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The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man

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Many will be delighted by the portrayal of Jesus that Walter Wink presents here. Others, however, who rely largely on dogma as their primary source for understanding who Jesus was and is, will undoubtedly experience an initial jolt by this book, but one, I think, that is potentially freeing and life transforming.

The book is refreshing, moving, clear, intelligible and well organized throughout. Perhaps one of the most important comments that can be made about this text is that it provides the reader with a perspective on Jesus which is not only believable, but meaningful. Without sacrificing the importance of Jesus, Wink presents us with an emerging Christology from below that he grounds in Jesus' own self understanding as gleaned largely through the Gospel accounts of his life, teaching and ministry.

Wink masterfully develops his thought by mining the Hebrew and New Testament scriptures taking as his central theme and starting point the numerous "son of the man/human being" sayings throughout the scriptures. As noted above, he begins with Ezekiel and moves on to Genesis which, as the author notes, was written after Ezekiel. He continues on with Daniel, the Gospels and concludes with pertinent extra biblical texts of the First Century CE. In the end we are left with an image of Jesus as one who fully realized his humanity and thus the goal of life as God intended.

Using a historical critical method and a critique of domination as his critical lens, Wink recovers emphases within the scriptures that have been lost in the Christian tradition due to the traditions tendency to accommodate and interpret the gospels in light of structures of domination. As Wink aptly illustrates, the fundamental thrust of Jesus' teaching and ministry was to confront and condemn all forms of domination. Accordingly, for Wink, the critique of domination provides the essential criterion for determining what was revelatory in Jesus' life and message as this apprears in the "son of the man" sayings.

The fundamental thesis of the book is that by recovering the archetypal meaning of "the son of the man," Jesus, the human being - the son and mediator of the truly Human One, becomes a catalyst for human transformation by teaching us what it means to be more fully human. Through careful and creative exegesis, Wink offers a provocative first century portrait of Jesus that systematically peels away the multiple layers of dogmatic assertions about Jesus and illuminates the earthly, human Jesus who truly was `one like us.'

This book is a wonderful scholarly addition to the study of Jesus. Likewise, it smoothly integrates theology, philosophy and psychology. Wink is simultaneously provocative, humorous, realistic and humble throughout. He is both a feminist and a liberationist in his critical approach to theology and the scriptures.

I recommend this text to all students of theology and anyone else who is interested in becoming more authentically human in light of their Christian commitment to God, through Jesus - the fully human, human being.

"God is Human" Walter Wink so believes. In `The Human Being', Wink redefines divinity, not as godlike, but as fully human, and calls us to become like God - actualized humans. "We are called not to become what we are not - divine - but to become what we are: human."

This book is an authoritative commentary on the words, "son of man" and "the son of the man" an expression found throughout the Bible and an expression that Jesus used almost exclusively to describe himself. The Hebrew phrase simply means "a human being." For Wink, Jesus came to teach us, to call us, to be truly human. A task that Wink feels we have failed at miserably.

"We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness . . but we have not yet arrived at true humanness." He goes on to say, "we are incapable of becoming human by ourselves. We scarcely know what humanness is, but we know well what inhumanity is."

I found the most interesting and engaging chapter 'Feuerbach's Challenge', where Wink agrees with Ludwig Feuerbach, the 19th Century German Philosopher, that God is the merely the projection of human values and human nature. He turns this around to support his thesis that the projection of our best
qualities and powers into Godhead, the emptying of ourselves into
transcendence is what God wants. "We are projections of God, functions of God, and that God is a function, a projection of us. Consequently, our perceptions of God are projections, as Feuerbach thought."

I was disappointed that Wink's focus is on us becoming `truly human', yet he only gives one and a half pages to discussing the definition of the `truly human'. Scant space when you consider this is the core of his thesis. Throughout the book he alludes to what being `truly human' means, but you must collect the fragments and paste together your own understanding. He states, "The new human being has not yet emerged. Evil is as powerful today as it was the day Jesus hung on the cross." Right, Professor, but what does the "new human being" look like, Jesus? And if Jesus, then the human side, right? Carl Jung's concept of `individuation' is referenced multiple times,
as is Maslow's concept of self actualization. But you come away with nothing definitive.

This book is a demanding academic read that will escape most of the general populace. It is recommended for ministers seeking a commentary on the words "son of man" and various passages throughout the Bible, as well as theologians and students of theology. In `The Human Being' Walter Wink has given us an exhaustive study on the words "son of man"; going beyond just the
Biblical and expanding the study into the use of the words in Pseudepigrapha, Apocrypha, Gnostic and Jewish mysticism and Apocrypha mystic writings. Recommended

Surely one of the most perplexing phrases in the Gospels is Jesus' repeated reference to himself as "Son of Man." Let's face it, for most biblical scholars, the term is simply an embarrassment, and they work hard to explain it away. Inconsistent statements such as saying that Jesus is fully human as well as fully divine are used to try to explain it. Or, attempts are made to show that "Son of man" is some divine title. In both the ancient and modern church, the phrase is basically non-existent in hymns, prayers, and liturgies.
Wink researches all the references to the son of man he could locate: in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and in Hebrew literature. For example, he shows that the capitalization of "Son of Man" was added by the translators, to give the impression that "Son of Man" is a title. In fact, there is no capitalization at all in the Hebrew or Greek texts of the bible. In fact, "son of" is a Hebrew idiom (usually appearing as "ben `adam") that means "member of a class," and Wink pulls many examples from the bible itself, examples that would not be obvious unless you return to the Hebrew text (or a literal translation, because the idioms are not translated as "son of," but as "member of," or the translation simply drops "son of " and just leaves the group name.) One example is in Genesis 18:7, which for example NIV translates as "Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf ..." but Young's Literal Translation is "and Abraham ran unto the herd, and taketh a son of the herd, ..."
The exception to this translation of "son of," Wink points out, is when Jesus refers to himself as "son of man." Here, the translators don't appear to be willing to have Jesus call himself a man, so the leave the strange-sounding phrase "Son of Man," and capitalize it to boot.
Wink has a knack for seeing through the fog of Christology and all the baggage that his been built around Jesus by the translators and theologians. Wink explores carefully the historical meaning of Son of Man in Jewish literature. Then he analyses the curious and unique use of Son of Man in Gospel ("bar enash" in Aramaic, which appears as "ho huios tou anthropou" in the Greek NT sources): that nobody else uses this term in the New Testament except Jesus himself, and that it really doesn't mean "I" since among other things Jesus frequently uses "I," and could have used that if he wanted to.
Wink's essential conclusion that Jesus' repeated use of "son of man" is to deliberately emphasize that he is human. Jesus was not claiming to be divine, not calling us to worship him, but calling us to be human, and that is our highest calling. Wink makes the profound observation that Jesus never appealed to God's authority for anything he said or did, and yet divine authority clearly shines through his words and deeds. Wink's interpretation of Jesus' message is not that being "human" is bad, but that our failure is that we are rarely human at all; that we act selfishly, without thinking, without consideration, without reverence for God. It is a compelling interpretation, well analyzed and defended. Wink shows that is the most consistent with what is found in the Gospels.
This interpretation will for many people hard to accept. It is one thing to have Jesus come down from high, to be worshipped, with a huge chasm between him and us. It is another to realize that Jesus was, in fact fully human while we most of us are barely so, and that he tried with all his might to show those around him the way to the Kingdom of God, and that is our calling not to worship Jesus but to share his understanding and worship of God.

I believe that if anyone can prepare the "modern" church for its critical next step into the future, it is Walter Wink. His development of the critical use of scientific theory mostly drawn from the "new" physics and the "new" biology, are extremely helpful in providing a guidepost into the integration of theology and science, using a philosophy of science integration.

The is one point that wish to state clearly. This series of texts is not about "your father's (or mother's) Jesus!" Wink demonstrates a Jesus that is dealing with issues of power and domination. It seems that little "theological reflection about the nature of the church" is present within the current psychological disposition of the American church. Wink provides a necessary corrective to this religious culture of psycho-babble.

It will be a difficult read. Keep a Bible handy.

The author, Walter Wink, correctly points out that "the quest for the historical Jesus" that has preoccupied New Testament scholarship for over 200 years has actually been a quest for the human Jesus. Wink takes Jesus' enigmatic term the Son of Man, literally the Son of the Man and very persuasively, in my view, argues that it is indeed both his designation of and his aspiration for himself which is of himself as "the fully human one" or, the politically correct, gender neutral "the human being." He was, in effect, designating himself as "The Man." No matter. The point is that, in the author's view, Jesus did not claim that he was the Messiah or Christ, still less that he was the Son of God. These were titles given to him by the early church. Wink's thesis implies that Jesus made no claim to being a one-time-only God Incarnate, but what and who we all may become by living our lives in complete faith in the goodness and love of God.

My only quibble with this wonderful book lies in its virtually complete reliance on a Jungian archetypal perspective. While at points this perspective is illuminating and it appears certainly to be Wink's preferred position I found it unnecessary and unduly distracting.On the whole though, if you read and digest this book, you will discover an utterly liberating way of understanding and experiencing the humanity of Jesus.

Excellent book for anyone interested in the picture of Jesus that emerges from careful reading of the Greek text and not from translations. It's a longish book and it requires attention, but it should prove rewarding for all Christians.

"The Human Being", the great biblical scholar Walter Wink's unprecedented and compellingly creative work on Jesus, contains the most definitive statement on who Jesus was and what Jesus expected of anyone who wished to live a fully human life. Believing that it is exceedingly wise to take seriously what Jesus called himself, and using detailed biblical analysis and the earliest known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, Wink focuses on the phrase that Jesus used as a self-describing name, a phrase that biblical scholarship ignored for 2000 years. It is a phrase that only Jesus used to call himself, and he used it some 53 different times, virtually his only form of self-identification, and no one else ever uses the phrase in reference to him. That phrase is "the son of the man", and it was not ever capitalized, meaning that it was not an honorific or special status title, or any claim to be something any other human could not be. It was seen by translators as so awkward a phrase that no one ever translated it without removing the second use of the article "the" in the phrase, and Wink demonstrates why that was a mistake. Wink details what this phrase means and where it comes from and why Jesus used it, while noting that its literal translation is "the human being". After four years of seminary and 35 years of continuing education classes and sermons with all their needed research, this book taught me more about Jesus than anything else I had ever read or heard or seen. If forced to have only one book in my library this is the book I would choose--it rates 100 stars, not just 5. It is without doubt, in my opinion, the best book ever written about Jesus, even though it is not an easy read. It will challenge any reader to rethink the authentic Jesus, what his message truly is, and what it can mean for seeking to live as an authentic human being. I recommend it as highly as I could ever recommend any book to anyone.

I am continually amazed at the idiocy that is mistaken for scholarship. Winks latest proffering in search of the "human" might have benefited from a consistant use of reason - a very "human" characteristic (no matter how epistemologically construed).
He is all for the historical\mythical\objective\subjective reconstructions of the "Jesus Seminar" assuring us that Jesus was a sinner,that that mean "ol" historic church has maliciously or ignorantly misidentified and reified the God-Man; but that lo, now he and select others are paving the way for everyone else to become more human.
His previous contributions have analyzed and exposed (with the agreeable nod of JEESUS!- that "hell raiser" - I'm sure!) all those perennially nasty systems of domination and he continues with this heuristic accordingly.
However, upon closer examination, "scholarship" and humanization become chicanery and pomp. If the "real" Jesus can not be known, if historical criticism is so sure now about what the gospels legitimately provide and what not, how with such selective ease does Wink quote from portions that conveniently ,but only, support his position? Hocus Pocus? If truth - as he defines it - is more important then fact (and that's a fact) and revelation is not unveiling the unknown but "what moves one to action" (Winks own revelation - an ironic "unveiling" no doubt) one can never be moved; because according to his own blithering the factuality of history can never really be obtained but rather only provisionally reconstructed. In fairness to consistancy that includes the etymology and employment of words, including the word "action", and since Winks acquisition of human language (which can not be a present actual fact because of its emergence in history - which is at best a productive myth)ethereally floats in this flux - voi la - chicanery!
As to crusading against the "powers" "in the name of JEESUS"? Oh, if he wants to make so many "MORE HUMAN" why charge for such a precious and sacred cause? Surely some liberal charitable trust would love to get in on this anti-domination bandwagon, would'nt they? Oh, and what a vitae. The last time I checked, book publishing was the all or none of academic respectability and promotion; hmmm !What better way to begin to be radical like Jesus (or his ellusive historioMythical impulse)then to "turn dem tables over right where ye at!" Instead of "humanizing" Jesus and Man "in this new time of ours" it sounds like a loss of nerve not meant to disturb.
As a Postmodern Mennonite I was hoping for truth and facts (even if contextually constrained)about Jesus the God\Man and the redemption of man, instead I got an impressive example of the complexity and ubiquity of pompous hypocricy from somone supposedly railing against it.