The Problem of the Messianic Self-Consciousness of Jesus

It is impossible, within the scope of a brief essay, to say much that is very new or even to repeat in significant proportion what has already been said about this problem, one which has exercised the minds of New Testament scholars from the very beginnings of historical criticism. I have chosen to approach this problem, however, for the very reason that it has not come to rest but has been appearing with renewed urgency and frequency in the most recent exegetical discussion. It has a kind of symptomatic value; it helps, I think, to lay bare some of the crises and challenges in the study of the Synoptic Gospels, and the first part of the paper will consider some of the varying fates encountered roughly since I900 by the problem of the Messianic self-consciousness of Jesus, loosely and rather widely defined as Jesus' own understanding and interpretation of his message and his mission. At the same time, the problem in one of its most specific and concrete forms, the question whether Jesus applied to himself the title ,,Son of Man has very recently come to lively and intense debate after a period of relative dormancy, and we shall turn at the very end of this paper to consider this renewed discussion and its bearing on our total understanding of the Synoptic tradition. The problem of the historical Jesus is usually said to have begun with HERMANN SAMUEL REIMARUS 1). This teacher of Oriental languages in Hamburg composed a critique of Christianity from a radical deistic position, portions of which were posthumously and anonymously published by LESSING between 1774 and I778. The last of these so-called Wolfenbiittel Fragments bore the