The Jewish gospels: the story of the Jewish Christ

This eschatological move (to include ALL humans) is one that many Jews would have rejected not because they did not believe that the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath but because they did not believe that Jesus was the Son of Man. DB argues that this divine figure to whom au-thority has been delegated is a Redeemer king, as the Daniel passage clearly states. Thus he stands ripe for identification with the Davidic Messiah, as he is in the Gospel and also in non-Christian contemporary Jewish literature such as Enoch & Fourth Ezra.

The usage of "Son of Man" in the Gospels joins up with the evidence of such usage from these other ancient Jewish texts to lead us to con-sider this term used in this way (and, more important, the concept of a second divinity implied by it) as the common coin - which DB em-phasizes does not mean universal or uncontested - of Judaism already before Jesus.

Thus the Son of Man in First Enoch & Fourth Ezra can be considered as other Jewish Messiahs of the First Century: the Jesus Folk were not alone on the Jewish scene. Also other Jews had been imagining various human figures as achieving the status of divinity and "sitting next to God" or even "in God's place" on the divine throne.

At about the time of the Boom of Daniel, Ezekiel the Tragedian, an Alexandrian Jew, wrote:
I HAD A VISION OF A GREAT THRONE ON THE TOP OF MOUNT SINAI AND IT REACHED TILL THE FOLDS OF HEAVEN.
A NOBLE MAN WAS SITTING ON IT, WITH A CROWN AND A LARGE SCEPTRE INHIS LEFT HAND.
HE BECKONED TO ME WITH HIS RIGHT HAND, SO I APPROACHED AND STOOD BEFORE THE THRONE.
HE GAVE ME THE SCEPTRE AND INSTRUCTED ME TO SIT ON THE GREAT THRONE.
THEN HE GAVE ME THE ROYAL CROWN AND GOT UP, FROM THE THRONE.

Here we have the crucial image of the divine throne and the emplacement of a second figure on the throne alongside of or even in place of the Ancient One. Within the context of Second Temple Judaism, "if we find a figure distinguishable from God seated on God's throne itself, we should see that as one of Judaism's most potent theological symbolical means of including such a figure in the unique divine identity."

Following this principle, we see that in this text Moses has become God. Not such an impossible thought, then, for a Jew, even one who lived long before Jesus. If Moses could be God in one version of a Jewish religious imagination, then why not Jesus in another?