The Son of God

Acts 9:20 & 22

And immediately he proclaimed Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.” . . . But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ.

N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone (Part One)

But wait a minute. Has not the phrase “son of God” subtly changed in the process? Yes, it has. It has gone from meaning simply “Messiah” [God’s anointed king, the “son” of David], or simply “Israel” [God’s “first born son”], to something else, something which the Old Testament had not envisaged, or not in that way, but which looms up behind as a great unspoken possibility. . . . Somehow, it seems, the early Christians, and perhaps pre-eminently Paul, are discovering that within the expectation of a Messiah who would be, in some sense, “God’s son,” there was a deeper truth: that the Messiah, when he came, would be God’s own second self, God in human form, wisdom incarnate. The phrase “son of God” came, very early in the Christian movement, to carry all of that meaning, without leaving behind (indeed, depending for its full sense upon) the “messianic” sense. And all of it made shocking but very clear sense of what Saul had seen in his vision on the road: “the glory of God in the face of Jesus the Messiah” (150-1).