"Daniel is unable to make heads or tails of the vision, but luckily—as typically happens in these apocalyptic texts that are disclosing sublime heavenly truths—an angel is standing by to interpret it for him. The beasts each represent a kingdom that will come, in succession to one another, to rule the earth. At the end, after the fourth beast, a humanlike one will be given dominion over the earth. In the angel’s interpretation of the vision, we are told that this dominion will be given to the “people of the holy ones of the Most High” (Dan. 7:27).
This may mean that just as the beasts each represented a kingdom, so too did the “one like a son of man.” The beasts were the successive kingdoms of Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece, which would each achieve world domination. The one like a son of man, then, would be the kingdom of Israel, which will be restored to its proper place and given authority over all the earth. Some interpreters have thought that since the beasts can also be taken to represent kings (at the head of the kingdoms), so too the one like a son of man—possibly he is an angelic being who is head of the nation of Israel.11
However one interprets Daniel in its original second-century BCE context, what is clear is that eventually in some Jewish circles it came to be thought that this “one like a son of man” was indeed a future deliverer, a cosmic judge of the earth, who would come with divine vengeance against God’s enemies and with a heavenly reward for those who had remained faithful to him. This figure came to be known as “the Son of Man.”...
What matters is the exalted character of the Son of Man. Many great and glorious things are said in the Similitudes about this person—who now is thought of as a divine being, rather than, say, as the nation of Israel. We are told that he was given a name “even before the creation of the sun and the moon, before the creation of the stars” (1 En. 48.2–3). We are told that all the earth will fall down and worship him. Before the creation he was concealed in the presence of God himself; but he was always God’s chosen one, and it is he who has revealed God’s wisdom to the righteous and holy, who will be “saved in his name,” since “it is his good pleasure that they have life” (48.2–7).
At the end of time, when all the dead are resurrected, it is he, the “Elect One,” who will sit on God’s throne (51.3). From this “throne of glory” he will “judge all the works of the holy ones in heaven above, weighing in the balance their deeds” (61.8). He himself is eternal: “He shall never pass away or perish before the face of the earth.” And “all evil shall disappear before his face” (69.79). He will “remove the kings and the mighty ones from their thrones. He shall loosen the reins of the strong and crush the teeth of sinners. He shall depose the kings from their thrones and kingdoms. For they do not extol and glorify him and neither do they obey him, the source of their kingship” (46.2–6).
At one point this cosmic judge of the earth is called the messiah...
Now the ruler anointed by God is not a mere mortal; he is a divine being who has always existed, who sits beside God on his throne, who will judge the wicked and the righteous at the end of time. He, in other words, is elevated to God’s own status and functions as the divine being who carries out God’s judgment on the earth. This is an exalted figure indeed, as exalted as one can possibly be without actually being the Lord God Almighty himself...
Now we have seen that the Son of Man also was worshiped. One could easily argue that anyone or anything seated beside God on a throne in the heavenly realm deserves worship. If you’re willing to bow down and prostrate yourself in the presence of an earthly king, then surely it’s appropriate to do so in the presence of the cosmic judge of the earth...
The Son of Man figure whom we have just examined would be one such divine figure, as he shares the status and power of God."
Bart D. Ehrman. HOW JESUS BECAME GOD: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, Kindle Edition (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2014.) pp. 60-62Erhman also professes:
Jesus, then, was coming to rule from heaven. In his own teaching he had proclaimed that the Son of Man was to appear as the cosmic judge over the earth. But now it was obviously Jesus himself who was coming from heaven to rule. The disciples very soon—probably right away—concluded that Jesus was the coming Son of Man. So when they told stories about him later, they had him speak of himself as the Son of Man—so much so that it became one of his favorite titles for himself in the Gospels. As we have seen, the Son of Man was sometimes understood to be a divine figure. In that sense also, then, Jesus was God. It should be noted that all four of these exalted roles—Jesus as messiah, as Lord, as Son of God, as Son of Man—imply, in one sense or another, that Jesus is God. (IBID, pp. 178)
And:
When the earliest Christians talked about Jesus becoming the Son of God at his resurrection, they were saying something truly remarkable about him. He was made the heir of all that was God’s. He exchanged his status for the status possessed by the Creator and ruler of all things. He received all of God’s power and privileges. He could defy death. He could forgive sins. He could be the future judge of the earth. He could rule with divine authority. He was for all intents and purposes God.
These various aspects of his exalted state are closely connected with the various honorific titles Christians bestowed upon Jesus in his exalted state. He was the Son of God. By no stretch of the imagination did that mean that he was “merely” the “adopted” Son of God. It entailed the most fantastic claims about Jesus that these people could imagine: as the Son of God he was the heir to all that was God’s. He was also the Son of Man, the one whom God had entrusted to be the future judge of the entire world. He was the heavenly messiah who was ruling—now—over the kingdom of his Father, the King of kings. And in that capacity as the heavenly ruler, he was the Lord, the master and sovereign over all the earth.
We may see why someone would call this a low Christology, but it certainly is not saying anything “lowly.” This is an exaltation Christology that is affirming stunning things about the teacher from rural Galilee who was exalted to the right hand of God, who had raised him from the dead...
It is because of this exalted status that Jesus was deemed worthy of worship. If the earliest Christians held such elevated views of Jesus as the exalted Son of God soon after his resurrection, it is probably already at this early stage that they began to show veneration to him in ways previously shown to God himself. In two important books, New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado has tried to solve the dilemma of how Jesus could be worshiped as a divine being so early in the history of the Christian religion—virtually right away—if in fact the Christians considered themselves monotheists, not ditheists (worshipers of two gods).8 Hurtado argues that both things were simultaneously true: Christians maintained there was only one God, and they worshiped Jesus as God alongside God. How was this possible? Hurtado sees Christianity as developing a binitary worship—in which Jesus was worshiped as the Lord, alongside God, without sacrificing the idea that there is only one God. In his view, Christians maintained that since God had exalted Jesus to a divine status, he had not merely permitted but even required the veneration of Jesus. Hurtado sees this as a unique development within the history of ancient religion—the worship of two divine beings within a theology that claims there is only one. In later chapters we will see how theologians eventually came to grips with this problem of how Jesus could be revered as God without sacrificing a commitment to monotheism. For now it is enough to stress that this was indeed the case: Christians insisted that they believed in only one God, and yet they revered Jesus as divine and worshiped their “Lord Jesus” along with God. (IBID, pp. 198-199)
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