Suddenly, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him. (Matthew 17:1-3)

Before we move on from the Transfiguration, I want to pause and dive further into the implication of this wondrous fact — that Moses and Elijah appeared on the mountain, talking with Jesus.

There’s great mystery to this moment, and I’m not going to unpack it all. But the appearance of these two giants of faith on Mount Tabor has had special relevance for the church throughout Christian history, and it still does today.

Elements and Allusions

Even had Moses and Elijah not been present, what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration would have made any thoughtful Jew in the first century think of them. Mountaintops were central to both their stories.

Moses first encountered God, burning in a bush, on a mountain. He led the people of God out of Egypt to Mount Sinai, where they were first constituted as a nation, and communed with God on the mountain — in fire and in cloud. Moses’s face shone with God’s glory, and it was while he was hidden in a mountain crevice that, in some inexplicable way, he physically caught sight of God passing by.

Elijah is also specially connected to mountains. He called down fire on Mount Carmel and defeated the prophets of Baal there. Later, on the run from Queen Jezebel, he encountered the presence of God outside of a cave on a mountainside, where he found that God was present not in a storm, in a raging fire, or in an earthquake, but in “a still small voice” — or as other translations have it, “a gentle whisper.”

All of these elements, the mountaintop, fire and cloud, the shining face, the voice — they all come together in the Transfiguration story.

Luke adds a detail that Matthew doesn’t — he tells us what they were talking to Jesus about. Most English translations say they were speaking with him about “his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31, ESV). But the Greek is more explicit in its Mosaic connotations: they were speaking of Jesus’s exodus.

Triumph Over Death

Along with all these mountaintop connotations, the presence of Moses and Elijah also says some important things about death, and specifically about God’s sovereignty over it. First of all — they aren’t dead. In this moment, they aren’t even absent. Two men who lived approximately 1400 and 800 years before Jesus and his disciples stood on that mountain and talked to the Lord, alive, active, and inexplicably recognizable.

The Church Fathers who believed the Transfiguration was a foretaste of the resurrection, meant to give the disciples courage in the face of Jesus’s coming sufferings and death, believed that in part because of Moses and Elijah’s presence. How better to encourage someone that death isn’t the end than by showcasing the ongoing life-in-God of supposedly dead people?

That’s not to say Moses and Elijah should be taken as a straightforward example of “what happens after we die.” They probably shouldn’t be, because both men had a strange relationship with death.

Elijah didn’t die; he was caught up bodily in a fiery chariot and carried into heaven. Moses died, the book of Deuteronomy is clear about that, but he did so alone, way up in the mountains of Moab somewhere, and the people of Israel never found his body. Deuteronomy says the Lord buried him! Jude, in the New Testament, alludes to a conflict between Satan and the archangel Michael over Moses’s body, which reflects a tradition recorded in an intertestamental book called The Assumption of Moses. That book is missing its critical parts and so can’t tell us a lot about what the Jews believed to have happened. But the title gives it away: a tradition existed that Moses’s body was assumed into heaven, much as many Christians have believed about the body of Mary, Jesus’s mother.

Whatever exactly happened to Moses, both men are clearly special cases. But their appearance on Mount Tabor does tell us that humans can live, as humans, recognizably themselves, and in some respect in their bodies, after death or departure from this world.

In neither case was this resurrection, like Jesus’s resurrection would be. But it clearly did declare the lordship, and the victory, of God over death — and by extension, the victory of his faithful servants over it.

The Witness of Moses and Elijah

It’s that last point, though, that I want to zero in on — the role of Moses and Elijah as servants of God. Whatever else their appearance means, there is no question that they represent more than just themselves.

Moses, of course, was the Lawgiver, constituting the people of God by law and covenant. Elijah was the paradigmatic prophet, calling the people back to God in a time of great unfaithfulness. They are not just any two men: they are the personified representation of “the Law and the Prophets” — the writings we today call “the Old Testament.”

A little over a hundred years after the resurrection and the going forth of the gospel into the world, a man named Marcion began to teach that the God of the Old Testament could not be the same as the Father of Jesus Christ (and therefore the God of the New Testament). He viewed the Old Testament God as angry, punishing, and jealous, while the New Testament God was compassionate, merciful, and loving. Unable to reconcile the two, he split away from the church and began gathering disciples. They formed a new “church,” a Marcionite church that lasted for about 300 years.

Marcion compiled a book called Antitheses, which listed Scriptures from the Old and New Testaments side by side to show how they were (in his view) incompatible. He gutted the New Testament Scriptures, viewing most of them as “too Jewish,” that is, too rooted in the Old Testament. He retained only Paul and some of Luke, but he removed parts of Paul’s letters too, on the grounds that they were later additions made by someone else.

(As a sidenote, it was Marcion’s adventures as a freelance Bible redactor that forced the Christian church to clarify which books it accepted as Scripture and which it did not, thus giving us the New Testament canon.)

Why go into all of this? Because while Marcion and his church are long gone, his ideas are not. They recur frequently, all too frequently even among Christians. We like Jesus, and the kinder, gentler God we imagine he presents, but we want to reject the God of the Old Testament, along with his rules and his wrath. How often we do hear “Well, that doesn’t apply to us. That’s the Old Testament!”

Frankly, this kind of position suggests we haven’t paid a lot of attention to the actual words and actions either of Jesus or the Old Testament. And yes, the change of covenants between Old and New do require us to read some Old Testament Scriptures with nuance and careful understanding. That’s a lot of what Paul spent his time doing — navigating the relevance and applicability of the Old Testament.

But if we imagine that we can divorce the two, that we can listen to Jesus without listening to the voice of the Old Testament, that the Law and the Prophets are without relevance to us who are in Christ, then why did Moses and Elijah appear on the mountain? Why, on the eve of Jesus’s suffering, death, and resurrection, did the disciples see the Law, the Prophets, and the Son of God all in conversation with one another?

One of my primary goals with this series on Matthew has been to show just how deeply rooted in the Old Testament the story of Jesus, and indeed all of the New Testament, truly is. The Old Testament is the garden from which the New Testament grows, and we cannot truly receive or understand one without the other. The New Testament finishes what the Old Testament begins, but aren’t beginnings just as important as endings? Without one, you’ll never have the other.

For the disciples, and for the earliest church that came after them, the appearance of Moses and Elijah might not have provoked thought on this particular point. After all, they had no doubts whatsoever about the importance of the Old Testament Scriptures. No disciple of Jesus had written a single word yet. For the earliest church, the Old Testament was the Bible. Whenever they proclaimed that something had happened “in accordance with the Scriptures,” it was the Old Testament Law and Prophets they meant. Their faith was Jewish, rooted in the history and writings of Israel. And this value and emphasis on the Old Testament continued. Just a glance at church writings over the first two hundred years will show how deeply the early church engaged with the Old Testament and how greatly they valued it. They knew that just as Christ was key to understanding the Old Testament, so the Old Testament was the key to understanding Christ.

Today, despite the work of Marcion and many other like him throughout history, Jesus still talks with Moses and Elijah. The voices of Old and New Testaments still sing in chorus with one another. The Law and the Prophets remain as witnesses to the being, the righteousness, and the passionate love of God. The coming of Christ does not mean we no longer need them. Rather, it means that we can enter into them fully, with the veil over our faces removed, seeing the glory of God.

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This is Part 256 in a series on the Gospel of Matthew, which you can access here. Unless otherwise marked, quotes are from the Holman Christian Standard Bible.

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