Transcripts:
What if I told you that centuries before the Gospels were written, before Jesus walked the hills of Galilee, there existed a Jewish text that described a radiant messianic figure called the Son of Man, a being who sits enthroned beside God, who judges the wicked, who brings salvation to the oppressed, and whose very appearance causes earthly kings to fall prostrate in reverence and fear. Here's the paradox.
This isn't Christian scripture. It's the book of Enoch, specifically the book of parables composed sometime between 50 BCE and 100 CE, quite possibly before or around the time of Jesus. And yet, when you read its description of the Son of Man, you'd swear you were reading the Gospel of John or the Book of Revelation. Picture this.
The patriarch Enoch, seventh from Adam, is swept up in a vision beyond human comprehension. He stands before the throne of the head of days, roughly parallel to Daniel's ancient of days, whose garment is white as snow, whose presence radiates infinite light. And there, standing beside this cosmic throne, is another figure, the son of man.
His face shines brighter than the sun. His robe gleams like lightning. He is called the righteous one, the chosen one, the anointed one. He will judge all creation. He existed before the sun and stars were made. In him, all righteousness dwells. Sound familiar? For nearly two millennia, this text was lost to most of the world, preserved only in Ethiopian Christianity, while Western churches forgot it existed.
When European scholars rediscovered it in the 18th century, they were stunned. How could a Jewish text describe a Messiah figure so eerily similar to Jesus Christ? Was this prophecy coincidence or evidence of a suppressed strand of pre-Christian theology that challenges everything we thought we knew about the origins of messianic expectation? Today we're going to explore one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in ancient apocalyptic literature, the son of man in the book of Enoch.
We'll dive into the throne room visions that describe him. Wrestle with the scholarly debates about Christian borrowing versus parallel development. investigate why this figure was hidden from most religious traditions for centuries and discover what this ancient vision of a hidden Messiah might mean for our modern world. By the end, you might find yourself questioning the neat categories we've drawn around religious history.
This is the story of the Son of Man before Christ. And it begins with a vision of fire. The Book of Enoch isn't a single text, but a collection of five separate books compiled over centuries. The section we're interested in is called the Book of Parables, also known as the Similitudes of Enoch, and it makes up chapters 37- 71 of First Enoch.
This is where the Son of Man appears in all his glory. The setting is cosmic. Enoch, the enigmatic figure from Genesis who walked with God and was taken up without experiencing death, is granted a vision that transcends ordinary human perception. He's brought before the throne of God, but the text doesn't use that name.
Instead, it speaks of the head of days, the Lord of Spirits. This is the supreme divine being dwelling in a palace of fire and light attended by myriads of angels. And then Enoch sees him, the son of man. Let me read you how the text describes this moment from chapter 46. There I beheld the head of days whose head was like white wool and with him another whose face was like the appearance of a man.
His countenance was full of grace like that of one among the holy angels. And I asked one of the holy angels who went with me and who showed me every secret thing concerning the son of man who he was from where he was and why he accompanied the head of days. And he answered me and said to me, "This is the Son of Man who possesses righteousness and with whom righteousness dwells.
He will reveal Saul the treasures of that which is concealed. For the Lord of Spirits has chosen him." Did you catch that? The Son of Man doesn't just embody righteousness. Righteousness dwells in him. He's not merely a revealer of secrets. He reveals the treasures of the concealed.
And most striking of all, he stands with the head of days, not beneath him, not distant from him, but accompanying him in the throne room of heaven. Now, if you're familiar with the Bible, alarm bells might be ringing. This language is lifted almost directly from Daniel 7, the famous vision where one like a son of man comes on the clouds of heaven and is presented before the ancient of days receiving dominion and glory and an everlasting kingdom. But here's the crucial difference.
In Daniel, the son of man is a somewhat ambiguous figure, possibly representing the people of Israel, possibly a messianic individual, possibly an angel. In Enoch, there's no ambiguity. This is a distinct pre-existent semi- divine being with a specific identity and cosmic role. The text continues to layer mystery upon mystery.
In chapter 48, Enoch is told, "Before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of heaven were formed, his name was invoked before the Lord of Spirits. He will be a staff for the righteous that they may lean upon him and not fall. He will be the light of nations and the hope of those who grieve in their hearts.
All who dwell upon the earth will fall down and worship before him. And they will glorify, bless, and sing praise to the name of the Lord of spirits. His name existed before creation. Read that again. Before the cosmos itself came into being, this figure already had a name, already had a destiny, he is pre-existent, not in the sense of being created first, but in the sense of transcending creation altogether.
What does the son of man do in this vision? The text is clear and remarkably consistent across the parables. First, he judges. Chapter 62 describes how kings and the mighty will see him seated on the throne of glory and will be seized with dread and trembling. They will be cast down, their faces filled with shame, darkness their dwelling place.
These are the oppressors, the powerful who crushed the righteous. And now they face cosmic justice delivered by the son of man. Second, he saves. The righteous and the chosen will be vindicated. They will feast with the son of man dwelling in his presence forever. The text says, "The righteous and chosen will be saved on that day, and the faces of the sinners and the unrighteous will no longer be seen.
The Lord of Spirits will dwell over them, and with that Son of Man, they will eat, lie down, and rise up forever and ever. Third, he reveals, he discloses hidden wisdom, unveils the mysteries of righteousness and judgment, and makes known the ways of the Lord of Spirits. This isn't just executive judgment.
It's epistemological transformation. Through the Son of Man, the cosmos becomes transparent. But here's where it gets even stranger. In chapter 71, at the climax of Enoch's vision, something shocking happens. The angel addresses Enoch directly. You are that son of man who was born to righteousness. and righteousness dwells in you, and the righteousness of the head of days will not forsake you.
Wait, Enoch is the son of man. The seer becomes the figure he's been seeing. Scholars have debated this passage for over a century. Some see it as a later interpolation added by a scribe who wanted to connect Enoch more directly to the messianic figure. Others read it as symbolic identification. Enoch participates in the son of man's identity without being identical to him, a kind of theosis or deification where the righteous human is transformed into a divine being. Still others argue the text is teaching something profound
about the fluidity of identity in mystical experience. We'll return to this puzzle, but for now, let's sit with the strangeness of it. Enoch sees the son of man. Then Enoch becomes or is identified with the son of man. Identity becomes fluid. Prophetic witness merges with prophetic fulfillment.
Why does any of this matter? Because when we turn to the New Testament, we find Jesus using son of man as his primary self designation. Not Messiah, not son of God in most cases, but son of man. He speaks of the son of man coming on the clouds of heaven, of the son of man being seated at the right hand of power, of the son of man having authority to forgive sins.
And suddenly the anoic vision becomes urgently relevant. Did Jesus know this text? Did his followers? Did the title carry all this apocalyptic weight, pre-existence, cosmic judgment, enthronement beside God when Jesus used it? These are not comfortable questions for those who prefer neat historical categories.
They suggest a much richer, stranger landscape of Jewish messianic expectation than we've typically imagined. They hint at a tradition where a divine human mediator figure distinct from yet intimately connected with God was already imagined and discussed long before the Christian church formulated its doctrines of Christ's divinity. Which brings us to our next question.
Who exactly is this son of man? Is he divine, angelic or human? And how did ancient interpreters understand his relationship to God, to humanity, and to the Messiah? The Son of Man in Enoch resists easy classification. He's not quite God, yet he possesses attributes we'd normally reserve for the divine.
He's not quite human, yet he's called son of man, which in Hebrew idiom means human being. He might be an angel, but if so, he's unlike any other angel in Jewish literature. Let's start with the divine characteristics. The son of man is pre-existent. His name invoked before the creation of the world. This alone places him in a category beyond typical messianic figures.
King David, for instance, wasn't pre-existent. Neither were the prophets. Even in highly developed messianic theology, the Messiah was expected to be a future descendant of David, born at the appointed time, not a being who existed before time began. The son of man sits on God's throne. Read that carefully.
Not beside the throne, though that's also mentioned. On the throne. Chapter 51 states, "In those days, the chosen one will sit on the throne of glory, and all the secrets of wisdom will flow from the council of his mouth." The throne of glory, language used across the parables to denote divine sovereignty, authority, identity.
To sit on someone's throne is to exercise their power, to represent their rule. It's a statement of status that borders on identity. Yet, the text maintains a distinction. The son of man is not the ancient of days. He's with the ancient of days, chosen by the ancient of days, empowered by the ancient of days.
There's a relationship here, an intimacy that suggests unity without collapsing into simple identity. Sound familiar? It should. This is the exact theological tension that would later occupy the Christian church for centuries. How can the Son be both distinct from and one with the Father? Some scholars argue we're seeing an early form of what would become benitarian theology.
The belief in two divine powers in heaven, both worthy of worship, both exercising divine authority, yet somehow remaining within Jewish monotheism. This wasn't as heretical as it might sound. Ancient Judaism had room for complex understandings of God's presence, the logos, the wisdom personified, the name, the glory.
These were not simply metaphors, but hypotheses, real aspects or emanations of the divine that could be spoken of as distinct entities. Could the Son of Man be an angel? This is a popular scholarly theory. Judaism had a rich angel with figures like Michael and Gabriel exercising immense cosmic authority.
There's even a tradition about Yahweh, a supreme angel who bears the name of God and acts as his representative. Some scholars point to the angel Medatron, who in later Jewish mysticism is said to sit on a throne beside God and is identified with Enoch himself. But here's the problem. The Son of Man in Enoch does things angels don't do.
Angels worship. The Son of Man receives worship. Angels are created. The Son of Man exists before creation. Angels execute God's commands. The Son of Man shares God's throne and judgment seat. If this is an angel, it's an angel who has crossed the line into divinity. Then there's the human interpretation.
Son of man in Aramaic and Hebrew is simply son of Adam, a way of saying human being. Maybe the point is precisely that this figure is human, not in the sense of being ordinary, but in the sense of representing perfected, glorified, divonized humanity. Enoch, after all, is human. And in chapter 71, he's told he is the son of man. Perhaps the vision is showing us what humanity can become when fully united with the divine, fully righteous, fully transformed.
This interpretation has powerful implications. It suggests that the barrier between human and divine is not absolute. that righteousness can elevate a person to cosmic status. That theosis, becoming like God, is not just Christian mysticism, but an ancient Jewish idea embedded in apocalyptic literature.
But wait, didn't Jesus use this title, too? constantly. In fact, Son of Man appears over 80 times in the Gospels, always on Jesus' lips. He speaks of the Son of Man having nowhere to lay his head, of the Son of Man being betrayed, of the Son of Man coming in glory with his angels. Did Jesus know the Anoic tradition? Was he deliberately evoking this image of a pre-existent enthroned judging figure? The scholarly consensus is complicated.
Some argue that Jesus was primarily drawing on Daniel 7, which is certainly older and more canonical than Enoch. Others suggest that by Jesus's time, son of man had become a widely recognized title for the coming messianic judge and Enoch was part of the cultural water in which these ideas swam. A few scholars go further, arguing that Jesus explicitly identified himself with the anoic son of man, claiming pre-existence and cosmic authority through his use of the title. What's undeniable is that early Christians
heard son of man through an anoic lens. When the Gospel of Matthew describes Jesus saying, "You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power and coming on the clouds of heaven." That's not just Daniel anymore. That's Enoch's vision of the enthroned figure beside the ancient of days. When the book of Revelation depicts the son of man with eyes like flames and a voice like many waters standing among the lampstands, it's echoing the radiant glorious figure from Enoch's parables. The early church father Tertullan
writing in the late 2n century knew the book of Enoch and considered it scripture. He cited it in his writings, treated it as authoritative, and saw no contradiction between Enoch's son of man and Christ. The same goes for Clement of Alexandria and origin. For them, Enoch was prophecy, and the son of man was always Christ prefigured in the ancient vision.
But then something happened. As the church moved into the fourth and fifth centuries, as orthodoxy became more defined and boundaries more rigid, Enoch was quietly shelved. It disappeared from the canon, survived only in Ethiopia and a few fragments elsewhere.
The Son of Man became exclusively a gospel title, stripped of its Enochic context, interpreted through Daniel alone. Was this accidental? Or was there something about the Anoak Son of Man that made church authorities uncomfortable? Something too Jewish, too apocalyptic, too strange? Did the figure's ambiguous nature, divine yet not quite God, human yet pre-existent, threaten the carefully balanced Christology being hammered out in councils and creeds? These questions lead us to our third inquiry.
What were the great debates surrounding this figure? Did Christians borrow from Enoch or did they develop independently? And what does this tell us about the origins of Christian theology? When European scholars first encountered the complete book of Enoch in the late 18th century brought back from Ethiopia by the explorer James Bruce.
The response was electric. Here was an ancient Jewish text quoted by the New Testament book of Jude, referenced by early church fathers and yet absent from Western Bibles for over a millennium. And it contained a messianic figure who looked suspiciously like Jesus.
The immediate question was obvious, who copied whom? Conservative Christian scholars argued for prophecy. Enoch was ancient, possibly even pre flood in origin according to tradition. The Son of Man passages were prophetic visions of Christ written centuries before his birth.
This fit nicely with the Christian narrative of Old Testament prophecy fulfilled in the New Enoch predicted, Jesus fulfilled. Simple. But critical scholars weren't convinced. Dating was the first problem. When exactly were the parables of Enoch written? The book claims to be from the patriarch Enoch, but virtually no scholar believes that the text is clearly apocalyptic literature, a genre that flourished in the second temple period, roughly 200 B.
CE to 100 CE. But where in that range do the parables fall? Here's where things get murky. Unlike the other sections of First Enoch, the Book of Watchers, the astronomical book, the dream visions, the epistle, the parables were not found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every other section turned up at Kuman, sometimes in multiple copies, but not the parables, not a single fragment. This is extraordinary.
The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in caves near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956, contained parts of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible, plus numerous sectarian texts and apocryphal works. The fact that they included Enoch but not the parables suggests one of two possibilities.
Either the parables were composed after the Kuman community stopped copying texts around 68 CE when the Romans destroyed the settlement or the parables existed but were deliberately excluded by the Kuman community for some reason. Most scholars lean toward the first option. The parables, they argue, were likely composed sometime in the first century CE, possibly as late as 50 to 70 CE.
If that's true, it's contemporary with the Gospels or even slightly later, which means the question of borrowing becomes much more complex. Could the parables have been influenced by early Christian preaching about Jesus as the son of man? It's possible by mid 1st century Christian communities were spreading throughout the Roman Empire proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah who would return as judge.
If the author of the parables encountered these ideas, they might have woven them into a Jewish apocalyptic framework. creating a son of man figure that reflected Christian influence. But there's a problem with this theory. The parables are thoroughly Jewish. There's no mention of a crucified Messiah, no resurrection on the third day, no new covenant, no superseding of Torah.
The son of man in Enoch vindicates the righteous of Israel, judges the gentile oppressors, and establishes God's kingdom, but in a framework that remains entirely within Jewish apocalyptic expectation. If this were Christian propaganda, it's remarkably subtle. Other scholars argue for parallel development. Both Jesus and the parables, they suggest, were drawing from a common well of Jewish apocalyptic thought that included Daniel 7, Ezekiel, and perhaps other lost texts.
The son of man was already a concept circulating in certain Jewish circles, not as a title for a specific individual, but as a symbol of the coming righteous judge, the representative of God's people, the agent of esqueological transformation. In this view, Jesus used son of man because it was already meaningful in his context.
The parables developed the concept independently, working out its implications in visionary detail. Both were responses to the same cultural moment. Jews living under Roman oppression, yearning for divine intervention, imagining a cosmic reversal where the mighty would fall and the righteous would be exalted.
This theory has the advantage of not requiring direct borrowing in either direction. It explains why the son of man language feels similar without being identical, why both emphasize judgment and vindication, why both connect to Daniel 7. It treats both Jesus and Enoch as creative interpreters of a shared tradition rather than one copying the other. But does it work? Can we really imagine two independent developments producing such strikingly similar ideas? pre-existence, enthronement, cosmic judgment, vindication of the righteous, rejection of the powerful. These aren't generic messianic features.
They're specific, detailed, and remarkably aligned. Some scholars have proposed a more radical solution. What if the parables are earlier than we think? What if they predate Jesus composed in the first century BCE or even the second? The absence from Kumran might not be a dating indicator but a sectarian one.
Perhaps the Kumran community rejected the parables because they disagreed with its theology, particularly its high Christologyike portrayal of the son of man. If the parables are pre-Christian, then the question reverses. Did Jesus and the early church borrow from Enoch? Did they know this text and deliberately adopt its son of man imagery? This would explain why son of man became Jesus preferred self-d designation despite being relatively rare in earlier Jewish messianic expectation. It would explain the cosmic pre-existent
claims made about Jesus in texts like the Gospel of John. It would provide a missing link in the development of Christian christologology. But it raises uncomfortable questions for traditional Christianity. If Jesus was drawing on Enoch, does that mean his claims to divinity were less original than we thought? Does it reduce the incarnation to a literary borrowing? Does it suggest that Christianity is less unique, more derivative than believers have maintained? Not necessarily. Even if Jesus knew Enoch, even if he
deliberately evoked its son of man imagery, that doesn't mean he was merely copying. It could mean he was fulfilling, not in the simple sense of prophecy fulfilled, but in the deeper sense of archetype embodied. The Enochic son of man was a vision, a hope, a symbol of what could be.
Jesus in this reading became that vision incarnate. He didn't borrow an idea. He lived it, actualized it, transformed a literary figure into historical reality. This is essentially how the early church fathers understood it. Tertullan, Clement, Origin. They all knew Enoch and they all read it as prophecy.
Not because they naively believed Enoch personally wrote it, but because they saw it as part of God's progressive revelation. The vision came first, the fulfillment followed. Modern scholarship is more cautious. Most scholars acknowledge significant connections between Enoch and the New Testament, but resist simple models of borrowing or prophecy.
Instead, they speak of interextuality, shared conceptual worlds, dialogues between texts. The parables in the Gospels are both wrestling with the question of what it means to hope for divine justice in a world of oppression. They're both using the language and imagery available in their cultural context.
Whether one directly influenced the other matters less than recognizing they're part of the same conversation. But here's what's undeniable. For centuries, this conversation was suppressed. The Book of Enoch vanished from Western Christianity, surviving only in Ethiopia. The Son of Man was reinterpreted solely through Daniel and the Gospels, stripped of its anoic context.
The rich complex tradition of pre-Christian apocalyptic messianism was forgotten, replaced by a simpler narrative where Jesus appeared as a bolt from the blue. Why? What was so threatening about Enoch that it had to be hidden? And what does its rediscovery tell us about the stories we tell ourselves regarding religious origins? The story of Enoch's disappearance is a story of boundaries, orthodoxy, and the consolidation of power.
It's also a story with more questions than answers. Let's start with what we know. In the first and 2 centuries CE, the book of Enoch was widely read and respected in certain Christian communities. The New Testament Epistle of Jude quotes it explicitly, referring to Enoch, the seventh from Adam, who prophesied about the Lord coming with thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment.
Early church fathers like Barnabas, Irenaeus and Tatian cited or alluded to it while Tertullian writing around 200 CE explicitly treated Enoch as scripture. Clement of Alexandria and Origin also cited it respectfully, though they were more cautious about its canonical status.
Tertullian defended Enoch's authority by arguing that Noah would have preserved it through the flood. He saw no contradiction between Enoch and Christian teaching. For him, the book was ancient prophecy, validated by its quotation in Jude and its testimony to Christ. But something shifted in the third and fourth centuries as the church became more institutional.
As councils met to define orthodox doctrine, as the biblical canon was slowly solidified, Enoch began to disappear from approved lists. It wasn't included in the canonical lists at Leodysa 363 CE and Carthage 397 CE and gradually fell out of use in the Latin West. Jerome, the great biblical translator, rejected it. Augustine expressed doubts about its antiquity and authority.
By the medieval period in the west, Enoch had vanished almost completely. Fragments survived in quotations, and a few scholars were vaguely aware that such a book once existed, but the actual text was gone. It was as if a door had closed and an entire tradition had been locked away. Yet in Ethiopia, something different happened.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church preserved Enoch as canonical scripture, copying it in Gaes, the lurggical language of Ethiopian Christianity. There it was never lost, never forgotten, never problematic. Ethiopian monks studied it. Artists illustrated it. Theologians incorporated it into their understanding of Christ and salvation. Why the difference? Geography partly explains it.
Ethiopia was relatively isolated from the centers of Roman Christianity, maintaining its own traditions and textual decisions. But there's likely more to it. Ethiopian Christianity had deep connections to Jewish traditions, to apocalypticism, to mysticism. The figure of Enoch fit naturally into their theology. They had no need to suppress it.
But why did the West suppress it? Several theories circulate among scholars, each revealing different anxieties within developing Christian orthodoxy. Theory one, theological discomfort. The son of man in Enoch is too ambiguous. Is he divine or angelic, human or heavenly? Pre-existent or exalted? As the church hammered out its christology, especially at councils like Nika in 325 CE and Calcedon in 451 CE, clear categories became essential.
Christ was fully God and fully human, one person in two natures, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father. The Anoic Son of Man didn't fit neatly into this framework. He was too fluid, too open to multiple interpretations. Removing Enoch removed a potential source of heresy. Theory two, Jewish associations. By the 4th century, Christianity was increasingly defining itself against Judaism, emphasizing discontinuity over continuity.
A text that was thoroughly Jewish in character, that made no explicit reference to Jesus, that placed a Jewish visionary at the center of cosmic revelation. Such a text might muddy the waters. Better to focus on prophecies that Christians could clearly claim as about Jesus, Isaiah, Psalms, Zechariah. Enoch was too Jewish, too apocalyptic, too strange.
Theory three, canon politics. The process of canonization wasn't just about identifying true scripture. It was about consolidating authority. Bishops and councils gained power by defining boundaries. This is in, that is out, we decide, you accept. Enoch was problematic because it was popular at the margins among groups that sometimes challenged episcopal authority.
Excluding it was a way of asserting control of saying we determine what's scripture, not tradition, not popular piety. Theory 4, the Enoch Medatron problem. In later Jewish mysticism, especially in texts like third Enoch, the patriarch Enoch is transformed into the angel Medatron, the lesser YHW, who sits on a throne beside God and bears God's name.
This tradition may have been developing already in the early centuries CE. Christian authorities hearing echoes of this in first Enoch's identification of Enoch with the son of man in chapter 71 may have recoiled. The idea of a human becoming divine sitting on God's throne challenged Christian claims about Jesus's unique divinity.
If Enoch could become the Son of Man, what made Jesus special? None of these theories alone explains everything, but together they paint a picture of a text that was gradually seen as more trouble than it was worth. Not heretical enough to warrant burning and explicit condemnation, but strange enough, ambiguous enough, complicating enough that it was easier to simply let it fade away. And fade it did.
For over a thousand years in the west, the book of Enoch existed only as a rumor, a title in old cataloges, a few quotations in patristic writings. The Son of Man vision was forgotten, replaced by interpretations of Daniel 7 that didn't require grappling with Enoch's cosmic throne room scenes. Then came James Bruce. In 1773, the Scottish explorer returned from Ethiopia carrying three complete manuscripts of the book of Enoch in Gaes.
It was an astonishing discovery. Scholars rushed to translate it first into English, then into other European languages. By the mid-9th century, the full text was available to Western readers for the first time in over a millennium. The reaction was explosive. Here was a text that predated Christianity, yet described a messianic son of man in language that seemed borrowed from the Gospels.
Except the borrowing, if any, went the other way. Liberal scholars seized on it as evidence that Christianity was less original than claimed. Conservative scholars scrambled to explain it, arguing for prophecy or for late dating. Jewish scholars were fascinated by this window into second temple apocalypticism, a genre that had largely been lost with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. Then in 1947 came the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Among the hundreds of texts discovered in the Kumran caves were fragments of Enoch, but as we've noted, not the parables. This discovery confirmed that at least parts of Enoch circulated in Jewish communities around the time of Jesus. It also reignited debates about dating and influence.
If the parables weren't at Kuman, did that mean they were later Christian or simply not favored by the Kumran community? The debates continue today. But what's beyond debate is that for centuries, a major piece of the apocalyptic puzzle was deliberately removed from Western consciousness. The son of man of Enoch was hidden and with him an entire strand of messianic theology that might have complicated, enriched or challenged how Christianity understood its own origins.
The question for us in our time is, what does it mean to rediscover this hidden figure? What does the Son of Man have to say to a modern world that no longer expects apocalyptic judgment, but still yearns for justice, transformation, and hope? Strip away the theological debates, the dating controversies, the questions of borrowing and influence.
What remains when we encounter the son of man on his own terms? What is the archetypal core of this figure that has fascinated readers for over 2,000 years? At its heart, the Son of Man represents hidden justice made manifest. He is the one who sees what others miss, who knows the secrets of the oppressed and the crimes of the powerful. In Enoch's vision, earthly rulers don't even know the Son of Man exists until the moment of judgment when suddenly their thrones crumble and they prostrate themselves in terror. They thought they controlled reality.
They discover they were merely actors in a cosmic drama they couldn't perceive. This resonates powerfully in an age of systemic injustice. Where power often operates invisibly, where the wealthy and connected seem untouchable, where institutions protect themselves while ordinary people suffer.
The vision of kings brought low, of secret sins revealed, of a righteous judge who cannot be bribed or intimidated. This speaks to a deep hunger for accountability that legal systems often fail to satisfy. But the Son of Man isn't merely a cosmic prosecutor. He's also the vindicator of the righteous, the one who sees and honors the hidden faithful. in Enoch's vision.
Those who suffered in obscurity, who maintained righteousness despite mockery and persecution, who trusted in justice even when justice seemed absent. These are the ones who will feast with the Son of Man, who will dwell in his presence forever. This is a theology of the hidden righteous. Those whose worth is invisible to the world but visible to the cosmic witness.
It's profoundly empowering for marginalized communities. For anyone who has felt overlooked, dismissed, or crushed by systems that don't recognize their humanity. You may be invisible to power, the vision says, but you are seen by the Son of Man. Your suffering is not meaningless. Your resistance is not futile.
A day of revealing is coming. Liberation theology has drawn deeply from apocalyptic texts like this. Scholars like John Sabrino and Gustavo Gutierrez have pointed to the preferential option for the poor embedded in apocalyptic visions. God sides with the oppressed and the coming kingdom will overturn present hierarchies.
The son of man in this reading is the symbol of God's solidarity with those who suffer unjustly. The promise that the current order is not final. But there's another dimension to the son of man. That's equally powerful. The mystery of hidden identity. In Enoch's vision, the patriarch sees the son of man and then is told that he himself is the son of man.
The observer becomes the observed. The witness becomes the witnessed. This suggests something profound about human potential and divine indwelling. Carl Young would have loved this. The son of man as the self, the integrated totality that we project outward as divine, but which is actually our own deepest nature revealed.
The apocalyptic journey is then a journey of self-discovery where we encounter envision the truth of who we are meant to become. Righteous, radiant, enthroned beside the divine. The throne room isn't somewhere else. It's the realized center of our own being. This isn't to reduce the son of man to merely psychological projection.
But it does open up the possibility that apocalyptic literature works on multiple levels simultaneously. It can be about historical expectation, a real judgment day, a real transformation of the world order. It can also be about inner transformation, the recognition of divine potential within the human, the possibility of theosis, becoming like God through righteousness and wisdom.
Modern seekers, often suspicious of traditional religious categories, can still find profound meaning in the Son of Man. He represents the ideal of moral clarity in a world of ethical confusion, the hope of justice in a world of impunity, the promise of recognition for those who maintain integrity despite cost. He's the ultimate whistleblower, the ultimate advocate for the voiceless, the ultimate manifestation of accountability.
He also represents leadership of a particular type. Not domination but service. Not glory seeking but hidden preparation. The son of man exists before creation but remains concealed until the moment of revelation. He doesn't force himself on the world. He waits for the appointed time. This is revolutionary leadership. patient, strategic, rooted in cosmic justice rather than personal ambition. Think about how contemporary movements struggle with leadership.
How do you organize resistance without reproducing hierarchies? How do you center marginalized voices without creating new forms of authority? The son of man offers a model. The leader who is also the community, the judge who is also the judged, the one whose authority comes not from self assertion but from righteousness recognized by all.
There's also something deeply satisfying about the aesthetic of the vision itself. The throne room of fire, the radiant figure, the cosmic court, the moment when pretense falls away and reality is revealed. This is the stuff of great myth, great cinema, great literature. It taps into our love of revelation scenes, of masks removed, of hidden things brought to light.
We live in an age obsessed with transparency, with exposure, with calling out hidden abuses. Me too, investigative journalism, leaks, and whistleblowers. All of these are secular manifestations of the apocalyptic impulse. We want the Son of Man's judgment. See everything, reveal everything, vindicate the victims, punish the perpetrators.
The ancient vision speaks to contemporary yearning. But here's the tension. Apocalyptic expectation has a dark side. It can breed passivity. Why work for change if God will soon overturn everything? It can breed self-righteousness. I'm among the righteous who will be vindicated. My enemies are among the wicked who will be judged. It can breed escapism.
This world is irredeemable. So I just wait for the next one. The challenge is to hold the Son of Man vision without falling into these traps. To let it inspire resistance without replacing action with mere hope. To let it sustain moral clarity without hardening into dualism. To let it offer comfort to the suffering without becoming an opiate that dulls the pain rather than addressing its causes.
Maybe the key is to read the vision participatively as Enoch himself does. He doesn't merely observe the Son of Man. He becomes identified with him. He doesn't just wait for judgment. He embodies righteousness here and now. The apocalyptic transformation begins in the present.
in the lives of those who choose to live as if the throne room is already real, as if justice is already the deepest truth, as if the hidden things are already coming to light. In this reading, the Son of Man is less a future event and more a present call. Live righteously, speak truth, resist oppression, embody the justice you hope to see. Be in your own small way the revelation of the hidden glory.
Don't wait for the cosmic judge to appear. Recognize that judgment begins now in every choice, every act of courage or cowardice, every moment of solidarity or betrayal. This is what makes the son of man a living symbol rather than a relic of ancient apocalypticism. Every generation must discover its own meaning in the vision, its own way of embodying the hidden righteousness that will be revealed.
For first century Jews under Rome, it meant hope for liberation. For Ethiopian Christians, it meant cosmic validation of their faith. For liberation theologians, it meant God's solidarity with the poor. For modern seekers, it might mean the integration of shadow and light, the recognition of divine potential, the commitment to transparency and justice.
The Son of Man remains hidden until he is revealed. But maybe revelation isn't just one future moment. Maybe it's ongoing. Every time someone chooses righteousness over convenience, truth over lies, justice over self-interest, maybe we're all potential sons of man, waiting to be recognized for who we really are. We began with a question.
How could a text written centuries before Christianity describe a radiant son of man enthroned beside the ancient of days, a messianic figure who sounds uncannily like Christ. We've explored the throne room vision, wrestled with debates about borrowing and prophecy, investigated the suppression and rediscovery of the text, and discovered contemporary resonances that transcend traditional religious boundaries.
But the deeper question remains, what does it mean that such a figure existed in imagination before he supposedly appeared in history? If you're a traditional Christian, one answer is straightforward. God prepared the way. The vision in Enoch was prophetic, a foreshadowing of Christ that confirmed his identity when he came.
The parallels aren't coincidental, they're providential. The Son of Man was always Christ, even before the incarnation. If you're a critical scholar, the answer might be Christianity emerged from a rich apocalyptic environment where figures like the Son of Man were already being imagined. Jesus either drew on these traditions or his followers retroactively read them back onto him. Either way, Christian wasn't created from nothing.
It synthesized existing ideas. If you're a mystic or depth psychologist, the answer might be the son of man is an archetype, a symbol of transformation that emerges independently in multiple traditions because it speaks to something fundamental in human consciousness.
Whether in Enoch, in the Gospels, or in personal vision, we encounter the same pattern. The hidden made manifest, the righteous exalted, the powerful humbled, the divine and human united. But maybe the most interesting answer is it doesn't matter which came first. What matters is what the existence of this figure reveals about human religious imagination and human hope.
The son of man in Enoch tells us that before Christianity codified its doctrines, before councils defined orthodoxy, before creeds drew lines between acceptable and heretical, there were Jews dreaming of a cosmic redeemer who transcended normal categories. Divine yet distinct from God, human yet pre-existent, judge yet savior, hidden yet destined for revelation.
This figure emerged not from philosophical speculation, but from historical suffering. Second temple Judaism was a world of occupation, oppression, and apocalyptic yearning. The son of man was hope embodied, a cosmic redeemer who transcended categories. Hope that the powerful would be accountable.
That the righteous would be vindicated. That the cosmic order was bent toward justice even when earthly order seemed bent toward oppression. When Christianity emerged proclaiming Jesus as the son of man, it was continuing this tradition, not creating it from scratch. Whether Jesus consciously drew on Enoch or simply breathed the same apocalyptic air, the result was a messianic figure who made sense to people already primed to imagine such a being.
The ground was prepared. The categories existed. The hope was alive. This should humble us. No religious tradition emerges fully formed, completely original, uninfluenced by its context. Christianity, for all its claims to unique revelation, developed in conversation with Judaism, with apocalypticism, with henistic philosophy, with Roman imperial ideology.
The Son of Man is evidence of that conversation, a reminder that even our most sacred ideas have histories, contexts, precedents. But this should also inspire us. If the son of man could be imagined before he was supposedly realized, it means human hope is generative, not merely receptive. We don't just wait for God to act.
We envision what divine action might look like. And in envisioning it, we participate in bringing it about. The throne room vision in Enoch wasn't passive prediction. It was active imagination shaping the possibilities for how redemption could be understood. The rediscovery of Enoch in the modern era is itself a kind of apocalypse, an unveiling.
It reveals that the history we thought we knew was incomplete. that the neat categories we drew between Jewish and Christian, human and divine, prophecy and fulfillment, were more porous than we imagined. It invites us to be more humble about our certainties and more curious about what else might be hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.
There's something beautifully ironic about the son of man being himself a hidden figure who was suppressed for centuries and then revealed. The vision itself is metapocalyptic, a revelation about revelation. So what should we do with this figure now that we've found him again? We could treat him as a historical curiosity, a footnote in comparative religion courses. We could weaponize him in arguments about Christian origins.
We could dismiss him as ancient mythology with no contemporary relevance. Or we could let him do what apocalyptic figures are meant to do. Challenge our complacency, expand our imagination, redirect our hope. The Son of Man in his throne room, radiant and just, seeing all, revealing all, vindicating the righteous, and overthrowing the powerful.
This is not a comfortable vision. It's a confrontational one. It asks, "Where do you stand? With the oppressors who will be cast down, or with the righteous who will be exalted? Do you live as if hidden things will be revealed? Do you act with the knowledge that a cosmic witness sees what human witnesses miss? These questions transcend religious boundaries.
You don't have to believe in a literal apocalypse to recognize that history often bends toward revelation. Crimes hidden for decades come to light. Systems that seemed permanent collapse. In our era, investigations and leaks play the apocalyptic role, unveiling what power hides.
And you don't have to be religious to recognize the human need for vindication that the Son of Man represents. Every person who has suffered injustice carries a version of this hope that someone sees, someone knows, someone will ultimately make it right. Whether we call that someone the son of man or conscience or history or the moral ark of the universe, the hope is the same.
Perhaps the greatest gift of Enoch's son of man is that he refuses simple categorization, divine or angelic or human, pre-Christian or post-Christian, prophecy or myth. He resists our either or thinking, demanding instead that we hold multiple possibilities at once. He's a figure of both end, both human and more than human, both ancient and contemporary, both specifically Jewish and universally resonant.
In a world increasingly divided by rigid categories, us and them, orthodox and heretical, believer and skeptic, the Son of Man offers a different model. He's the one who sits between heaven and earth, between God and humanity, between judgment and mercy. He's the mediating figure, the bridge, the one who makes connection possible. Maybe that's what we need most right now.
Not more certainty, not clearer boundaries, not purer orthodoxies, but figures of connection, symbols that link heaven and earth, past and future, justice and mercy, transcendence and imminence. The son of man in Enoch can be that figure if we let him. He's been hidden long enough. He's been rediscovered. The question now is what will we do with him? Will we try to pin him down to make him fit our categories? Or will we let him remain what he's always been, gloriously ambiguous, radically hopeful, eternally challenging. The throne room awaits. The ancient of days sits in fire and
light. And the son of man stands beside him, radiant as the sun, waiting for the moment when hidden things become manifest. When the righteous are vindicated, when the world as we know it, gives way to the world as it should be. That moment, Enoch tells us, is coming. It's been coming for thousands of years.
It's always coming. And in some sense, it's already here. In every act of justice, every revelation of truth, every recognition of hidden righteousness, the Son of Man was hidden before Christ. He was hidden after Christ. And now he's revealed again, not to settle debates, but to open them, not to close questions, but to invite us deeper into the mystery of hope, justice, and transformation. Welcome to the throne room. Welcome to the vision.
Welcome to the eternal question of what it means to be human in a cosmos that yearns for redemption. The son of man is waiting. He's been waiting all along. And perhaps in ways we barely understand. We are him and he is us. And the revelation is not something that will happen, but something that's happening now in this moment as you read these words and wonder what comes next.
[Music]
