When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea
Philippi
The towns that were in the neighbourhood of this city; which city
went by several names before, as Leshem, ( Joshua 19:47
) which being taken by the Danites, they called it Dan; hence we
read of (Nwyroyqd)
(Nd) , "Dan, which is
Caesarea" F2. It was also called Paneas, from the
name of the fountain of Jordan, by which it was situated; and
which Pliny says F3 gave the surname to Caesarea; and
hence it is called by Ptolomy F4 Caesarea Paniae; and by the
name of Paneas it went, when Philip the F5
tetrarch rebuilt it, and called it Caesarea, in honour of
Tiberius Caesar; and from his own name, Philippi, to distinguish
it from another Caesarea, of which mention is made in the Acts of
the Apostles, built by his father Herod, and so called in honour
of Augustus Caesar; which before bore the name of Strato's tower.
The Misnic doctors speak of two Caesareas F6, the
one they call the eastern, the other the western Caesarea. Now,
as Mark says, whilst Christ and his disciples were in the way to
these parts; and, as Luke, when he had been praying alone with
them,
he asked his disciples, saying, whom do men say that I the
Son of
man am?
He calls himself "the son of man", because he was truly and
really man; and because of his low estate, and the infirmities of
human nature, with which he was encompassed: he may have some
respect to the first intimation of him, as the seed of woman, and
the rather make use of this phrase, because the Messiah was
sometimes designed by it in the Old Testament, ( Psalms 80:17
) ( Daniel
7:13 ) or Christ speaks here of himself, according to his
outward appearance, and the prevailing opinion of men concerning
him; that he looked to be only a mere man, born as other men
were; was properly a son of man, and no more: and therefore the
question is, not what sort of man he was, whether a holy, good
man, or not, or whether the Messiah, or not; but the question is,
what men in general, whether high or low, rich or poor, learned
or unlearned, under the notion they had of him as a mere man,
said of him; or since they took him to be but a man, what man
they thought he was; and to this the answer is very appropriate.
This question Christ put to his disciples, they being more
conversant with the people than he, and heard the different
opinions men had of him, and who were more free to speak their
minds of him to them, than to himself; not that he was ignorant
of what passed among men, and the different sentiments they had
of him, but he was willing to hear the account from his
disciples; and his view in putting this question to them, was to
make way for another, in order to bring them to an ingenuous
confession of their faith in him.