Illuminating the Son of Man with the Gnostic Understanding of the Historical Jesus: Q 9:58(Matt. 8:20) and the Gospel of Thomas 86

This study begins from the premise that Q 9:58 (Matt. 8:20 and Thomas. 86) as wisdom tradition originally was a Gnostic idea of the historical Jesus. The human who enlightens knows that he is different from the birds or the foxes in the material and visible world. He belongs to the invisible world of God who is his Father. He realizes that he desires to be one with the Son of Man as his heavenly counterpart and becomes the Son of Man. But the Q redactor and the synoptic authors changed Jesus’ original thought about the Son of Man into the radical homelessness of discipleship. The former received Q 9:58 (Matt. 8:20 and Thom. 86) which was floating and circling around his Q church and edited it into a new situation for discipleship with christological development. But the author of the Gospel of Thomas and the later second and third century Gnostic teachers tried to develop Jesus’ Son of Man idea into a more complicated and various Gnostic idea, “the bridal chamber.” They did not understand Jesus as the christological Son of Man, but a Gnostic teacher who teaches that all Gnostics can become one with God and the Sons of Man with gnosis! The author of the Gospel of John rejects this Gnostic Son of Man along with the theological and christological concept that only Jesus must be the Son of Man as the Son of God, and we can only be saved through him. Therefore, this article intends to follow a historical and theological development and movement of the idea Son of Man from the historical Jesus to the earliest various churches.