Knowing Jesus through Illeism

J. Neil Daniels

Illeism is one of those strange little features of Scripture that we tend to skim past without much thought, but it’s worth pausing over. The term just means speaking about oneself in the third person, as if you were talking about someone else entirely. Jesus does this a lot, most famously with his repeated references to Himself as the “Son of Man.” For modern ears, it can sound a bit stilted—almost like a character in a novel talking about themselves from the outside. But in the biblical world, this way of speaking carried deep resonance. It wasn’t just a rhetorical quirk; it carried weight and authority, linking the speaker to traditions far older than the Gospels themselves.

You can see this most clearly in John’s Gospel. Jesus not only calls Himself the Son of Man but also refers to the roles of “Father” and “Son” in ways that sound detached, almost formal. Perhaps the most striking example comes in John 17:3, when Jesus prays, “Now this is eternal life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom You have sent.” Imagine saying your own name in a prayer like that—it jars against our usual instincts. Yet, in light of the Hebrew Scriptures, it makes more sense. God frequently speaks of Himself in precisely the same way: “Thus says the Lord…” rather than simply “I say.” Ancient kings and deities across the Near East adopted this manner too, so it’s not surprising that Jesus draws on the same mode of self-reference.

And what does this actually do? It sets Jesus apart, giving His words an air of majesty and otherness. He is not merely a wandering rabbi pointing people toward God; He speaks as the one uniquely bound up with God’s identity and mission. By framing Himself in this third-person way, He places His person and work within the long stream of divine self-disclosure. It is a subtle but unmistakable signal that in listening to Him, one is encountering not just a prophet but the very presence of God’s reign breaking in. The style matches the substance: illeism becomes a vehicle for revelation.

Of course, Jesus never walked into a room and said flatly, “I am God,” as though announcing a job title. As Paul Barnett notes in Messiah: Jesus—the Evidence of History, such a claim would have sounded absurd in that world—like saying heaven itself had been abandoned, God’s throne left empty. Instead, Jesus revealed God “functionally, declaratively, and relationally.” His illeism is part of that revelation. It communicates who He is not in the crude terms of a résumé but through a manner of speaking that echoes divine authority and kingly rule. For readers today, recovering the strangeness of this way of talking sharpens our understanding of who Jesus claimed to be—and how carefully He chose His words to fit the grandeur of His mission.

For an excellent study, see Roderick Elledge, Use of Third Person for Self-Reference by Jesus and Yahweh: A Study of Illeism in the Bible and Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Its Implications for Christology (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017).