A great deal of business, in every sense of the word, was conducted between the free through slave intermediaries, constantly available as buffers, proxies, substitutes, fall-guys, and messengers. Slaves provided the free with leeway in their relations with each other, and they also enabled a set of relations shadowing those with their peers, both a convenience and a source of friction. The present chapter concerns these triangular relations between slaves and free.

Nowhere did slavery affect relations between the free more acutely than in the Roman family. The very words domus and familia had a capacious semantic range, including (sometimes, but not always) both slaves and family in a single unit. Seneca, for instance, (De Ira 3.35.1) lists slaves, freedmen and clients, together with wife, as part of the domus. It is not until modern times that such usages fade to isolate starkly the nuclear family as an affective and domestic unit. Within the Roman house, slave nurses and paedagogi would stand in for parents in some areas of the care and education of the children and, conversely, one or more of the slave familia might actually be children of the paterfamilias, and a slave or freedwoman his concubina. The legalities of the situation could get complicated, and they offered rich opportunities for the exercise of legal and rhetorical ingenuity. Martial (6.39) displays his literary wit on a wildly paradoxical menage in which it is the matrona, not the paterfamilias, who is confusing the situation: Cinna has been made a father seven times by his wife Marulla, but not a father of children/freeborn (non liberorum), for his wife has been doing the rounds of the slaves.

As an extreme condition, slavery provided the free with a metaphor and a yardstick for a variety of relationships. Aristotle had mapped out political, social and familial relations in terms of dominance and subordination, drawing a series of analogies and distinctions between the different relationships, and others followed suit. Cicero's version in De republica 3.37 (=Augustine Contra Julianum, 4.12.61) is particularly interesting:

Cicero identifies three spheres of domination: the state, the family and the individual. The slave-master relation takes its own place within these, as a sub-category of familial relations, but slavery also provides a principle of differentiation: you can't dominate a citizen or a child as you would a slave; the body is to be guided, but the desires are to be compelled and chastened like slaves. Failure to observe these distinctions leads to slavish dispositions in the relevant sphere.

Before I summarize the course of our investigation and suggest something of its possible contribution to New Testament studies, I should like to ask very briefly some general questions about the ideological implications of the rhetoric in James, particularly with reference to James 2.5. By “the ideological implications of the rhetoric,” I mean how the “ideology” of the Epistle of James functions as the social use of language that it is; namely, a written instance of deliberative discourse emanating from the first century of the Mediterranean world. And, here, the operative definition of ideology is a “neutral” one, the one employed by John H. Elliott (1981), in A Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy. Accordingly, ideology is “ ‘an integrated system of beliefs, assumptions and values, not necessarily true or false, which reflects the needs and interests of a group or class at a particular time in history’ ” (p. 268; quoting D. B. Davis, 1975, p. 14). And I presume (following Elliott) that the ideological character of James is such that there is within it “an interrelation and inseparability of social and religious frames of reference, meaning and function” (p. 268).

We have discussed some of the ways in which the rhetoric of James 2.1–13 exploits the “beliefs, assumptions and values” of the author, the audience, and the broader culture in an effort to persuade the audience that acts of partiality are incompatible with Jesus' faith.

If Jesus used the expression “Son of Man,” to whom did he refer? The question arises from the fact that in all the Son of Man sayings, Jesus speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, as if referring to someone else, though in most cases the context makes clear that he is speaking of himself. This oddity has given rise to five main interpretations that seek to account for it. (1) Jesus habitually referred to himself in the third person with a title. (2) Jesus referred to himself not with a title, but with an Aramaic idiom by which one could refer to oneself in the third person. Later the church misinterpreted the idiom as a messianic title. (3) Jesus referred not solely to himself, but to a collective or corporate entity which included himself. Later the church misinterpreted the collective reference as a reference to Jesus alone. (4) Jesus referred not to himself, but to another messianic figure distinct from himself. Later the church applied the messianic title to Jesus. (5) Jesus did not speak about himself in the third person, but the early church did. References to the Son of Man in the third person reflect the language of the church speaking about Jesus.

Son of Man as a titular self-designation

The Evangelists leave the impression that Jesus regularly spoke about himself in the third person with a christological title, “the Son of Man.” This portrayal was never questioned or explained by interpreters in the pre-critical period. Even now, many accept it as historically accurate without explaining it. Those who have tried to explain such a self-referring title have interpreted it as cryptic, idiomatic, proleptic, or borrowed.

Near the end of the twentieth century, F. H. Borsch summed up the status of Son of Man research: “It is clear that there is no consensus solution to the Son of Man problem on the immediate horizon” (Borsch 1992: 144). While no consensus exists, progress has been made in a number of areas, and a measure of agreement has been reached on some issues.

1. Very few proposed solutions have completely died out. Even the interpretation of the phrase as “the Son of Mary” has had its advocates in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish between marginal proposals and those that lie at the center of the debate. Those interpretations which must now be considered marginal include genealogical interpretations (Chapter 1), the human Son of Man (Chapter 2), the corporate interpretation (Chapter 4), and derivation of the expression from Ezekiel or Primal Man speculation (Chapter 6).

2. Probably the majority of scholars have come to agree that no unified “Son of Man” title or concept existed in pre-Christian Judaism (Chapter 7). Our examination of the relevant apocalyptic and rabbinic material confirmed this view (Chapter 9). Consequently, the view that Jesus referred to some other expected messianic figure as the Son of Man must now be considered a marginal interpretation. The title “Son of Man” in all of its occurrences in the Gospels can best be understood as referring solely to Jesus.

3. The much-debated issue of the date of the Similitudes of Enoch thus turns out to be of only secondary significance for the Son of Man problem.

The view that Jesus spoke of an apocalyptic Son of Man presupposed that such a conception existed in Judaism prior to Jesus. This presupposition came under attack at the end of the nineteenth century and again in the 1960s. Various factors joined to cast in doubt the view that the title “Son of Man” or a unified Son of Man concept existed in pre-Christian Judaism.

The nineteenth-century consensus

A few scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries affirmed that when Jesus spoke of himself as the “Son of Man,” the Jews were familiar with the title and understood him to mean the Messiah. Serious objections, however, were raised against this view.

(1) First, scholars at the end of the nineteenth century pointed out that the expression “son of man” never became a title in pre-Christian Judaism. In Daniel, the phrase “one like a son of man” is not a title, but a description of a manlike figure. Likewise, the human figure in 1 Enoch is introduced not with a title but with a description: “the son of man to whom belongs righteousness” (1 Enoch 46.3). Subsequently, he is called “that son of man” with reference back to his initial appearance. That this phrase never becomes a fixed title is further suggested by the fact that the Ethiopic uses three different expressions for it. Nor is there such a title in 4 Ezra 13, where the human figure is called simply “a man” or “the man” (the one referred to previously). Finally, though the Rabbis did interpret the figure in Daniel 7.13 as the Messiah, they did not refer to him with the title “Son of Man.”

The dissolution of the apocalyptic Son of Man consensus in the 1960s brought with it a new emphasis on the interpretation of “son of man” as a nontitular idiom. In 1990 Reginald Fuller saw a trend toward interpretations of this kind:

This type of interpretation has a long history, going back to the Reformation. While patristic and medieval authors interpreted ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου in its Greek sense, Reformation scholars began to examine the possible Semitic background of the phrase, usually tracing it to Hebrew ben adam or Aramaic bar enasha. While most scholars continued to view the expression as some sort of title, others began to see it as a nontitular idiom. Three possible idiomatic senses of the expression were investigated: the circumlocutional sense (“this man” = “I”), the generic sense (“man” in general), and the indefinite sense (“a man,” someone).

A circumlocution for “I”

Phase 1: 1557–1835

As early as 1557, Theodore de Bèze (Beza) appealed to Hebrew idiom to account for the expression “son of man.” Noting that Jesus spoke of the son of man in the third person while apparently referring to himself, Beza suggested that the expression was a Hebrew idiom, used as a circumlocution for “I”:

Introduction

This chapter concerns the intertexture of James 2.1–13, and, most particularly, it focuses on the intertexture of James 2.5, an apparent allusion to a well-known saying of Jesus. Since the stated purpose of this inquiry is to ascertain the socio-rhetorical function of James 2.5, it is helpful to clarify why and how the intertexture of the unit is integral to my goal.

Intertextual analysis is important for socio-rhetorical criticism because it takes very seriously the point that all language is a social possession (Halliday, 1978, pp. 1–35) and bases itself on the notion that all texts are constructed on the foundations of antecedent texts (see the essays in Draisma, 1989; Vorster, 1989, pp. 19–20; Kristeva, 1969, p. 52). Following Robert Alter's (1989, p. 112) definition of allusion as “the evocation in one text of an antecedent … text,” whether oral or written, and recalling that allusion is a fundamental aspect of rhetorical invention, it is rather obvious that the intertextual conception of a text as a mosaic of many earlier textual fragments is of primary rhetorical interest. Moreover, as a facet of socio-rhetorical criticism, intertextual study does not only call attention to the ways in which the rhetor appears to activate previous texts; it also addresses the rhetorical subject of the potential effects that allusions have as new figurations in the rhetor's strategy of persuasion.

This investigation concerns itself with the socio-rhetorical function of an apparent allusion to a saying of Jesus in the Epistle of James. It approaches James as an instance of written rhetorical discourse, a text that seeks to modify the social thought and behavior of its addressees. It presupposes a broad scholarly consensus, according to which the text appropriates a tradition of Jesus' sayings, and it seeks to ascertain the social texture of one particular allusion to a saying of Jesus in James 2.5 by a rhetorical analysis according to Greco-Roman conventions.

The reasons for choosing James 2.5 are significant. First, practically all previous investigations that give serious attention to James' use of Jesus tradition identify James 2.5 as an important allusion to a saying of Jesus (Deppe, 1989, pp. 89–91, 237–38). Second, this verse occurs in a unified argument (James 2.1–13) which is one of the three rhetorical units that, in the opinion of the scholarly majority, have the greatest potential for disclosing the thought, piety, and style of the text (Dibelius, 1975, pp. 1, 38–45, 47–50). Third, we shall see that James 2.1–13 displays a definite pattern of argumentation that evinces Greco-Roman rhetorical strategies.

A second disputed issue, beyond the question of reference, is the question of which sayings actually represent the words of Jesus. In the pre-critical period, interpreters never raised this question, simply assuming that all the sayings attributed to Jesus were actually spoken by him. The question arose once scholars began to recognize different classes of Son of Man sayings, classes which seemed difficult to reconcile under a single concept. With the advent of the apocalyptic explanation of “Son of Man,” scholars began to see two categories of sayings represented in the Gospels: the apocalyptic sayings, which spoke of the future coming of the Son of Man, and the non-apocalyptic sayings. Other scholars further subdivided the second category into sayings relating to Jesus' earthly ministry in general and those relating specifically to his death and resurrection. Thus developed the three groupings familiar today: sayings concerning the (present) earthly Son of Man, the suffering Son of Man, and the (future) coming Son of Man. Though this threefold grouping is sometimes credited to Bultmann ([1948–53] 1951–55: 1.30), it actually appears in the works of numerous earlier scholars.

For those who accepted the apocalyptic origin of Son of Man, the question became how to relate the apocalyptic sayings to the non-apocalyptic sayings in the Gospels. If the Son of Man was an apocalyptic figure who would come only at the end-time, how could Jesus speak of himself as the Son of Man already in his earthly ministry? As Bousset stated the problem,