I may, however, be able to contribute to the discussion of what the “Son of God” meant in the first century.

My teacher and one of two dissertation directors, Nils A. Dahl, brought new insight to the discussion, which I believe he never had the chance to publish. He himself received his doctorate during the Nazi occupation of Norway; in fact, the Nazi-appointed administration insisted that the defense take place so as to keep order in the university. But, after the defense, they discovered that his dissertation valorized the Jewish background to the New Testament. So they confiscated every copy they could find, preventing it from being published for a time.

Just before Mr. Dahl’s 80th birthday, a number of copies of the original print run were found and some of those were still legible after they were rebound. He was given these copies as his 80th birthday present and he, in turn, gave them out to many of the participants in celebratory conference at the Norwegian Academy of Science.

Here is what he taught: Usually we think of “Son of God” as a term relevant to the Greco-Roman context of early Christianity. It only occurs in the editorial level of the gospels (that is there is no evidence Jesus used such a term of himself) and it is a regular term to describe heroes and other offspring of philandering Greek gods like Zeus. Being superhuman, many of them did mighty deeds. A great many of these “sons of God” wound up as the names of constellations like Orion.

But there is a Jewish background which may account for the original usage of the term. The first is that God calls Israel and David, “my son” several times in the Hebrew Bible. This is not the same as a Hellenistic title, but it does bring up implications of “sonship.”

These terms were available exegetically to the evangelists to describe the baptism: “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11 and parallels) or the justly famous John 3:16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever shall believe in him shall not die but have eternal life,” or even the transfiguration (Mark 9:7 and parallels). There are certainly echoes of Genesis 22, the sacrifice of Isaac, in these passages as well.

And there are echoes of the messianism whenever the context of David is brought up. But the messianic context appears to have been unclarified until after the crucifixion when Jesus was martyred on the charge that he was a messianic pretender, as the titulus on the cross makes clear: “Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews.”

Thus, the Romans, ironically, are the first sure historical confessors to Jesus’ messianic identity. Mark especially makes clear that Jesus never claimed the title in his ministry.

The other major significance of the word “son of God” in the Hebrew Bible has to do with angelology. Angels of God are called “the sons of God” frequently in the Bible and so, when the term is used about Jesus, these implications are being understood as well. The Christian notion of the divinity of Jesus may well come from his identification with an angelic or divine presence by the early Church. There is no evidence that Jesus used these terms about himself at all but a great deal of evidence that this was the basic category that the Jesus movement used to explain his resurrection after the experience of the first Easter.

The other term, which has been brought up several times, is "son of man." It can mean just a human being in Hebrew. But it also has other implications and it looks like Jesus may actually have used the term. When it is used in the New Testament, the context is usually the Hebrew Bible passage of Daniel 7:13, where a human-shaped figure is enthroned next to God, which immediately proclaims that Jesus is the figure ascended to heaven enthroned next to God who brings judgment to the world. Daniel 12 makes clear that some of the resurrected will shine as the stars in the heavens, which seems to me to mean that they will become angels, because the stars were thought by the Hebrews to be angels (e.g. Job 38;7 Judges 5:20).

These angelological traditions are very prominent in Jewish mysticism and suggest that the hidden connection between Judaism and early Christianity is best understood by looking at Jewish mysticism and not the more commonly known rabbinic tradition. Daniel 7 and Daniel 12 (on resurrection), together with Psalm 110 were the basic scriptures used to confirm Jesus’ resurrection, and not any traditional messianic prophecy. That means that Jesus’ divinity was proclaimed early and often. The DaVinci Code assertion that Jesus was viewed as a man until Constantine is just flat wrong.

It is a particular pleasure to be able to bring my dissertation director’s thoughts on the importance of the Jewish context to the discussion this week, just before Christmas.