It is a truism in modern Jewish-Christian theological dialogue that the historical Jesus is more useful to us than the theological Jesus. The historical Jesus was a Jew, a Jewish preacher, and a Jewish martyr; he can be reclaimed as a figure of Judaism to some degree without losing his status in Christian faith and worship. The theological Jesus, on the other hand, is the creation of the Church: he is, in fact, the dividing line between Jews and Christians, across which we may not cross, for the notion of his deity and of his incarnate status are, supposedly, antithetical to Judaism, and there are certain formulaic ways of constructing both that are, supposedly, integral to Christianity.
I’m not the only one to think so, but I find this a fairly limited view of things. For one thing, I think the historical Jesus does challenge, or at least flood with new light, the traditional image of Jesus in Christianity in ways that should lead to Christian theological reckoning with history. For another thing, though, the earliest ingredients in the theological Jesus—whom I have elsewhere called the kerygmatic and dogmatic Jesus—are all derived from the thought world of Second Temple Judaism. The notion of Jesus as a messiah, a messiah exalted to divine status and powers, a messiah who is an embodiment or incarnation of the divine, a messiah who is an intermediary, emanation, or even hypostasis of the divine, all comes from the variety of Jewish thinking about the divine that appears in our Second Temple and even in some of our rabbinic texts. These ideas as applied to Jesus may be inimical to Judaism, but that is more because of the social history of Judaism and Christianity together since late antiquity than because of genuine theological otherness. Had Christianity never developed its adversus Iudaeos rhetoric, been formalized as the state cult, or engaged in persecution of Jews and Judaism in official ways in the Roman Empire and Western Europe, then it is very likely that faith in Jesus, or at least theological interest in Jesus, would remain a live option in Modern Judaism. Jesus may well have endured in Early Jewish consciousness, if not as a messiah, then at least as an honorable prophet or martyr of the first century struggle against the Romans. Perhaps, as one modern Jewish scholar has suggested, he would have found his place among the Ten Martyrs of the Yom Kippur liturgy, alongside, say, Akiva.
Recognition of this accident of history has led some Modern Jewish scholars to seek to reclaim Jesus as a figure of Judaism, usually with respect to the historical Jesus, but occasionally also with respect to the theological Jesus. Some Modern Jewish scholars have posited Jesus as a prophet raised from the dead by God to disseminate ethical monotheism and messianism among the nations, in a more positive spin on Maimonides’ interpretation of Christianity; others have suggested that Jesus might qualify as the Messiah ben Joseph, one of two traditional rabbinic messiahs who is supposed to die as a martyr in battle short of the David messiah; others have suggested that Jesus is best understood as an illumined zaddik, not unlike someone like Nachmanides or the Besht, who can be said to have been a living incarnation of the Torah, such that Christian devotion to Jesus is intelligible in a Modern Jewish framework. These are all fascinating takes; I would say that at most, the way they trickle down to ordinary Jewish spaces, communities, and thinking on-the-ground is in a popular understanding in Modern Judaism that Jesus himself was a Jew and did not seek to found Christianity. (Things are worse in the Christian world, where most Christians cannot be said to positively understand that fact.) These are all remarkably generous attempts to reclaim not only the historical Jesus as a point of Jewish-Christian contact but also the theological Jesus as something that can be, if not centrally or essentially significant to Judaism, then at least something intelligibly significant, something that does not have to be noxious to Judaism. It is a way of taking even very distinctive Christian beliefs and finding a way, if not to include them within licit Jewish practice, then at least to make them more comprehensible within a Modern Jewish frame of mind. And, as such scholars frequently note, there are ample parallels in post-biblical Judaism, whereby these ideas—again, originally Jewish in origin—recur in later Jewish thought, sometimes through reappropriation from Christians. The concept of divine unity-in-plurality, for example, survived for several centuries, first in the Hekhalot texts’ notion of a humanlike or angelic secondary God, and second in the sefirotic body of God from medieval kabbalah; the similarity to Trinitarianism in character was already evident to Jewish critics of kabbalah who suggested that at least the Christians only split God into three—the kabbalists were splitting him into ten! The concept of divine incarnation, in and as the cosmos or in and as a privileged human figure, also survived in Judaism in this stream, finding its ultimate expression in Hasidism. And the concept of a suffering and vindicated messiah recurs in the Messiah ben Ephraim, a late successor to the Messiahs b’nai Joseph and David, who instead of leading a glorious revolution suffers and dies as an expiation for the sins of Israel and the world, and is then resurrected and exalted to heaven. Acknowledging such recurring tropes in Jewish texts, some scholars are beginning to come around to the idea that, while individual Jews and Jewish communities do not need to, and shouldn’t, reformulate their whole Judaism to effectively become Christians, Judaism also does not have to construct its boundaries so as to be anti-Christianity. Judaism and Christianity have a shared theological, ethical, and eschatological heritage that should make the natural rhythms, lifeways, and thought worlds of both traditions mutually intelligible.
It seems to me that such acts of generous re-reception oblige Christians to think about ways that they might express their Christologies in a biblical idiom more intelligible to Jews and Judaism in kind. If Jewish scholars are reading our shared and separate texts generously, and choosing to see the Judaism in Christianity without accepting Christianity as a still licit form of Judaism, then Christians have to be able to find that Judaism too. In what follows, I’ll try my hand at an example of what I mean, by way of an exercise.
In Exodus 3-4, we get Moses’s call narrative. Whether Moses was a historical figure or not is a matter of some dispute among scholars—there remains a moderate camp of scholarship holding that his literary figure is based on a real person, and a minimalist camp of scholarship holding that he is purely a folk hero whose only concrete existence is in our mythic tradition about him—but it does not matter, for our purposes, because here we get some of the most important identifying features of Moses’s prophetic image, and the archetypical function it played for later Jews. First, Moses is summoned in a context of “misery,” “sufferings,” and for the sake of deliverance, directly to the Pharaoh, the pagan emperor, and to lead the Israelites out of Egypt (Exod 3:7-10). Moses is, in other words, a prophet that is also a liberator, a savior: the goal of his prophecy is liberation. Second, Moses is reluctant: he does not want this job, and repeatedly tries to tell God that he has picked the wrong guy (3:11-12; 4:1-17). Third, Moses reveals God’s Name to the people, as well as divine deeds which manifest God’s power (3:13-22; 4:2-5, 6-9). Fourth, capping the prophetic profile, Moses’s position as God’s prophet places him, comparatively, as God, first to Aaron (4:16), then later to Pharaoh (7:1).
The first and third features are easily remembered of Moses from the ensuing narrative: he takes the Israelites out of Egypt, and he does so by the means of miraculous deeds, both the Plagues in Egypt as well as facilitating various miracles in the wilderness narrative. The second and fourth are more typically lost on the modern reader. It may escape our memory, for example, that Moses’s reluctance to serve as God’s prophet is matched by his personal suffering as the mediator between the people and God, to the point of wishing for his own annihilation if God will not see his promise through due to the magnitude of the burden of leading the people (Exod 32:9-14), and culminating in a life of dying outside of the promised land, on Mt. Nebo, where he can see it but cannot enter. It may also escape our memory that Moses is progressively deified over the course of the text of Exodus and in Early Jewish literary expansions thereon. Moses’s ascension up Mt. Sinai is often parsed in Jewish literature as his passage beyond earth to the heavenly world; there he sees God (Exod 33:17-34:9); and when he returns, his face is shining, glorified by the encounter (34:29-35). Many Early Jewish texts riff on the idea of Moses’s participated divinity in a variety of ways. 4Q374 f2 2.2-9 says that Moses was “as God over the majestic ones,” meaning the Egyptians in context.1 The Greek text of Sirach 45:1-5 says that God made Moses “equal in glory with the holy ones (ὡμοίωσεν αὐτὸν δόξῃ ἁγίων καὶ ἐμεγάλυνεν αὐτὸν ἐν φόβοις ἐχθρῶν; Sir 45:2); the Hebrew fragment from Cairo Genizah B just says “gods” (א]להים]).2 Perhaps most famous among biblical scholars is Ezekiel the Tragedian’s depiction of Moses being given the throne, crown, and scepter of God on Mt. Sinai, receiving worship from stars, and seemingly cosmic omniscience (Ezek. Trag. 66-89). Philo says that “as a god [God] appointed [Moses]” (Sacr. 9).3 It was typically thought by Ancient Jews that the Torah’s relative silence about Moses’s death and burial implies that the true ending of his story was his heavenly translation to angelic or divine status. This is explicit in Josephus’s version (Ant. 4.8.49). Artapanus, in his third surviving fragment (contained in Eusebius’s Praep. ev. 9.27.1-6), says that the deified Moses was made Hermes “because of his translation of the sacred letters” (διὰ τῆν τῶν ἱερῶν γραμμάτων ἑρμηνείαν; fr. 3.6).4 When Moses appears in the Transfiguration scenes (Matt 17:1-8; Mk 9:2-8; Lk 9:28-36) together with a glorified Elijah in entourage around the glorified Jesus, we should take this as, at a minimum, indicative of widespread Early Jewish belief that Moses had been deified at the end of his life, just like Elijah afterwards and just like Enoch before both of them. Crucially, as Dorothy Lee argues, the Transfiguration seems to suggest that the common features of the three figures are that they are each prophets who suffer and are later vindicated with heavenly, angelic, divine life.5 Whatever else the vision may be intended to say about the identity and function of Jesus, it minimally makes use of this basic analogy between the three.
These aspects of Moses’s prophetic portraiture—his suffering and glorification—were not lost on other Early Jews, who, because of the Deuteronomic promise of one, looked forward to a future prophetic successor to Moses (Deut 18:15-22).6 Jeremiah’s Deuteronomistic outlook would seem to make him a candidate to be the “prophet like Moses,” the failure to heed his prophecy the cause of Judah’s downfall. The prophet of Deutero-Isaiah (Isa 40-55), for example, whose prophecy, suffering, and vindication lead to liberation for the people of Israel by way of return from exile and correspond with God’s glorification of and in Zion, seems to most scholars to be modeled on the Mosaic archetype.7 Like Moses, he is called God’s servant; like Moses, he is chosen from birth; like Moses, God’s spirit is upon him; like Moses, he gives torah, teaching; like Moses, he establishes a covenant; like Moses, he leads the people through the desert to water; like Moses, he is meek; like Moses, he is God’s chosen one; like Moses, he offers his life for others; like Moses, he sprinkles blood on the people or peoples; like Moses, he inaugurates an exodus.8
These biblical models of receiving the Mosaic archetype also inspired later, Second Temple figures and communities to aspire to Mosaic status. 4QTestimonia [4Q175] 1-8 looks forward to a prophet like Moses, as does 1QRule of the Community [1QS] 9:11.9 Josephus tells us about two prophetic figures, Theudas and the Egyptian, who seem to have drawn on the expectation of a Mosaic prophet in the formation of their movements.10 Moses could also be understood in royal terms by Early Jews. 4Q377 f2 2.3-12 calls Moses the “Messiah.”11 Targum Neofiti to Exodus 12:41-42 sees Moses leading the people on the night of their liberation from Egypt in parallel to the future King Messiah.12 In Deuteronomy 33:4-5, Moses is called king (תורה צוה לנו משה מורשה קהלת יעקב ויהי בישורון מלך; νόμον, ὃν ἐνετείλατο ἡμῖν Μωυσῆς, κληρονομίαν συναγωγαῖς Ιακωβ. καὶ ἔσται ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ ἄρχων); in the Targumim on this passage, it is variously emphasized that Moses was king (Tg. Ps.-Jon.) or that, like Moses, there will be a king in the eschatological future (Tg. Onq.; Tg. Neof.).13 Philo says that God made Moses “god and king of the whole nation” (ὅλου τοῦ ἔθνους θεὸς καὶ βασιλεύς; Mos. 1.158). The Targum to Song of Songs 4:5 parallels the Messiah ben David to Moses.14
The historical Jesus self-presents in the memories of the Synoptic Gospels more as an Elisha-like prophet than a Moses-like prophet. For one thing, he takes the origin of his ministry from John the Baptist, who likely believed that he was a returned Elijah and who is remembered as such in the Synoptics. For another thing, he, like Elisha, was reputed for miracle working, which Elijah did comparatively less of. And at least one logion attributed to Jesus connects his life to that of Elisha (Lk 4:16-30). As messianic expectation around Jesus grew and culminated in the events that led to his crucifixion and death at Roman hands, experiences of his resurrection encouraged verification of belief in his messianic identity, and the loss of the first Jewish-Roman War put communities of Jesus’s followers in new sociological predicaments, the image of Jesus in the formation of the New Testament texts expanded from that of a prophet whose expiatory, martyric suffering was vindicated by God with resurrection (of a pneumatic kind, originally, rather than a sarkic kind) to being the such prophet, the prophet like Moses, whose teaching of the Torah, the Prophets, and fulfillment of their expectations were now definitive. This is, as Dale Allison has contended, largely Matthew’s typological innovation in Christology, one that chooses to see in the career of Jesus the rise of a new Moses, endowed with prophetic authority that Matthew’s Pharisaic opponents within their shared Judaism must now acknowledge, even as he acknowledges their own successive authority to Moses himself (Matt 21:1-3).
The Mosaic typology is largely absent from Paul; it is not heavily emphasized in Mark beyond the Transfiguration scene, and occurs in Acts but not so much in Luke (e.g., Acts 3:22; the references in Stephen’s speech in ch. 7). Apart from Matthew, though, the main text to make use of it is John’s Gospel, where Jesus’s succession to Moses is signaled from the Prologue (Jn 1:17) and Moses and his career are frequent touchstones for understanding Jesus’s identity and work, whether by comparison or contrast (1:45; 3:14; 5:45-46; 6:32; 7:19, 22-23; 8:5; 9:28-29). If one subtracted Matthew from the canon, that is to say, this particular way of construing Jesus’s significance, as the New Moses in clear continuity with the original Moses, would not be as visible in the New Testament as a whole. Paul has the expiatory martyr Jesus vindicated as God’s Davidic messiah, but not the Mosaic Jesus; Mark has Jesus the suffering servant messiah, but not Jesus the Mosaic messiah simpliciter; Luke-Acts has Jesus the prophet messiah, but looks in general to other prophetic models to understand Jesus. John has a Mosaic-seeming Jesus, but only in its redacted form, which includes the prologue, does it reflect the connection between the two, and the succession is phrased negatively rather than positively, as it is also in Hebrews. Only in Matthew do we get Jesus as a new Moses in the tradition of Jewish expectation, not over against it.
Matthew is also, crucially, the first Gospel to make the open worship of Jesus something that happens already in Jesus’s lifetime. The magi come to visit the infant Jesus so that they can prostrate (proskyneō) to him, albeit for his royal identity rather than his prophetic one; the disciples also do so when they encounter him risen in Galilee (Matt 28:17). Jesus confesses that all authority “in heaven and on earth” has been entrusted to him, and gives the great commission to make disciples of all nations and baptize them, teaching them to obey all his commandments (28:18-20). Of interest here, when Jesus invokes heaven and earth in the Gospel, it is often in Torah-based contexts: “until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (5:18); to Peter, he gives the power to bind and loose in heaven and on earth, that is, to make halakhic decisions for the community that are of a binding character (16:19; 18:18); and in the last occurrence before this logion of the risen Jesus, Jesus adds his own words to the Torah: “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (24:35). Given that Jesus also commands his disciples to listen to the Pharisees, the strong implication of his words here are that they are to go and teach Judaism to the nations: they are, in other words, to teach them the Torah and Jesus’s interpretation of it. Their baptism of the nations extends John’s baptism, but now with a new significance, perhaps suggesting ritual conversion to Judaism thereby.
Matthew conforms Jesus to the whole Mosaic typology. Jesus is the prophet whom God calls to bring about a new act of liberation: “he will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21). Jesus demonstrates divine secrets, as in the words of the so-called “Johannine thunderbolt” (11:25-27). Jesus suffers on the cross. And, finally, Jesus is glorified, like Moses, like Elijah, to the status of divine life, and his words now join the prophetic corpus of Torah and Prophets that the disciples must bring now to the nations.
The gentile focus of the mission is not a breach in the Mosaic archetype, but its logical fulfillment, because it is first to Aaron, but then to Pharaoh that Moses is made God in the tradition. Just as with Moses, so the logic of the typology would hold, the deification of Jesus is hidden from the sight of his own people: Moses comes down and veils his shining face, and his death, burial, and translation to heavenly status are not publicly known, but hidden, esoteric events. Likewise, it is only to the gentiles that the worship of Jesus is made known—first through the angelic revelation to the Magi, then through the disciples.
So, a Mosaic Christology of Jesus’s divinity might be one of those touchstones that, while it won’t fully reconcile Jews and Christians, might make us more intelligible to one another. I have suggested previously that Jesus’s resurrection, understood as a sapiential, prophetic vindication of a wise, just person such as many other Early Jews believed happened to Jewish heroes of the past like the patriarchs, the prophets, and the martyrs. I would also suggest here that his deity is best understood less as a one-off—something anomalously true of Jesus—and more as the indwelling of the divine presence in the human form of the prophetic hero, a well-known belief in Early Jewish literature.15 That is to say, I take the divinity of Jesus in the sense that scripture presents it: an indwelling in the human being of the divine presence, elevating the human being to the status of divine icon, and in the process, humanizing the divine and divinizing the human being, just as many Ancient Jews believed of ancient heroes like Moses, and just as influenced the development of the later Christologies. This way of phrasing Jesus’s divinity may not fully satisfy traditional Christological metrics of the different communions, nor would most Jews other than the most sympathetic and comparatively informed be generally interested in choosing to see Jesus as one such incarnation among many in sacred history.16
But it seems to me that making such a move, even just as an intellectual exercise, also provides a benefit to specifically Christian theology: it allows Christians to retrace the steps towards Nicaea beginning with the New Testament itself, rather than just looking back from Nicaea on the New Testament. I think doing Nicene exegesis of the New Testament, and of the Christian Bible in general, is fine—provided we stay cognizant that, if Nicaea is the mountaintop, or Chalcedon or whatever, then the hike up the mountain begins from the “indigenous Christologies,” so to speak, of Jesus and his Movement in Ancient Judaism that the New Testament authors actually use or create, which later generations receive and rework in order to get to the Nicene synthesis. The deity of Jesus was not obvious, but was an intuition of a creative, exegetical, worshipful, and speculative consciousness, one that developed precisely by applying and interweaving more and more native concepts until the collective portraiture was more than the sum of its parts.
So, turning back to the sense in which God makes Moses God, or a god, as the model for understanding what God has done to Jesus does not get us all the way to what Christians now believe about Jesus, but it does get us to an important checkpoint, one that we should remember and sit with before moving on. Jesus the divinized Mosaic prophet, whose divinity is made apparent to the nations, gives us a Jesus who comes to preach divine secrets, liberation, who suffers, but whose suffering leads to his vindication, his empowerment, and his exaltation. It gives us a Jesus who, if not “predicted” by the text or context of the Hebrew Bible, at least conforms to the deep subtexts of the corpus. And so it gives Jews and Christians a theological Jesus that we can perhaps talk about more fruitfully.
Gregory R. Lanier, Corpus Christologicum: Texts and Translations for the Study of Jewish Messianism and Early Christology (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2021), §64.
Lanier, Corpus Christologicum, §95.
Lanier, Corpus Christologicum, §234.
Lanier, Corpus Christologicum, §209.
See Dorothy Lee, Transfiguration, New Century Theology (London: Continuum, 2005).
See Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 57-66. In general I am hesitant to recommend Pitre, and will never recommend Scott Hahn, for the simple reason that in the former’s case I sometimes feel that the Catholic apologetic bent is overwhelming the scholarly dispassion, and in the latter’s case that is virtually always true. But in this particular instance, Pitre is reflecting a genuine datum of scholarship on Early Judaism.
See, e.g., H.M. Barstad, A Way in the Wilderness: The ‘Second Exodus’ in the Message of Second Isaiah (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1989); R.E. Clements, “Isaiah 53, and the Restoration of Israel,” 47-54 in Jesus and the Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 and Christian Origins, ed. Williah H. Bellinger Jr. and William R. Farmer (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1998); Dale C. Allison Jr., The New Moses: A Matthean Typology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993). I owe the references to Pitre, who also marshals Von Rad and Mowinckel in his corner.
All of the comparisons are Pitre’s. See Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 60-61.
Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 63-64.
Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper, 64-66.
Lanier, Corpus Christologicum, §66.
Lanier, Corpus Christologicum, §7.
Lanier, Corpus Christologicum, §12.
Lanier, Corpus Christologicum, §23.
There are lots and lots of folks to cite here, but just have one: Andrei Orlov, The Glory of the Invisible God: Two Powers in Heaven Traditions and Early Christology (London: T&T Clark, 2019) and idem, Embodiment of Divine Knowledge in Early Judaism (London: Routledge, 2021). I also wrote something on this here.
But here at least one person that deserves mention is Shaul Magid, Hasidism Incarnate: Hasidism, Christianity, and the Construction of Modern Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), who makes the case that Hasidic beliefs about tzadikkim are not substantially different than incarnational Christologies in Christianity, even though Modern Jews continue to construct their tradition as “not-Christianity.”
This is probably one of the most level headed approaches to how we might define Jesus theologically vs historically. The point you make about how the divinity of Jesus was not obvious is incredibly important. This allows historically informed and spiritually minded persons the grace to be comfortable with uncertainty, but understanding how we got to where we are. Moses was one archetype for understanding and growing closer to God and Jesus is perhaps simply another more clarifying lense to examine the unseen God with.
What are your thoughts on Daniel 2:46? Here a prophet is given sacrificial homage, which is usually given to God.
Might be another place of the deified prophet, and/or could help Jews (and Christians) to contextualise the cultic honour which Christians give to Jesus.