. . . the "Animal
Apocalypse" (1 Enoch 85-90), which shows the "Son of Man" as a
new Adam, more perfect than the first one, and inaugurating a new world, more
glorious than the old one. Himself a combination of angelic and Adamic, this
personage appears in Daniel 7 as the "understudy" of God [the Ancient
of Days], a phenomenon already found in Ezekiel (for example, chapter 8) and,
later, in Qumran and Christian literatures. The Community Rule presents the
"God of Israel and his Angel of Truth" as, in fact, one and the same
person. In Rev 1.14, Christ's "hair of his head is white as snow-white
wool, and his eyes are flaming like fire." (André Lacocque,
"Allusions to Creation in Daniel 7," in John J. Collins and Peter W.
Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 2 vols. [Supplements
to Vetus Testamentum LXXXIII,I; Formation and Interpretation of Old Testament
Literature II, 1; Leiden: Brill, 2001], 1:123-24, comment in square brackets
added for clarification)
Elsewhere in this essay, we read that
In Christian ancient art, Christ
is sometimes represented as the Ancient of Days, for example, on an ivory
diptych of the 6th century now in Berlin's Staatliche Museen, and on a mural
painting in Kastoria. See photographs in Le Monde de La Bible I 14 (Oct.
1998) 21 and 29. (Ibid., 124 n. 36)
As Collins notes,
Early Christian interpreters
assume the identity of the “son of man” with Christ and usually read Dan 7:13
as a prophecy of the second coming. A possible exception is found in Rev 14:14,
where a figure seated on a cloud, like a son of man, may be an angel rather
than Christ, in view of the reference to “another angel” in the following
verse. This passage is not an interpretation of Daniel 7 in the sense of
claiming to give the meaning of Daniel’s vision, but it is a valuable
illustration of how this imagery was understood and used in antiquity. (John
Joseph Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel [Hermeneia—a
Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible; Minneapolis, Minn: Fortress
Press, 1993], 307–308)
