it to have been spoken to the people at Jerusalem. Or, on the other hand, the secret is known to the hearers. In that case they understand that the term Son of Man points to the position to which He Himself is to be exalted when the present era passes into the age to come. It was thus, no doubt, in the case of the disciples at Caesarea Philippi, and of the High Priest to whom Jesus, after answering his demand with the simple "Yea" (Mark xiv. 62), goes on immediately to speak of the exaltation of the Son of Man to the right hand of God, and of His coming upon the clouds of heaven.
Jesus did not, therefore, veil His Messiahship by using the expression Son of Man, much less did He transform it, but He used the expression to refer, in the only possible way, to His Messianic office as destined to be realised at His "coming," and did so in such a manner that only the initiated understood that He was speaking of His own coming, while others understood Him as referring to the coming of a Son of Man who was other than Himself.
The passages where the title has not this apocalyptic reference, or where, previous to the incident at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus in speaking to the disciples equates the Son of Man with His own "ego," are to be explained as of literary origin. This set of secondary occurrences of the title has nothing to do with "Early Church theology"; it is merely a question of phenomena of translation and tradition. In the saying about the Sabbath in Mark ii. 28, and perhaps also in the saying about the right to forgive sins in Mark ii. 10, Son of Man doubtless stood in the original in the general sense of "man," but was later, certainly by our Evangelists, understood as referring to Jesus as the Son of Man. In other passages tradition, following the analogy of those passages in which the title is authentic, put in place of the simple I-expressed in Aramaic by "the man"-the self-designation "Son of Man," as we can clearly show by comparing Matt. xvi. 13, "Who do men say that the the Son of Man is?" with Mark viii. 27, "Who do men say that I am?"
Three passages call for special discussion. In the statement that a man may be forgiven for blasphemy against the Son of Man but not for blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in Matt. xii. 32, the "Son of Man" may be authentic. But of course it would not, even in that case, give any hint that "Son of Man designates the Messiah in His humiliation" as Dalman wished to infer from the passage, but would mean that Jesus was speaking of the Son of Man, here as elsewhere, in the third person without reference to Himself, and was thinking of a contemptuous denial of the Parousia such as might have been uttered by a Sadducee. But if we take into account the parallel in Mark iii. 28 and 29 where blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is spoken of without any mention of
