Is Daniel’s “one like a son of man” who I think he is?

Peter Schäfer also suggests that the Son of Man in Daniel is Michael:

“I would like to close by putting forward the thesis that it is likely that the ‘one like a human being’ or the Son of Man in Daniel 7 is the highest angelic figure distinct from God, presumably the archangel Michael. Elevated to a godlike status, this angelic figure becomes the origin and point of departure for the later binitarian figures who will reach their culmination and end point in Metatron.” (Two Gods in Heaven: Jewish Concepts of God in Antiquity), p. 24

You are not merely making an incidental identification (“Michael is another name for Christ”); you are constructing an entire reading strategy in which the Son must belong to the created, angelic realm, and then you are searching the canon for the highest-ranking angelic figure available to bear that weight. Once that controlling premise is in place, Michael becomes attractive because he is explicitly named, explicitly martial, explicitly linked with end-time conflict in Daniel and Revelation, and explicitly called “the archangel” in Jude. From there, a set of familiar moves follows: singular/plural arguments about “archangel,” syntactical claims about “with an archangel’s voice,” an appeal to Michael’s command over “his angels” in Revelation 12, and then a systematic attempt to defang Hebrews 1–2 so it can be read as ranking Jesus above other angels while still keeping him inside the angelic category.

But that entire program collapses under close exegesis, because the New Testament does not merely say Jesus is higher than angels; it distinguishes him from angels in kind. Hebrews 1–2 is not a “Jesus outranks the angelic pyramid” text; it is a “the Son is not part of that pyramid at all” text. And the very places you press hardest—Daniel 7, Jude 9, 1 Thessalonians 4:16, Revelation 12—actually push the other direction once you stop treating angelic language as a category you can smuggle the Son into and start reading each passage on its own terms and then in canonical synthesis.

• The First Category Mistake: “Some Scholars Say X about Daniel 7, Therefore Jesus Taught X about Himself”

You appeal to a line found in notes and scholarship: some interpreters read Daniel 7’s “one like a son of man” as an angelic figure, plausibly Michael, especially when Daniel 10–12 explicitly names Michael as Israel’s heavenly patron. You cite Collins and Nickelsburg in that vein, and you report that Robert Alter aligns with that possibility. You then infer: Jesus believed Daniel; Jesus called himself the Son of Man; therefore Jesus “logically” believed he was Michael.

Even if we grant the first step for the sake of argument—even if Daniel 7’s figure were best read in its original apocalyptic setting as an angelic representative—your conclusion does not follow. It does not follow for a simple reason: Jesus’ claim to be the Son of Man is not an antiquarian footnote about how Second Temple angelology classified Daniel’s imagery. It is an act of self-identification as the eschatological bearer of the dominion described in Daniel 7, interpreted through Jesus’ own mission, authority, suffering, death, resurrection, exaltation, and coming judgment. That is, Jesus does not merely “repeat Daniel 7”; he re-centers Daniel 7 in himself, and he expands it by weaving it together with other texts (especially Psalm 110) in ways that exceed what any “Michael = Son of Man” reading can comfortably contain.

You yourself underscore how Jesus uses Danielic themes “retroactively,” applying the Son of Man designation to earthly authority (forgiving sins; lordship of Sabbath), to humiliation and suffering, to death and resurrection, and to enthronement and judgment. That very point is fatal to your inference. If Jesus is willing to apply Daniel’s Son of Man imagery to realities Daniel 7 does not explicitly mention, then you cannot treat Jesus’ use of the title as a locked endorsement of one narrow scholarly hypothesis about Daniel’s original referent. Jesus is not saying, “I endorse Professor X’s reconstruction of Daniel’s angelic symbolism.” He is saying, in effect, “I am the One to whom this vision truly points, and I will enact its meaning.”

This is precisely why the New Testament’s own usage matters more, for Christians, than any one modern reconstruction. And the New Testament’s usage of Daniel 7 language does not present Jesus as an angelic prince among other angelic princes; it presents him as the enthroned ruler to whom angelic powers are subordinated.

• Daniel 7: What the Text Actually Emphasizes, and Why “Michael” Is Not the Needed Conclusion

You frame Daniel 7 as introducing an apocalyptic Son of Man figure who is “completely subordinate” to God (the Ancient of Days). In one sense that is trivially true: every creature is subordinate to God, and even within Trinitarian theology the incarnate Son, as man and as mediator, obeys the Father. But “subordinate to God” does not tell you whether the figure belongs to the created angelic order or whether the figure participates in the divine identity in the distinctive ways later revelation makes explicit.

Daniel 7 places two things in front of you.

First, it places bestial empires—violent, dehumanizing sovereignty—over against a humanlike figure. Whatever else the humanlike figure is, it is the symbolic reversal of beastly dominion. This already explains why the figure is “like a son of man”: the point is contrast. The vision opposes beastly kingdoms with a humanlike kingdom.

Second, it places the granting of universal dominion and worshipful service in the foreground. Daniel 7:14 says the figure receives dominion, glory, and kingdom so that “all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.” In Aramaic, the verb for “serve” here is commonly associated with religious service in Daniel (the same semantic field used for what is owed to deity). If the figure is merely a created angel, the vision is at minimum flirting with the kind of veneration elsewhere refused to angels. And that tension is exactly where canonical development matters: the New Testament does not resolve Daniel 7 by saying, “Yes, it was Michael all along.” It resolves Daniel 7 by identifying the exalted Son of Man with Jesus and by placing angels in the posture of service and worship toward him.

Now, you try to make the Michael identification feel necessary by contrasting it with “corporate” readings and insisting that “corporate identity” is a novelty. But that sets up a false funnel: either corporate symbol, or Michael. There is a third option—indeed, the dominant Christian option historically—that the figure is an individual representative head whose destiny entails the destiny of the saints. Daniel itself already pushes you toward representative logic: beasts are not merely one animal; they represent kingdoms. Likewise, the humanlike figure can be an individual who embodies the people, receives the kingdom, and then shares it with “the saints.” That is not a modern “novelty”; it is the ordinary way apocalyptic symbolism works.

So even before the New Testament enters the room, your “there can only be one subordinate ruling figure” rhetoric is doing too much. You attempt to anchor that claim in Exodus 23:20–23, but that passage does not establish a metaphysical rule that God must have only one “subordinate ruling figure.” It is a covenantal warning: obey the messenger God sends; do not rebel; God’s name/authority is at stake in that mission. If anything, that passage creates problems for your thesis when you read it canonically, because the “Angel” there speaks and acts with a divine authority that strains the category “created angel,” which is precisely why many classical Christian interpreters treated “the Angel of the LORD” as a theophanic manifestation rather than a mere angelic creature. Your use of Exodus 23 is not proving “only one subordinate ruler exists”; it is assuming it.

• The Second Category Mistake: Treating “Son of Man” as Merely an Angelic Job Title

You repeatedly emphasize that Jesus identified himself as the Son of Man and that this is Daniel 7’s main background. That is substantially correct: Daniel 7 is a major background for Jesus’ self-designation, and modern notes (including the NET Bible’s Daniel 7:13 note you cite) explicitly acknowledge that connection and mention Michael as one interpretive possibility among others.

But your conclusion depends on quietly converting “Son of Man” into “angelic commander identity.” That conversion cannot survive Jesus’ own use of the title.

When Jesus says the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he is not claiming the delegated authority of a chief angel. He is exercising a prerogative that, in Jewish monotheistic categories, belongs uniquely to God. The controversy in the Synoptic healing narratives is not “which angel outranks which”; it is “who can do what only God can do.” When Jesus fuses Daniel 7 imagery with Psalm 110—“you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven”—the scandal is not that Jesus claims to be Michael; it is that he claims to share the divine throne and theophanic coming. A created angel claiming that would not merely be “subordinate”; it would be blasphemous.

This is why your syllogism fails at the crucial hinge. Jesus’ Danielic self-identification is not the claim “I am Israel’s patron angel.” It is the claim “I am the enthroned eschatological judge and king who comes with divine authority.” If you insist on pushing that claim back into the angelic order, you have to neutralize the very texts that make Hebrews 1–2 necessary in the first place.

• “Did Jesus Ever Say ‘Second Person of the Trinity’?”—A Straw Man That Avoids the Real Data

You ask, rhetorically, whether Jesus ever declared that he was “the second person of the impersonal Trinitarian Godhead,” and you answer “No.” But no orthodox Trinitarian is arguing that Jesus used later technical vocabulary. “Trinity” is a doctrinal summary of biblical realities: the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and yet God is one. The question is not whether Jesus used fourth-century terminology; it is whether he speaks and acts in ways that place him on the Creator side of the Creator/creature boundary.

And that is exactly what the texts you want to reassign to angelic status keep doing. Jesus speaks of a pre-creational glory shared with the Father, not a created angelic origin. He receives confessions and worship that angels refuse. He is portrayed as the agent of creation in ways that Judaism reserves for God’s unique work, and Hebrews applies to him language about the divine immutability and creative foundation of the cosmos. Once you see that, the “impersonal Godhead” jab reads less like an argument and more like an evasion.

• Hebrews 1–2: You Are Treating an Ontological Contrast as a Mere Rank Comparison

Your most ambitious move is your sustained attempt to show Hebrews 1–2 does not exclude angel Christology, and that “archangel” language can be harmonized with the chapter’s purpose. But this is where the Watchtower reading most clearly breaks against the grain of the text.

Hebrews does not simply say: “Jesus is the top angel.” It argues: the Son is categorically other than angels.

The opening claims are not merely honorific. The Son is described as the one “through whom” God made the ages/worlds and as the one who “upholds all things by the word of his power.” Then, in the chain of scriptural citations, the author presses the contrast: “For to which of the angels did God ever say, ‘You are my Son’?” The force of that rhetorical question is not “no ordinary angel gets this,” but “no angel, as angel, gets this.” If your reply is “but an archangel is a special angel,” you have not answered the question; you have conceded it. An archangel is still an angel. Hebrews’ logic is deliberately exhaustive: angels are one category; the Son is not that category.

You attempt to soften Hebrews 1:6 by suggesting that angelic worship (or proskuneō) can be rendered to a superior angelomorphic being. But Hebrews is not operating in the ambiguous social-obeisance register where someone bows to a king. Hebrews is quoting Israel’s Scriptures to establish the Son as the rightful recipient of the reverence owed in God’s economy. The same New Testament corpus is unambiguous that angels refuse worship: “You must not do that… Worship God.” If the Son were an angel, Hebrews 1:6 would be dangerously close to authorizing what other texts prohibit.

Your treatment of Hebrews 1:8–9 is even more strained. You argue that Psalm 45’s royal language can call the Davidic king “God” in a representational sense, and therefore Hebrews can apply it to Jesus without implying deity. But Hebrews is not using Psalm 45 to say “the Son is a representative ruler”; it is using Psalm 45 to differentiate the Son from angels by enthroning him in a way that angels are not enthroned. In the same breath, Hebrews contrasts angelic status—“He makes his angels winds, and his ministers a flame of fire”—with the Son’s eternal throne: “But of the Son he says, ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever.’” You can try to reduce the vocative, but you cannot escape the rhetorical structure: angels are servants; the Son is enthroned as divine ruler.

Then comes Hebrews 1:10–12, the real terminus of the argument. The author applies to the Son a creation hymn addressed to the LORD: “You, Lord, laid the foundation of the earth… they will perish, but you remain.” You say this can be true in the sense that Jesus was “involved with creation under the Father as representative,” and that this still leaves him created. But Hebrews does not present this as mere participation; it presents this as the Son as the enduring, unchanging Lord in contrast to the mutable creation. That is not angel language. It is Creator language.

And you cannot rescue your position by saying Hebrews is only proving “superiority over angels” because, again, your conclusion (“chief angel”) remains within the very set Hebrews is excluding. The Son is superior to angels precisely because he is not one of them.

Your reading of Hebrews 2:5 is likewise not an exposition of the text; it is an insertion: you assert, in effect, “the world to come is not subject to angels, but it is subject to the supreme angel.” The author does not say that. He says it is not subjected to angels at all, and then he explains the logic through Psalm 8 and the incarnation: the Son became truly human, lower than angels for a little while, in order to redeem humans and to bring them to glory. That argument is incoherent if the Son is, in his own pre-human identity, an angel. It is precisely because he is not an angel that “becoming lower than angels” has force.

Your appeal to Charles Gieschen’s work on “angelomorphic Christology” is a common scholarly detour in this debate, and it needs to be handled carefully. Yes, there is Second Temple and early Christian material where exalted figures are described in angelic conceptuality, and Gieschen’s Angelomorphic Christology exists and is widely cited in that area. But it does not follow that Hebrews endorses the Watchtower conclusion “therefore Jesus is an angel.” Hebrews can acknowledge and even exploit the angelic conceptual world while still rejecting an ontological identification of the Son with angels. In fact, Hebrews reads like a deliberate correction of any drift toward angel veneration: it insists that the Son is the one angels worship, not the one who belongs to their order.

• Jude 9: Michael’s Own Words Block Your Identification

You try to make Jude 9 do two jobs: establish Michael as the archangel, and keep the identification open by claiming nothing prevents Michael from being Christ in a different mode.

But Jude 9’s narrative logic points the other direction. Michael is in dispute with the devil and explicitly does not presume to pronounce judgment; he says, “The Lord rebuke you.” That is not merely “humility”; it is a marked delegation of authority. Michael appeals to the Lord’s rebuke rather than issuing the rebuke as his own prerogative.

Now compare that with how Jesus addresses Satan and demons in the Gospels. Jesus does not say, “The Lord rebuke you.” He rebukes. He commands. He silences. He casts out. The entire rhetorical force of Jude 9 is that even a high angel does not speak the way the false teachers speak; he defers judgment to the Lord. That only has punch if Michael is not himself “the Lord” in that scene.

If you reply that Christ, in humility, could speak that way, you are again dissolving the text into unfalsifiable “he could have.” But Jude is not giving you metaphysical possibilities; he is giving you a contrastive example. And in that example, Michael is not the one exercising the Lord’s authority; he is the one appealing to it.

• “Archangel” in the Singular: Grammar Is Not Ontology

Your case repeatedly leans on the claim that “archangel” appears only in the singular, and therefore there is only one archangel. That is a grammatical fallacy.

Singular usage can be generic, monadic, or simply idiomatic. “The high priest” is singular in many contexts without implying there can only ever be one high priest across all time. “The devil” is singular without implying the spiritual realm contains only one evil spirit. Even within your own set of texts, Daniel calls Michael “one of the chief princes,” which is the opposite of uniqueness language: it explicitly places Michael among other chief princes. Your appeal to Jude’s article (the archangel) proves even less than you think because Greek regularly uses the article with proper names and titles without implying uniqueness in the metaphysical sense.

Moreover, the very tradition-world you invoke by discussing 1 Enoch is famous for listing multiple archangels. You attempt to soften that by saying Jude’s quotation does not entail endorsement of Enoch’s whole angelology, which is a fair caution, but it cuts against your own “singular means only one exists” method. Once you concede the author can use a term in a way that is rhetorically pointed without committing to every cosmological detail, you have conceded that your singular-grammar argument cannot bear the doctrinal load you place on it.

• 1 Thessalonians 4:16: “With an Archangel’s Voice” Does Not Mean “Is the Archangel”

You treat “with an archangel’s voice” as a statement of identity: Jesus has an archangel’s voice because he is the archangel. But the syntax does not require that conclusion, and the parallelism in the verse strongly discourages it.

The verse describes the Lord’s descent with a commanding cry, with an archangel’s voice, and with God’s trumpet. If you insist that “with an archangel’s voice” must mean identity, you immediately create pressure to read “with God’s trumpet” as identity too, which you then try to avoid by distinguishing the comparisons. But that response is ad hoc because the verse itself does not signal you that one “with” phrase is identity while another is accompaniment. The more natural reading is that Paul is stacking the auditory and cosmic accompaniments of the Parousia: the Lord descends amid the command, the archangelic heralding, and the divine trumpet blast. That is why many interpreters understand the archangel here as a herald figure rather than as a predicate of the Lord. (You even cite Darrell Hannah reporting that sense.) Darrell D. Hannah’s Michael and Christ exists and is precisely devoted to tracing these traditions.

Nothing about that reading “demeans” Christ. On the contrary, it magnifies him: the archangelic shout and trumpet do not define who he is; they dramatize the authority with which he arrives. Your worry that comparing Jesus to an “inferior being” would not emphasize authority is misplaced. Ancient texts routinely emphasize a king’s arrival by describing the heralds, trumpets, and attendants that accompany him. The attendants do not make the king less; they make his majesty more visible.

• Revelation 12 and Revelation 19: You Are Forcing Two Distinct Figures into One

You argue that Revelation 12:7 shows Michael leading angels, and Revelation 19 shows Jesus leading heavenly armies, and therefore it “would not make sense” for two commanders to exist, so Michael must be Jesus.

But Revelation itself does not behave as though it has a problem with multiple agents carrying out God’s purposes. The book repeatedly presents angelic agents executing judgments while also presenting the Lamb as the central divine-royal figure. It is not “rival command”; it is delegated action under the sovereignty of God and the Lamb.

More importantly, Revelation 12 itself contains a messianic figure distinct from Michael: the male child who is to rule the nations and is caught up to God and his throne. The narrative’s internal grammar already gives you two distinct dramatis personae. If you collapse Michael into Jesus, you create an unnecessary confusion in the chapter: the Messiah appears as the child, and then “the Messiah” appears again as Michael, and the text never signals the identity swap. The simpler reading is the one the text itself encourages: the messianic child is Christ; Michael is Michael.

You ask, “Where is Jesus in the battle if Michael is not Jesus?” The answer is: in Revelation’s symbolic drama, the victory of Christ is the ground of the expulsion of the accuser, and angelic warfare imagery depicts the enforcement of that victory in the heavenly court. You do not have to make Jesus identical with Michael to affirm Jesus’ supremacy over the dragon. In fact, Revelation’s own center of gravity—worship of the Lamb, enthronement, universal dominion—keeps pushing you away from turning Christ into a named angel.

• “He Became Better Than the Angels”: You Are Misreading the “Became”

You quote Hebrews 1:4 and insist, “We agree Jesus became better than the angels,” and you treat this as proof that he can still be an angel who is promoted above angels.

But Hebrews’ “became” language is tethered to the incarnation and exaltation, not to an ontological promotion of a creature from one rung to a higher rung. Hebrews begins by describing the Son in terms that already exceed the angelic order—creation, sustaining power, exact imprint of God’s nature—and then it speaks of his session at the right hand after purification for sins. That is the sequence: eternal Son, incarnation, atonement, exaltation in his mediatorial role. The Son “became” superior in the sense that, as the incarnate redeemer, he is enthroned and publicly installed as the heir and king. That is not the story of an archangel receiving a higher title; it is the story of the divine Son completing redemption and being enthroned as the God-man.

• Why the Watchtower Tradition Thinks Jesus Is an Angel—And Why That Reading Fails

If you step back and ask the question you posed—why Jehovah’s Witnesses think Jesus is an angel—the answer is not primarily that the Bible “plainly” teaches it. The answer is that their theology requires Jesus to be a creature, not God, and therefore it must locate him somewhere in the created hierarchy that can still explain his cosmic authority. “Chief angel” is the perfect solution to that constraint: it preserves an exalted Christ while denying the Creator/creature distinction that orthodox Christianity insists on.

Your own argumentation displays the telltale signs of that constraint-driven reading. You repeatedly treat texts that distinguish Christ from angels as if they merely rank him above them. You treat accompaniment language (“with an archangel’s voice”) as identity language because it serves the conclusion. You treat singular grammar as metaphysical uniqueness when it suits you, and then you soften it when 1 Enoch complicates it. You treat Danielic symbolism as if Jesus’ use of it must lock him into one scholarly reconstruction of Daniel 7, even though you simultaneously admit Jesus applies the title far beyond Daniel 7’s immediate description.

A more disciplined reading does the opposite. It lets Daniel 7 be apocalyptic symbolism that the New Testament claims is fulfilled in Christ; it lets Michael remain what Jude and Daniel present him to be, a high angel who serves God; it lets 1 Thessalonians 4:16 describe the Parousia’s attendant heraldry; it lets Revelation 12’s drama keep its own distinctions; and above all it lets Hebrews 1–2 say what it is plainly designed to say: the Son is not an angel, and angels are not the Son.

If you want the shortest way to put the issue, it is this. Your thesis requires that “Son of Man” and “archangel” can be made to converge on the same identity. Hebrews is written precisely to prevent that convergence. Michael can be a glorious servant of God. Jesus Christ is presented, in the New Testament’s fullest register, as the one whom that glorious servant worships and obeys.