266.  We do not know how Jesus came to adopt this title.  Its association with the predictions of his coming glory shows that he knew that in him the Daniel vision was to have fulfilment.  The predictions of suffering and death, however, are completely foreign to that apocalyptic conception, being akin rather, as Professor Charles has suggested, to the prophecies of the suffering servant in the Book of Isaiah (Book of Enoch, p. 314-317).  Moreover, it may not be fanciful to find in his claims to heavenly authority a hint of the thought of the eighth Psalm, “Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet” (see Dalman WJ I. 218).  Although the name expresses a consciousness of dignity, vicarious ministry, and authority, similar to thoughts found in Daniel, Isaiah, and the Psalms, it was not deduced from these scriptures by any synthesis of diverse ideas.  It rather indicates that Jesus in his own nature realized a synthesis which no amount of study of scripture would ever have suggested.  He drew his conception of himself from his own self-knowledge, not from his Messianic meditations.  On his lips, then, “the Son of Man” indicates that he knew himself to be the Man whom God had chosen to be Lord over all (compare Dalman as above).  The lowly estate which contradicted the Daniel vision prevented Jesus’ hearers from recognizing in the title a Messianic claim; for him, however, it was the expression of the very heart of his Messianic consciousness.

267.  If Jesus gave expression to his official consciousness when he used the name “the Son of Man,” the title “the Son of God” may be said to express his more personal thought about himself.  It is necessary to distinguish between the meaning of this title to the contemporaries of Jesus and his own conception of it.  In the popular thought “the Son of God” was the designation of that man whom God would at length raise up and crown with dignity and power for the deliverance of his people.  This meaning followed from the Messianic interpretation of the second Psalm, in which the theocratic king is called God’s son (Ps. ii. 7).  In another psalm, which Jesus himself quotes (John x. 34), magistrates and judges are called “sons of the Most High” (lxxxii. 6).  Another Old Testament use casts light on this,—­the designation of Israel as God’s son, his firstborn (Ex. iv. 22; Hos. i. 10), with which may be compared a remarkable expression in the so-called Psalms of Solomon (xviii. 4), “Thy chastisement was upon us [that is, Israel] as upon a son, firstborn, only begotten.”  In all these passages that which constitutes a man the son of God is God’s choice of him for a special work, while Israel collectively bears the title to suggest God’s fatherly love for the people he had taken for his own.  The Messianic title, therefore, described not a metaphysical, but an official or ethical, relation to God.  It is certainly in this sense that the high-priest asked