Before asking what Moses and Elijah were doing with Jesus at the Transfiguration, I want to ask a prior question: What did Jewish scripture and tradition think had happened to Moses and Elijah before they ever appeared on that mountain?
Elijah presents the easier case. Second Kings does not record his death. Elijah and Elisha are walking together when a fiery chariot separates them and Elijah ascends “in a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11). Centuries later, Sirach still speaks of Elijah as one who had been taken up and who was expected to appear again at the appointed time.
Moses is stranger. Deuteronomy is explicit that Moses died in Moab. Yet his burial was unlike anyone else’s: he was buried where no human witness apparently observed it, and “no one knows his burial place to this day” (Deut. 34:5–6). Then Jude adds a detail found nowhere in the Old Testament: Michael the archangel disputed with the devil “about the body of Moses” (Jude 9).
So what became of Moses?
That question was already being asked by Jews around the time of Jesus. Josephus describes Moses disappearing when a cloud suddenly came over him, although Josephus also acknowledges that the Torah says Moses died. Philo describes Moses leaving mortal life for immortality and beginning a journey from earth to heaven. Other Jewish traditions speak of divine burial, angelic involvement, and eventually even claim that “Moses did not die.”
I would like to look first at those traditions—carefully distinguishing the Hebrew Bible, Second Temple Jewish sources, later rabbinic traditions, and still later Jewish legends—and only then turn to Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9.
My particular question is this: Is there enough Jewish background to make it reasonable to understand Moses and Elijah as existing in some transformed heavenly condition when they appeared with Jesus?
And there is a second puzzle. Peter apparently knows that the two strangers are Moses and Elijah. But Peter had never met either man, and there were obviously no authenticated portraits from which to recognize them. The Gospels tell us that the two men were talking with Jesus before Peter named them. Did their conversation identify them? Did Jesus tell the disciples who they were? Or does the narrative simply leave the means of recognition unexplained?
I don’t know the answer to either question yet. That’s what I would like to explore.
The biblical account is remarkable for what it says—and what it does not say.
In 2 Kings 2:11, while Elijah and Elisha are walking and talking, “a chariot of fire and horses of fire separated the two of them, and Elijah ascended in a whirlwind into heaven.”
The text does not say that Elijah died. It does not describe a burial, and there is no tomb. Elisha sees Elijah disappear and subsequently takes up Elijah’s mantle.
There is an interesting qualification, however. The company of prophets apparently did not immediately conclude that Elijah had permanently departed the earthly world. They proposed sending fifty men to search for him, because they thought “the spirit of the LORD has caught him up and thrown him down on some mountain or into some valley” (2 Kings 2:16). Elisha initially told them not to go. They searched for three days and did not find him (vv. 16–18).
Much later, Malachi contains the promise:
“Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the LORD comes.” (Malachi 4:5 NRSV)
And by the second century BC, Ben Sira could describe Elijah as one who “was taken up by a whirlwind of fire, in a chariot with horses of fire” and who was “ready at the appointed time” to return and perform an eschatological role (Sirach 48:9–10).
So, before we get anywhere near the Transfiguration, it seems we can establish at least this much: Jewish Scripture and pre-Christian Jewish tradition provided a basis for believing that Elijah had not undergone an ordinary death and burial and that he could appear again.
What they do not yet tell us is what sort of existence Elijah had between his departure and his expected return. Was he bodily alive somewhere? Transformed? Heavenly? Something else?
I think that is the first question worth exploring before we turn to the considerably more complicated case of Moses.
A methodological note: I have deliberately not introduced Platonism—or the concept of an inherently immortal, disembodied soul—into this discussion. So far I am trying to let the biblical texts and the relevant Jewish sources supply their own categories.
If a Platonic or otherwise Greek concept of the soul becomes necessary to explain Moses, Elijah, or the Transfiguration, we can introduce it when the evidence warrants it. But I don’t want to assume it at the outset.
Moses and Elijah both are said to have gone up a mountain to talk with God. It is not a stretch to say they all ascended the same mountain.
From this starting point, I have wondered if perhaps there was a time warp going on, that to Moses and Elijah they went up and came down, the same as Jesus did, but that their starting points in time differed.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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