has a perfectly sound Sitz im Leben in
the original setting of the saying; however, it is possible that it originated as a
double translation of or &kap a;&lambda;&iacute;&nu;&eta; that it is a simple addition which arose

during oral transmission of the saying; or that it had a specific Sitz im Leben
in a gnostic setting in which the saying was expanded. Fortunately the
meaning of the original saying is not seriously affected by this degree of
uncertainty: cf R. McL. Wilson, Studies in the Gospel of Thomas (London:
Mowbrays, 1960), p. 59; B. Gartner, The Theology of the Gospel of Thomas
(London; SPCK, 1962), pp. 600-61, 245-47; A. Strobel, ’Textgeschichtliches
zum Thomas-Logion (Mt 8,20/Luk 9,58)’, Vig Chr 17 (1963), pp. 211-24; W.

Schrage, Das Verhaltnis des Thomasevangeliums zur synoptischen Tradition

und zu den koptischen Evangelienubersetzungen, BZNW 29 (1964), pp. 168-

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 19

70: J.-E. M&eacute;nard, L’&Eacute;vangile selon Thomas (Nag Hammadi Studies, V;

Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), pp. 11-13, 187-88. For earlier reconstructions, cf. A.
Jesu Muttersprache (Freiburg i.B./Leipzig, 1896), p. 96; C.F. Burney,
Meyer,
The Poetry of Our Lord (Oxford: OUP, 1925), pp. 132, 169, a version very
close to the Palestinian Syriac of Luke 9.58, which interpreted &kap a;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&omega;&sigma;&epsiv;&tau;&sfgr;
as qnvnyn, but supposed to be Aramaic verse, with ’three-beat rhythm’ and

’rhyme’; J. Jeremias, New Testament Theology, I (London: SCM, 1971),

p. 23, for the most part following Burney.
17. As a general statement, e.g. R. Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic
Tradition (ET; Oxford: OUP, 2 1968, from the 1931 edn), p. 28; F.W. Beare,
The Gospel according to St. Matthew (Oxford: OUP, 1981), p. 213, against
this view, e.g. J.M. Creed, The Gospel According to St. Luke (London:
Macmillan, 1930), p. 142; I.H. Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Exeter.
Paternoster, 1978), p. 410; against my view of it, J.D.G. Dunn, Unity and
Diversity in the New Testament (London: SCM Press, 1977), p. 39; M.D.
Hooker, in Text and Interpretation. Studies in the New Testament presented
to Matthew Black, ed. E. Best and R McL. Wilson (Cambridge; CUP, 1979),

p. 158. For other recent discussions based on assumptions different from

those which I have sought to establish, cf. S. Schulz, Q. Die Spruchquelle der
Evangelisten (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1972), pp. 434-42; H. Schurmann,
’Beobachtungen zum Menschensohn-Titel in der Redequelle’, in Jesus und
der Menschensohn. Fur Anton V&ouml;gtle, ed. R Pesch and R Schnackenburg
with O. Kaiser (Freiburg / Basel / Wien: Herder, 1975), pp. 124-47, esp. 132-
33, 140ff
18. Both factors should be regarded as fundamental to the interpretation
of any saying. As in the case of’ambiguity research’ (supra, n. 15), it should
have been possible to turn to students of language in general for discussions
of the relationship between a sentence and its context in determining what
any speaker or writer means, but for many years linguists suffered from the
same fault as New Testament scholars in interpreting sentences in isolation.
It is fortunate that some linguists are now mending their ways, partly at least
under the influence of children’s specialists and ethnomethodologists, both
groups compelled by their subject matter to look at more than linguistic
items when interpreting linguistic utterances. Their protests, analysis of
what happens when sayings are interpreted literally, and proper stress on the
importance of different kinds of context seem to the present author to be just
as fundamental for the New Testament scholar interpreting sayings of Jesus

as they are for the interpretation of anyone else’s utterances; cf. C.S. Smith,
’The Vagueness of Sentences in Isolation’, Papers from the Thirteenth
Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society (1977), pp. 568-77; H.H. Clark,
’Inferring what is meant’, in Studies in the perception of language, ed. W.J.M.
Levelt and G.B. Flores d’Arcais (Chichester: Wiley, 1978), pp. 295-322; J.R
Searle, ’Literal Meaning’, Erkenntnis 13 (1978), pp. 207-24, reprinted in J.R
Searle, Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
20

(Cambridge: CUP, 1979), ch. 5; E. Ochs, ’Introduction. What Child

Language Can Contribute to Pragmatics’, in E. Ochs and B.B. Schieffelin
(eds.), Developmental pragmatics (London / New York: Academic Press,
1979), pp. 1-17; A.L. Vanek, ’A Note on Context-Sensitive Grammar’,
Papers in Linguistics 12 (1979), pp. 271-92; R.D. van Valin, ’Meaning and
Interpretation’, Journal of Pragmatics 4 (1980), 213-31.
19. The species will have been vulpes vulpes and canis aureus. Cf. H.B.
Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible (London: Christian Knowledge
Society, 1867; 10
1911), pp. 85-88, 109-11; R. Burrows, Wild Fox (London:
David and Charles, 1968); Encyclopaedia Judaica, s.v. ’Animals of the Bible
and Talmud’, ’Jackal’; F.S. Cansdale, Animals of Bible Lands (Exeter:
Paternoster, 1970), pp. 124-26; B. Grzimek, Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclo-
paedia, vol. 12, Mammals III (London / New York: Van Nostrand, 1972),
pp. 195-99 (Introduction to canids, by H. Wendt), 236-43 (Jackals, by D.
Muller-Using, B. Grzimek, and H., Wendt), 243-54 (Foxes, by A. Pedersen,
H. Dathe, D. Muller-Using and H. Wendt); H.F. Ewer, The Carnivores
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 253-61; E.P. Walker et al.,
rev. J.L. Paradiso, Mammals of the World (London / Baltimore: John

Hopkins, 1975), II, pp. 1148ff.: ’Carnivora; Family: CANIDAE’.

20. (Matt. 8.20 syr. pal.; Jeremias, loc. cit.) is perhaps the most
probable word behind &phis;&omega;&lambda;&epsiv;o&upsi;&sfgr;, but the point which I am making here will
follow if we use (Luke 9.58 syr. (pal.; Burney, loc. cit.), or .
21. It is a normal word in biblical Hebrew and in later Aramaic: at Ezra
7.15 it refers to God’s dwelling in Jerusalem, and it has been restored as
at 1 En. 89.36, where it refers to the Tabernacle. In the OT, the sg. is
almost always used of God’s dwelling, but this is probably due to the content
of the OT, that is, the reference of the word rather than its meaning in either
Hebrew or Aramaic. The same factor will have affected the usage of the LXX,
which normally renders it with &sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&eta; or &sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&omega;&mu;&alpha;, both of which are
however from the same root as &kap a;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;&eta;&nu;&omega;&sigma;i&sfgr;. &kap a;&alpha;&tau;&sigma;&sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&oacute;&omega; in the LXX
almost always renders the Hebrew (more than 50 times), and likewise
the Aramaic at Dan. 4.19 Theod. is in fact rendered with
&kap a;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&omega;&sigma;i&sfgr; at Ezek. 37.27 LXX, Ps 45(46).5 Symmachus and Ps.
48(49).12 Symmachus. Thus it seems to me to be the best choice, and its
translation with &kap a;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&omega;&sigma;&epsiv;i&sfgr; in this context is sound and comprehensible.
However, it is possible that was too closely associated with God’s

dwelling and not in normal usage in a general sense, and it is not the only
word which Jesus might have used here. (Matt. 8.20 pesh, sin, cur;
Luke 9.58 pesh, cur, used here by Meyer, op. cit.) is suitably used in later
Aramaic, and occurs in the sense of ’roof in a document of 408 BC (A.

Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B. C. (Oxford: OUP, 1923), no.
30 line 11 // no. 31 line 10); the verb is found at Dan. 4.9, the noun
(or possibly the verb) at 11 QTg Job 28.7 (Job 36.29) and probably at 1 En. 4.
At Dan. 4.9 Theodotion rendered with &kappa;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;&kappa;&eta;&nu;O&omega; (LXX &sigma;&kap a;i&alpha;&zeta;&omega;). It is

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
 21

therefore perfectly possible that was in use in the Aramaic of our

period with the required meaning, and if this was the case, the rendering
&kap a;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&omega;&sigma;&epsiv;i&sfgr; would have been sound. is another possibility (Dan.
2.11; 4.22, 29; 5.21;11QTg Job 32.5 (Job 39.6, rendering the Hebrew ),
and in later Hebrew and Targumic Aramaic); in this context a translator
might have used &kap a;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&sigma;&kap a;&eta;&nu;&OHacgr;&sigma;&epsiv;i&sfgr; rather than the perhaps more likely
&kap a;&alpha;&tau;o&tau;&kap a;&iacute;&alpha;&tau; used by Theodotion (Dan. 2.11; 4.22, 29; 5.21; of these examples,
LXX translates our MT only at Dan. 2.11, where it has the similar

&kap a;&alpha;&tau;O&tau;&kap a;&eta;&tau;&nu;&rho;&tau;O&nu;).

22. Cansdale, op. cit., p. 140; he estimates (p. 152) that no less than 80% of
all species in Palestine are to some degree migratory, and suggests that since
these include some very common birds, the proportion of residential
individuals may well have been considerably less that this (i.e., presumably,
less than 20%).
23. The evidence for this is not as tight as one would like it to be, but it
appears to be sound. As with ’ambiguity research’ and the importance of
seeing linguistic utterances in their contexts (supra, nn. 15, 18), progress has
been inhibited or even prevented by the widespread habit of treating
artificial sentences in isolation rather than dealing with large passages of
natural language. It is therefore reasonable to hope for a dramatic improve-
ment in the near future. For existing work, which just suffices for the point
at issue, cf. R.P Abelson and D.E. Kanouse, ’Subjective Acceptance of
Verbal Generalization’, in S. Feldman (ed.), Cognitive Consistency (London
/ New York: Academic Press, 1966), pp. 171-97; R. Revlis, S.G. and Lipkin
J.R. Hayes, ’The Importance of Universal Quantifiers in a Hypothetical
Reasoning Task’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 10
(1971), pp. 86-91; R. Revlis and J.R. Hayes, ’The Primacy of Generalities in
Hypothetical Reasoning’, Cognitive Psychology 3 (1972), pp. 268-90; H.
Gollob, B. Rossman and R.P. Abelson, ’Social judgement as a function of the
number of instances, consistency, and relevance of information present’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27 (1973), pp. 19-33; G.O.
Klemp, ’The Influence of Selected Verb Characteristics on the Acceptance
of Generic Assertions’, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 13
(1974), pp. 355-64; G. Bear and A. Hodun, ’Implicational Principles and the
Cognition of Confirmatory, Contradictory, Incomplete and Irrelevant
Information’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32 (1975),
pp. 594-604; D.M. Podeschi and R.S. Wyer, Jr, ‘Acceptance of Generalizations
Based on Inductive and Deductive Evidence’, Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 34 (1976), pp. 496-509.
24. H. Sacks, ’Everyone has to lie’, in Sociocultural dimensions of language
use, ed. M. Sanches and B.G. Blount (New York: Academic Press, 1975),
pp. 57-79.
25. Sacks, op. cit., pp. 76-78.
26. K. Wales,’’’Personal’’ and "Indefinite" Reference: The uses of the

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015
22

Pronoun ONE in Present-day English’, Nottingham linguistic circular 9) 9

(1980), pp.93-117 (the quotation is from p. 93): cf further K. Wales,
’Exophora re-examined: the uses of the personal pronoun WE in present-day
English’, UEA Papers in Linguistics 12 (1980), pp. 12-44.
op. cit., pp. 320-26; for other criticisms, Casey, Son of Man,
27. Vermes,
pp. 224-26.
28. Supra, pp. 7f. and nn. 17-18.
29. R. Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (ET; Oxford:
Blackwell,2 1968;from the 1931 edn), p. 28. The often cited ’parallel’ from
Plutarch’s life of Tiberius Gracchus is worth noting here: &OHacgr;&sfgr; &tau;&alpha; &mu;&epsiv;&nu; &thetas;&eta;&rho;&iacute;&alpha;
&tau;&alpha; &tau;&eta;&nu; ’I&tau;&alpha;&lambda;&iacute;&alpha;&nu; &nu;&epsiv;&mu;&Oacute;&mu;&epsiv;&nu;&alpha; &kap a;&alpha;&iacgr; &phis;&omega;&lambda;&epsiv;&Ograve;&nu; &epsiv;&chi;&epsiv;&tau; K&alpha;&iacute; &kappa;O&tau;&alpha;&tau;&Oacute;&nu; &epsiv;&sigma;&tau;i&nu; &alpha;&upsi;&tau;&omega;&nu;
&eacgr;&kap a;&alpha;&sigma;&tau;&omega; &kap a;&alpha;&iacgr; &kap a;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;&delta;&upsi;&sigma;&epsiv;&tau;&sfgr;, &tau;O&iacgr;&sfgr; &delta;&epsiv; &upsi;&pi;&epsiv;&rho; &tau;&eta;&sfgr; I&tau;&alpha;&lambda;&iacute;&alpha;&sfgr; &mu;&alpha;&chi;O&mu;&epsiv;&nu;Oi&sfgr; &kap a;&alpha;&iacgr;
&a cgr;&pi;O&thetas;&nu;&eta;&sigma;&kap a;O&upsi;&sigma;i&nu; &alpha;&epsiv;&rho;O&sfgr; &kap a;&alpha;&iacgr; &phis;&omega;&tau;&Oacute;&sfgr;, &alpha;&lambda;&lambda;O&upsi; &delta;&epsiv; O&upsi;&delta;&epsiv;&nu;&Oacute;&sfgr; &mu;&epsiv;&tau;&epsiv;&sigma;&tau;i&nu;, &alpha;&lambda;&lambda;’ &alpha;&delta;&kappa;iOi
&kap a;&alpha;&iacgr; &alpha;&nu;&iacute;&delta;&rho;&upsi;&tau;&ogr;&iota; &mu;&epsiv;&tau;&alpha; &tau;&epsiv;&kappa;&nu;&omega;&nu; &pi;&lambda;&alpha;&nu;&omega;&nu;&tau;&alpha;i &kap a;&alpha;&iacgr; &gam a;&upsi;&nu;&alpha;i&kap a;&omega;&nu; Bultmann comments
fairly mildly, that this ’has a much more particular meaning, but it illustrates
the folk-lore character of the language’ (op. cit., p. 98 n.1). In fact it
illustrates that in a situation where some people were genuinely homeless,
the lot of animals could be seen as more fortunate than theirs, in this case by
a well-known speaker who had this much in common with Jesus, that he

used effective imagery to put his message across on a particular occasion.

Bultman, op. cit., p. 396, notes also Homer, Od. 18.130ff.; this too is not
proverbial, and is quite unlike the sentiment in or behind our passage.
30. This is a factor of more general importance, which answers another
point articulated clearly by Walker, JBL 100 (1981), p. 645: ’Is Casey
justified in concluding that the twelve Son of man sayings allegedly derived
from the Aramaic idiom in question are based upon authentic sayings of the
historical Jesus (the earliest followers of Jesus also presumably spoke
Aramaic!)?’ His earliest followers did indeed speak Aramaic; but, apart from
points affecting single examples of this idiom, all of which seem to me to
have an excellent Sitz im Leben in the life and teaching of Jesus, the early
church would not in general have any good reason for using so indirect an
idiom in a saying which it attributed secondarily to Jesus.
31. Casey, Son of Man, p. 231. For colleagues who still allege that I believe
in an inefficient or foolish translator, I repeat the challenge which I made
there. Can you reconstruct a feasible version of this Son of man statement in
Aramaic, and then translate it, by means of a process reasonably attributable
to an ancient translator, into better Hellenistic Greek?
32. Work on this aspect of the problem is still in its infancy: cf C.M.
Tuckett, ’The Present Son of Man’, JSNT 14 (1982), pp. 58-81; M.
Pamment, ’The Son of Man in the First Gospel’, NTS 29 (1983), pp. 116-29.
More extensive treatment is given by B. Lindars, Jesus, Son of Man
(London: SPCK, 1983) (published after this article was completed).
33. For relevant Greek uses of &upsi;&iacgr;&oacgr;&sfgr;, cf. W. von Martitz, TWNT, VIII, s.v.
&upsi;&iacgr;&oacgr;&sigmav; &kap a;&tau;&lambda;,. A.
34. Cf R. Leivestad, NTS 18 (1971-72), pp. 252-53.

Downloaded from jnt.sagepub.com at VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIV on

March 13, 2015