(b) Rev 1.13-16.

13 [A]nd in the midst of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. 14 His head and his fair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, 15 his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters. 16 In his right hand he held seven stars, and from his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword, and his face was like the sun shining with full force.

The seers first vision portrays Jesus standing among the “lampstands,” symbolic for the seven churches of Asia Minor, indicating Jesus’ presence with them (1.13). The Greek homoion huion anthrōpou (“one like a son of man”) is anathrous compared to the double articular ho huios tou anthrōpou (“the son of the man”) of the Gospels and so indicates a reversion back to the Danielic form which is also anathrous in the OG and Theodotian versions. The exalted Jesus functions here like an angelus interpres as he commissions John as a scribe and explains to him the meaning of the vision (Rev 1.19-20; cf. 4.1). But ore than that, Jesus appears with divine qualities and angelic form in John’s vision.

What is significant is that the appearance of the son of man assimilates features of Daniel’s Ancient of Days and the angel on the bank of the Tigris River. The whiteness of the son of man’s head and hair are drawn from the Ancient of Days (Dan 7.9; cf. 1 En. 46.1), while the description of his flaming eyes, bronze-like limbs, golden sash, and loud voice reflects the angel (Dan 10.5-6 [OG/Theod.]). The seer’s exalted Jesus so closely resembles the angel in Dan 10.5-6 that Hippolytus assumed that the angel was the pre-incarnate Jesus. John’s vision narrates Jesus as a divine being with a visible form interlacing theophanic and angelophanic qualities.

Various Jewish writings also draw on features from Daniel to describe angels. It is said of the angel Yahoel that the “appearance of his body was like sapphire, and the aspect of his face was like chrysolite, and the hair of his head, like snow” (Apoc. Ab. 11.2). Aseneth encountered an angel similar to Josephus “except that his face was like lightning, and his eyes like sunshine, and the hairs of his head like a flame of fire of a burning torch, and hands and feet like iron shining forth from fire, and sporks shot forth from his hands and feet” (Jos. Asen. 14.9). Zephaniah thought he had met the “Lord almighty” in the form of a “great angel, Eremiel” with “his face shining like the rays of the sun in its glory since his face is like that which is perfected in its Glory. And he was girded as if a golden girdle were upon his breast. His feet were like bronze which is melted in fire” (Apoc. Zeph. 6.11-12). In an early medieval text, Metatron’s description of their faces is like lightning; their eyes are like torches of fire; their arms and feet look like burnished bronze, and the roar of their voices when they speak is as the sound of a multitude” (3 En. 35.2).

In John’s vision in Rev 1.13-16, Jesus has theophanic, angelophanic, and messianic traits, which are indicative of other angelolophanies in Jewish literature.