Alexandru, there is significant anthropological evidence that Moses did indeed live. The marriage and ascendancy pattern of his Horite Hebrew family has been analysed and shown to be authentic. Such scientific analysis simply isn’t possible for fictional characters. We discuss the veracity and historicity of the OT narratives at the international Facebook group The Bible and Anthropology.
Alexandru…those are intense and indepth questions…Moses is a name of known Egyptian origin. If (and I say IF) he lived and was raised as is recorded, then Moses was a child of the Egyptian kap and certainly literate. This does not mean he wrote every part of the Pentateuch-- certainly had sources for some or much of it — but his having contributed in some sense is not to be ruled out.
Historians claim many things, but then accept other things which have same or less evidence…and there is no universal disagreement that there was no man named Moses…esp since the name was relatively common…
As for the Exodus as an historical event…if you read around you read different historians’ views…seems at least they agree that there were Semitic people living and working in labor-intensive jobs in the area of Egypt mentioned in the Bible… that many of those :Hebrews had Egyptian names, so obviously resided at some time in that land…the various described plagues were direct insults to Egyptian religion and to the deity of Pharaoh…the sites of various Exodus encampment are being sought by archeologists and there is some evidence of it in some places…No room for everything here. As an instructor of mine once said “There is too much noise” about the Exodus for it not to have happened…Others note that no one typically boasts of slavery as the source of their national origin…there also is some evidence that the pharoah of Exodus era lost his firstborn son…this last thing may be controversial and, yes, lots of people lost their children in those days…
You have brought up many other issues about OT and NT…too much for this small space. But the opinion that Jesus did not exist is that of an extremist fringe minority and there is plenty of outside information about Jesus that comes from the generation, or centuty, in which He lived and died and rose again,
Hope this helps, although no time to be in depth
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Matthew P…I suspect that a better way of putting it would be to say that a document which describes an historical event should be examined for what it is without dismissing it out of hand. If there is evidence for much of the details of the account, then this might be an argument in favor of the aspects of the account that we seem to have no way of verifying…Everyone has a bias in all this, of course…I read the account of a British colonial administrator whose career had put him in some authority over that region of the Near East in the 1920s…He verified some of the details of the Exodus event as things that still could be encountered in the Sinai…but thought Moses was a charlatan…So he argued for historicity but not for the spiritual aspects of it…And just to correct Shawn’s comment about date of first written docx in that region — they did recently discover an ancient abecedary along the area of the West Nile near Luxor. The writing on the abecedary – which they dated at 1500 BCE (centuries earlier than what Shawn has) – was an early Semitic alphabet…Egyptians, BTW, did not write in Semitic. So this tablet belonged to some non-Egyptian living in that area long ago…
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When it comes to history from thousands of years ago, the reality is we can know little ‘for sure’. I would ask: what evidence do we have for the existence of anyone who may have lived 5000 years or more ago? I would suggest apart from some scant writings about a handful of individuals, very very little. But that doesnt mean those ancestors didnt live - they clearly did. As for the Exodus, for example, it seems to me again there will be very little or no evidence, apart from what we have in the Bible. Why? because if it happened as described, the Egyptians are highly unlikely to have recorded it anywhere as it was a loss to them, and they rarely if ever recorded defeats. And there is unlikely to be any physical evidence left from thousands of years ago from a nomadic group of people travelling through a desert area. I suspect it is wrong to claim the numbers were in the millions but more likely 10’s of 1000’s (I read quite a convincing article on that). So I wouldnt expect to find any ‘hard’ evidence any time soon. Those who claim it didnt happen are simply going on the lack of such hard evidence, and choose to ignore the Biblical testimony. As for Jesus, I think His referencing Noah, Abraham, Moses etc is important. If they didnt exist, one could argue Jesus was simply speaking like any other Jew who believed in the historicity of such people. But then Jesus was not like any other Jew! It is interesting that He doesnt reference ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’ as two named individuals. I would therefore suggest in Jesus’ mind, Noah, Abraham and Moses all existed as real individuals but not Adam and Eve. In which case I would agree with Him!
Re: not capitalising Bible
Not that I’m aware of. I usually use a capital but occasionally I slip up.
Taking up your important further question about how the historicity of the OT affects Jesus’ teaching: When Jesus quotes other sources he does not necessarily corroborate them. He is speaking into the current culture and uses its tropes in order to be understood.
Unfortunately too many Christians today read his teaching out of context. An important example of this is how we read his quotation of the Pharisees’ mantra “Not a jot or tittle …”, which he quotes to refute. But many Christians embrace this as “Gospel”.
So, the historicity of his citations is not the point. Does his teaching stand in its own right?
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Hi Chris,
I wouldn’t say that all YECs do it – if you’re being more careful with your grammar then well done, pat yourself on the back. Certainly I can’t say I’ve ever noticed it on any of the leading YEC websites (Answers in Genesis, creation.com etc). But I first noticed it among certain other YEC contributors both here and on Peaceful Science. Incidentally I’ve since noticed it among a number of other Christians who have no identifiable position on the age of the earth or evolution that I’m aware of. I have a couple of Facebook friends who are pastors who seem to write “the bible” rather than “the Bible” fairly consistently. As I said, it makes me wonder whether someone or other is specifically teaching that that’s what we should do.
Looking at it from a purely historical perspective, one would have to conclude that Moses did not write the Pentateuch in any modern sense of the notion of authorship. After all, the closing chapter of the Pentateuch describes the death and burial of Moses! Of course, there are always those who would argue that Moses was able to do this because he had been miraculously granted foreknowledge of his own death and burial. There is nothing like declaring a miracle when facts get in the way of your favourite theory. However, I think that many people who argue this will someday come to laugh at themselves.
There are a number of factors to take into account when reading the Old Testament. One is to understand the need to establish the genre of the literature being read. For a New Testament example, Jesus told a parable about a “good Samaritan”. The parables were fictional stories that Jesus created to convey important messages about spiritual and ethical realities. If he had identified actual people in his parables, his listeners would have gone off in tangents because of their knowledge of those particular individuals. So I had to laugh one time when I was on a bus travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho and the tour guide, larrikin that he was, pointed to some stone ruins on a hill and told everyone it was “the inn of the Good Samaritan”. Suddenly the bus lurched to one side as its occupants moved to take photos through the windows on one side of the bus. When I looked at the tour guide he was smirking about the fact that some people who read the Bible think that every story describes an actual historical event, whether it was meant to or not.
This understanding is crucial to the question of whether or not there was an historical Adam as described in one of the Creation stories. Many, many cultures have Creation stories, both in ancient times and today. They are meant to convey spiritual and moral values, and the owners of these stories know there is a particular way in which they are meant to be understood. As one indigenous leader said of his own culture’s Creation story, “I don’t know whether this story actually happened, but I know that this is true.”
One of the problems involved with understanding historical stories in the Bible is that they are always viewed through the eyes of faith. For example, when the early Christians wrote about the miracles of Jesus they viewed them through the lens of faith, perceiving in them that Jesus was the Messiah. Others looked at the same actions of Jesus and declared that “Jesus was a sorcerer who led Israel astray”. So what was the historical truth? All the historian can do is tell us what people believed, not what actually happened.
The viewing of history through the eyes of faith leads to theologising about events. What was their historical significance? How can we preach a sermon on them that will bring out their meaning for today? The problem with the ancient texts of the Old Testament is that the earliest copies of them are found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a few other places. What we find amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls are different versions of the same Biblical books. So by the time of these texts the stories of the Old Testament had been through centuries of theologising. How much of these stories was history and how much was theology? It is fairly easy to show how stories about spiritual events in Jewish lore grew over time.
With the New Testament it is different. The Gospel stories about Jesus were put together within decades of the events they portray; and the source materials that went into those Gospels are even earlier.
So what are we to do with those accounts in the New Testament where Jesus appears to acknowledge Old Testament characters like Moses? I think that Jesus tended to meet people where they were at. If Jesus’ countrymen believed that Moses was the authority “behind” the Old Testament, Jesus did not challenge that. (But he did challenge Moses, eg, the antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount). What about the Transfiguration? It was a vision, according to the Gospel authors. A representation of the Law and the Prophets, prior to the new “exodus” that Jesus was to accomplish by his death and resurrection. (The word in the Greek text often translated as Jesus’ death is actually the Greek word for exodus.)
So what about the New Testament? As an example, take the account of the two disciples on the Emmaus Road. The risen Jesus walks incognito beside them until they recognise him in the breaking of the bread. A great bit of theologising there about the presence of Jesus whenever we break bread together. But was it just theology without any history? The story of the two disciples on the Emmaus Road concludes not with the breaking of the bread, but with the appearance of the risen Jesus to the disciples. Jesus invites them to touch him and see that he is no ghost. The question for the historian is not what the historian believes him or herself, but with what the earliest Christians believed. Almost overwhelmingly, most historians agree that the earliest Christians believed that the risen Jesus was a physical presence. Historians cannot tell you what actually happened. They can only tell you what people who were there believed had happened.
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I wonder if there are linguistic clues that may shed some light - would 400 years of captivity in Egypt have altered the Hebrew language? Should we see some parallels in the Egyptian/Hebrew of the time?
Interesting question, Stacey. The existence of Egyptian names amongst men of Hebrew lineage (Moses, Hophni for a start) suggests some intermingling. The discovery of an abecedary with Semitic characters on it – found on west bank of the Nile and dated to about 1500 BCE is interesting since this suggests Semitic people living in Egypt at the time…plus some cultural details.
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Very good ideas, gregorite. It could also be that Jesus spoke of Moses as real because He (Jesus) knew that Moses had existed. As you would say, this is through the eyes of faith…but no different, in this case, than believing things about other men and women of ancient times – for whom there may be no more evidence than in these biblical stories. But I like some of your thoughts.
Yet another possibility is that Moses was a real figure, but much of what is attributed to him is actually not his. We know that Moses delegated his role of judging the people to others, (e.g. Deuteronomy 1:13-17 and Exodus 18:13-26). So many of the case laws were declared not by Moses, but by others appointed to the task. In fact, those case laws have established precedents for judgements to this day. These judgements will appear in the Law of Moses and not actually be his judgements, but those of others. So does the appearance of Moses in the Transfiguration scene represent Moses the historical figure; or Moses the giver of the Law? When Jesus says, “Moses said of old …”, is this actually the historical Moses, or the Moses who is a symbol of the Law? I think Jesus would have worked with the people’s conception of “Moses”, and so the use of such attributions as evidence of an historical Moses, just like the one on the Pentateuch, is on shaky ground.
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Gregoreite…I think those are some good questions. A judge in a courtroom today is not literally himself/herself the embodiment of the U.S. Constitution. But he/she is schooled in it, abides by it (as he/she sees it and is accountable if wrong), is sworn to uphold it. Moses himself would probably have said “his” laws were from God not just from him. Thus he, like those he appointed, was stewarding what he was given, or said to have been given. But yes, I am sure the biblical books simplify the process of administering those laws. And, as you and many others have noted elsewhere, Moses did not likely describe his own death — and he had sources for his writings — census accounts, oral traditions, possibly more. . He was a child of the kap and no doubt literate, so just a s capable of having penned (or dictated — or had things dictated to him) some or most of what is attributed to him ( or he edited existing documents).
The appearance of Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration event may have been less an example of Jesus working “with the people’s conception of ‘Moses’” than a clarification of Elijah… The pericope is primarily focused on the personality of Elijah --though some would say both Moses and El;ijah there represented (as actual representatives) the Law and the Prophets which pointed to Jesus. The conversations were a continuation of other conversations in the particular gospel chapters in which they were found. “Who do people say that I am?” is a question Jesus asked His disciples. This was followed by their responses and then “Who do you say that I am?” was followed by Peter’s famous declaration and Jesus’ rather positive response, with the added assertion that it was not human thinking that had taught Peter this but God Himself who had given Peter knowledge of who Jesus is. The positioning of the Transfiguration event, though perhaps a day or two down the road chronologically, but in the gospels a mere couple verses “down the page” from Peter’s declaration – seems to take for granted the reality of Elijah and of Moses. This is because the concept of “Moses and Elijah as companions of the Messiah-King” was a distinctly Jewish one — see, for example. “The Jewishness of Jesus” by Peter Schafer.
Thus the Transfiguration event was much more about verifying Jesus as “the Christ of God” (as Peter had described Jesus), whose coming was expected, in popular teaching, to be verified in some way by the presence of Elijah. That is why the disciples in the Transfiguration pericope are so focused on seeing Elijah — whose presence (predicted in Malachi 4:5) Jesus clarifies in terms of equating John the Baptist with the earlier prophet.
If there is any “working with the people’s concept” here, it was the working with who was expected, by biblical tradition, to herald the arrival of the Messiah — and affirmation that that individual was indeed present…
I don’t know that Moses was necessarily a bit player in the scene. But some acceptance of historicity or “reality” seems to be part of the event – especially if the three disciples (like us, I suppose) were meant to accept the larger reality, which is that the Jesus who stood before them as a real personality – was in conversation with two known figures — both supposedly long dead but here seen “alive and kickin’” and fully aware of things–was the long-awaited Messiah, “Christ of God” (as Peter had earlier put it), “Emmanuel,” God-made-flesh…Jesus was working less with people’s conception of Moses than He was bolstering their perception of Him.
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Robin … I am going to leave aside all sorts of speculation about Moses’ literacy and the sources available to him, as speculation does not have the quality of evidence.
The question is whether or not the vision of Moses and Elijah appearing with Jesus in the Transfiguration establishes the historicity of Moses, and especially of Moses as he is portrayed by others in the Bible. So the prior question is about the purpose of the Transfiguration in the Gospel accounts. I think you are right in seeing an affirmation that Jesus is the Christ in this passage, but this is only one third of the picture. The story moves very quickly from the affirmation of Peter for his recognition of Jesus as Christ, to Jesus’ identification of Peter with Satan when Peter rejects the death and resurrection of the Messiah. This is the most shocking and therefore dramatic point in the Transfiguration story, so that is where the purpose lies. Peter’s affirmation of Jesus as the Messiah means nothing if he cannot accept the idea that the Christ will die. Indeed, the only way to follow Christ is to take up one’s cross and follow him. The Christian Faith means dying and rising with Christ.
This point about the nature of Christian discipleship is expanded as we realise that the journey to Jerusalem is a journey to the cross and thus is a metaphor, in the Synoptic Gospels, for the pathway of discipleship. If Peter cannot grasp this he cannot be Jesus’ disciple. However, Peter has a whole lot of resistance to the idea that the Christ will die; and even Jesus’ identifying of Peter with Satan does not seem to get the message across. All the way along the pathway to the cross, Peter and some of the other disciples do their best to put the idea of Jesus’ death out of their minds, as the Gospel narratives show.
Let’s stand back a little bit in order to get the grand vision of Jesus’ story in the Synoptic Gospels. Act 1 is all about Jesus’ powerful ministry in Galilee – a ministry which led to some wanting to make him king. However, on its own, this gives a false impression about the nature of the Christ and his followers. So Act 2 in the Synoptic Gospels sets out to set matters straight. The journey to Jerusalem is a metaphor for the journey of discipleship – “they followed Jesus along the way”. But the journey to Jerusalem is a journey to the cross, and thus to be a true follower of Christ one must die and rise with him. Peter, and some of the other disciples, are having great difficulty accepting this. Their vision of the Messiah is of someone who comes in power – full stop! We should not be surprised when some of the disciples, physically following Jesus along the way, ask about being given the seats of power alongside Jesus. Indeed, even in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus is being arrested, Peter draws his sword and strikes at the head of one of the arresting officers.
The message which Peter and the other disciples have to get through their head is that the Messiah will die. The message of the passage in which Peter confesses Jesus to be the Christ reaches its most dramatic moment when Jesus identifies Peter with Satan because he cannot accept that the Messiah must die. This passage is then linked to the passage about the Transfiguration where the most dramatic part occurs when God speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mar 9:7 NRS) After Jesus comes down from the mountain he continues to teach his disciples accordingly and the text tells us:
“They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” (Mar 9:30-32 NRS) Yet a third time Jesus teaches the disciples that he must die and rise, but the disciples were amazed and afraid and two of them were so clueless that they sought to secure powerful seats alongside Jesus in his kingdom. Jesus again points them to his death. (Mark 10: 32-40).
The point of the Transfiguration is God’s command to listen to Jesus about the necessity of the Messiah dying and rising. The figures of Moses and Elijah are drawn into the vision to suggest their support of this understanding. Something similar occurs in Luke’s account of the Emmaus Road experience (Luke 24). Two disciples are walking along dejected because they had thought Jesus would be the one to restore Israel. But they now have to come to terms with the fact that Jesus is dead and the Romans continue to occupy Israel. The risen Jesus, incognito, then points them to Moses and the Prophets for an understanding that the Messiah must suffer. “Moses” here has become a synonym for the Law and as the Bible itself shows, Moses himself neither gave all the laws in the “Law of Moses”, nor is he attributed with the authorship of the Pentateuch by the Bible. “Moses” simply becomes an abbreviated way of speaking about the Pentateuch.
But lest there be any doubt that the Transfiguration does not testify to the historical existence of Moses, consider the embarrassment caused to the early Church by Peter’s belief he should set up a shelter for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, then and there. The Gospel authors rush to make excuses for him.
Now in all that I have written there is no evidence that Moses did not exist, nor that he did not have a significant role in the establishment of Israelite religion. Personally I believe that he did exist, but the lines between the historical Moses and what “Moses” came to stand for in the Bible are likely to be rather blurred from an historical point of view.
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That’s a nice sermonette. We will leave that as it is, a presentation of a set of thoughts. And all very good ones.
You can get a variety of meanings out of the Transfiguration, and seeing it in various ways is helpful. “Vision”?? Well maybe that too…
But I thought the discussion was the historical truth of the Old Testament. Scholars may accept the Diary of Anne Frank as discussing experiences she and her family were having and writing about. But as for finding pottery shards (that is, the 1940s A.D. equivalent or similar) that validate everything she wrote about — they cannot and they just “accept” based on general knowledge of life in that era, that situation, the general experiences and longings of a girl that age, or whatever they might decide conformed with “common sense” or physics or local history. That is generally how it goes with a lot of texts related to past events and people.
It is the same with the discussion here of “the historical truth of the Old Testament” – that is, the larger general subject here. And for that, there is whatever can be gleaned archaeoogically. The possibility or probability of a man leaving his cushy home in Ur of the Chaldees — cannot prove he did it, but we do know, for example, of a trade route goiing the direction of Harran and that people of the general time period made such treks. This is just an example.
Moses being real — no birth certificates issued…Moses being literate (however that may be defined) is based on some broader general knowledge that Egyptian princes achieved some level of education and that he, more likely than not, received that. But no one will ever find his dead bones with a stylus or Bic Pen between his right thumb and forefinger…and so on for other things from the past—from any past event, for that matter. You can only say whether the information conforms, or does not conform, to what else is known of the habits and lifestyles of that period.
I like how you apply the events of the Transfiguration and following to the general lesson of life for those of us who claim to believe in and follow Jesus. There is a lot that individual believers can take away from these events. Peter’s behavior in response to the Transfiguration was/is human behavior. He was blown away and just stammered, was frightened and “went off his meds” (metaphorically speaking). You and I would be similarly blindsided by such a thing —perhaps moreso… After all, we are children of the Englightenment and cannot believe what we cannot scientifically verify --thus, we might actually behave in a worse manner than Peter!! … My point, of course, was that Peter and the other two disciples somehow believed-- and accepted – they were seeing real people talking to another real person (Jesus). How they knew — were they wearing name tags? does Moses look like Charlton Heston so it is immediately obvious? (I am being silly here – Heston was not born yet)… That is, there is more to the story than the thumbnail Gospel sketch.
The fact that there is more to the story makes it possible for us to discuss in detail forever and ever…
But it seems a bit less likely that their name tags said “representing the Law” and more likely that these were the actual ancient people who spoke with Jesus, who was the actual member of the Trinity — than to simply think this was a “vision” in some ethereal,non-real sense. The expectation was for Elijah — the real thing – to herald the arrival of the Messiah — the real thing — and not a representation…That is, this is what was being looked for. If a “real” Jesus was chatting with a “real” Elijah, what does that make Moses?
At any rate, you do have nice analogies here and that is all fine with me. They are all great.
As for the issue of the historical truth of the Old Testament — I suppose we all may look for different “evidences” in that regard. I just read reviews of a newly constructed museum about biblical text history — something I will happily visit on vacation this summer. I noted that some reviewers hated the place because they saw rooms filled with what they called broken pottery. They seemed to not know why the pottery was there. Instead, they wanted a dramatization of the Life of Christ. Others — like me — will be pleased to see this “broken pottery”. This should serve as an ever-present illustration of the disparity in people’s expectations. And we all have them. What works as evidence for one person, may not for another…C’est la vie!
So have a great Sunday…gorgeous weather outside.
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I believe I remember Hoffmeier and Kitchen mentioning some interesting fact about the historicity of the Exodus, namely that Egyptologists believe in its historicity to a significantly larger degree than archeologists in Israel. Do whatever you want with that statement, but neither side can reasonably expect archeological traces from a nomadic group several thousand years ago.
Thanks, Dominick. I have read Hoffmeier and Kitchen too — along with others. And yes, they do have some interesting references on the likelihood of the Exodus. Hoffmeier has spent some years participating in the excavation of one such site along the purported Exodus route. I read somewhere else long ago and far away that the Exodus route described in the biblical text was —for many millennia – a familiar route, known in even more recent times among people who participated in certain commercial ventures (legitimate ones). Durant, I believe, also mentioned it. I also read a book published in the early 1930s— think about 1932 – by a British military man who had served as some colonial administrative official in that region. His account of the Exodus and of Moses is interesting. While a skeptic — that is, he seemed to think Moses was a real person but also a long-ago charlatan — he led his readers about the region of the Sinai wanderings with ease and without much questioning. His only approach was to suggest that Moses was fooling gullible people into thinking God was performing miracles, etc. This — as with everything else – moves us into the realm of presuppositions. It may be part of our Enlightenment heritage to be skeptical. But people were not stupid in 1200 B.C.E. either – or more easily hoodwinked than we are. We just, as a result of the mentality of our time, have other presuppositions.
But thanks again…
If referring to the museum of the Bible in D. C., we went there this spring, and I found it very well done and interesting. We had our granddaughter with us so did not linger much on the exhibits, but could spend a half day or more there easily. I was not real impressed with food in the restaurant on the top floor and it was pretty packed and slow, so may not want to plan lunch there if your schedule permits.
Did they serve Egyptian fish,cucumbers, leeks, lentils, and garlic such as the Israelites yearned after in Numbers 11:5, or some other sort of biblical food?
Thanks, Phil…appreciate the reference and maybe will eat elsewhere!!
And I like Randy’s question but doubt that the did it that way…
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