Below is from the post here by Bart Ehrman.
Q: I was wondering what the scholarly consensus is on Jesus’s references to the ‘Son of Man’? I was reading Helen Bond’s book ‘The Historical Jesus’ and she suggested Jesus was talking about himself whenever he referred to ‘Son of Man’. I always found that confusing as Jesus seemed to sometimes refer to ‘Son of Man’ in the third person, but sometimes seemed to apply the title to himself.
Bart’s Response:
Yes, the view Bond (who is a very fine scholar) put out is probably the most widely held one, but I don’t think it’s right.
There are huge debates about what the phrase “Son of man” means on the lips of Jesus and which of the son of man sayings he actually said and which were put on his lips by later story tellers. It is interesting that when he refers to the son of man as the cosmic judge of the earth, he does not appear to be talking about himself (Mark 8:38; 13:26-27; etc.) Since the story tellers thought he was the future judge of the earth, it does not seem like those sayings would be ones they would have made up.
So I think they are the ones he said, that he called God’s future judge the Son of Man (based on Dan. 7:13-14), but that after his death when his followers thought he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven, they naturally concluded he was the one God would send. He was the son of man. The natural result was that they reported (non-historical) sayings in which he referred to himself by that term. That is why the Gospels much later report him using it as a self-designation.
