Is Jesus the New Moses?

Is Jesus the new Moses? More specifically, how is Jesus portrayed as the new Moses in the Gospel of Matthew? Many scholars generally agree that the Gospel of Matthew links Jesus and Moses together in several different ways, and that Matthew may have written his Gospel to show that Jesus was in fact the Jewish messiah who, like Moses, gave his people God’s law (Ehrman Chapter 6). Whether it is how Jesus is presented as a great teacher or his role as a great leader, there are strong Mosaic passages and parallels in Matthew. Moses isn’t the only comparison to Jesus made in the Gospel of Matthew, but he is the most prominent (Schreiner 2019). In this blog, I will be discussing in what ways Jesus and Moses are similar through story comparisons and through the overall structure of the Gospel of Matthew. To begin, I want to address how Matthew’s way of comparing Moses and Jesus is different from other comparisons and why he chooses to go this route.

For a historian, making biblical allusions is difficult since today we are so far removed from ancient Jews and Christians. However, there are ways of measuring how probable a proposed allusion is. To begin this process, historians ask themselves ways one text may be linked to another. There are at least six ways: explicit statement, inexplicit citation or borrowing, similar circumstances, key words or phrases, similar narrative structure, and word order or syllabic sequence (Allison 19,20). These ways are used to determine when Matthew is making a comparison between Jesus and others. Drawing comparisons between Jesus is very clearly a compositional habit of Matthew as he draws explicit and implicit parallels throughout his Gospel. An explicit comparison between Jesus and John the Baptist is John 16:13-14, “Who do men say that the Son of man is? ‘And they said, ‘Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’” There are few examples of explicit comparison however implicit parallelism can be seen throughout the whole Gospel. An implicit parallelism just between Jesus and John the Baptist include how the people regarded John as a prophet (Matthew11:9, 14:5) and how the people regarded Jesus as a prophet (Matthew 21:11,26,46). Also, how John and Jesus were both rejected by “this generation” (Matthew 11:16-19). This all goes to show that Matthew constantly illustrates Jesus’ significance through comparison with others (Allison 139) and mostly in an implicit nature.

When focusing on Mosaic imagery in the Gospel of Matthew, there are no explicit references between Jesus and Moses. Matthew does not write “Jesus is the prophet like Moses” or “Jesus is the new Moses,” but that’s not to prove that this imagery doesn’t exist. As historians have come to realize, Matthew is not an explicit writer, and he rarely comes out and explicitly says what he is trying to communicate (Schreiner 2019). He has an emphasis of fulfillment in his Gospel and is known for emphasizing how Jesus fulfills prophecies and expectations from the Old Testament. Matthew has the power to write implicitly about Moses because he knows his audience. His Gospel is directed primarily towards a Jewish audience. Jews were familiar with the story of Moses, and Matthew may have expected his readers to catch onto the Moses parallels. Also, careful readers of Jewish scripture would have already been waiting for the new Moses (Schreiner 2019). We know this through scripture such as Deuteronomy 18: 15-19 where God promised the coming of a prophet like Moses. The Gospel’s thematic emphasis and audience allow Matthew to reference his parallelisms implicitly.

Many modern commentators agree that the start of Moses typology starts in just Matthew 1-2 (Allison 140). These chapters use five of the six commonly used devices in constructing typologies listed in the second paragraph. Matthew 2:15 is referenced as an explicit comparison of Jesus and Moses (Allison 140). It writes, “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” The quote is also written in Hos 11:1 with the original context of Israel’s exodus from Egypt where Israel is called the son of God (Harrington 44). This correlation stresses the continuity between Jesus and Israel. A biblical commentator, R.T France, wrote that Matthew 1-2 shows that Jesus’ story is a replay of the exodus from Egypt, a story whose hero is Moses (Allison 141). Some scholars claim that this quote makes Jesus the new Israel not the new Moses. There is reason to this argument, but seemingly every major event in Matthew 1-5 has a complement in the story of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. For example, this phrase from Exodus one, “At the time of Moses’ birth, the king, Pharaoh, gave the order to do away with every male Hebrew child,” implicitly correlates with “Near the time of Jesus’ birth, the king, Herod, gives the order to do away with the male infants of Bethlehem” (Matthew 2: 16-18). Some scholars can agree that Jesus’ experience of another exodus makes him both like Israel and Moses (Allison 142). However, the main argument however is for Moses. The numerous echoes of the Moses birth and infancy story- killing male children, conflict with rulers, divine protection, Egypt- emphasize the linking between Jesus and Moses more than Israel.

The parallels between Moses and Jesus continue deeper in chapter two. In Matthew 2:19-21 we are introduced to major parallels in Exodus: Moses and Jesus both went into exile, they remained in exile until the king seeking their lives died, the death of the king was communicated supernaturally, and Moses, like Jesus later, returned from exile with his family. When these events are listed as such, it is difficult to fight the comparisons between the two characters. However, objections do rise for scholars who look at these verses in a different light.

Some scholars claim these verses hold a greater correspondence between Herod and Pharoah or Joesph and Moses than Jesus and Moses (Allison 143). While it is true that Herod and Pharoah are both the king figures who force Moses and Jesus out of their land, and Joseph and Moses are the ones who perform the task of taking their family back to Egypt, Dale Allison, author of The New Moses, fights that the main comparison is still Jesus and Moses. Allison makes the interesting point that the clause speaking of Jesus as the object of “those seeking the life of the child” (Matthew 2:20) is directly parallel with Exodus 4:19, “All those seeking your life” where Moses is the object. To Allison and other scholars, this parallelism is huge in making the point that Jesus is the new Moses (Allison 144).

Another parallel that is central in the argument of Jesus as the new Moses is the parallel of the Sermon on the Mount. This parallel is perhaps the one of the most widely accepted parallels that mark Jesus as the new Moses. In an official publication of the Roman Catholic Church, they write, “In this Sermon [on the mount], Jesus, who is the new Moses, gives a commentary on the decalogue, the Law of the Covenant, thus giving it its definitive and fullest meanings.” The frequent association between Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount and Moses is due to how Moses received God’s commandments on Mount Sinai just as Jesus reveals God’s will and reinterprets the commandments also on a mountain (Harrington 78). In the nineteenth century, Frederic Godet, a Swiss Theologian, formed this judgment: “The mount where Jesus speaks is as the Sinai of the new covenant.” (Allison 173) Not only is there the association of the physical mountain climbed by both Jesus and Moses, but Matthew’s prologue to the Sermon uses Mosaic imagery (Schreiner 2019). His words, “he went up the mountain” directly correlate with words used to describe Moses ascending Sinai in Exodus 19:3. Also, Matthews description of Jesus sitting down to teach recalls Moses’ stance when he received God’s law on Mount Sinai (Schreiner 2019). This image of Jesus sitting also evokes his image of a lawgiver (Allison 180). Even though Moses’ stance in Deuteronomy 9:9 is debated due to translation of the Hebrew verb, evidence proving the picture of Moses sitting on Sinai was familiar in Matthews Jewish world (Allison 176).

So why is there so much debate and opposition between biblical scholars when looking at parallels? Aren’t they looking at the same text? Before going into the mosaic structure of the gospel of Matthew, I wanted to touch on the disagreements found in biblical interpretation as all of the parallels I mentioned have arguments that can be found against them. The recognition that the meaning a scholar finds in scripture is influenced inevitably by the presuppositions with which they approach it (Smart 57). Bias is inevitable and everyone, including historical scholars, have created bias from their own lived experience. When pointing out a biblical parallel, there is almost always an opposition, but the overflow, abundance, and emphasis of the overall idea that Jesus is the new Moses is widely believed and recognized by scholars, historians, and even the Church.

As I’ve discussed earlier, there are multiple ways to distinguish how one text may be linked to another. Using specific implicit or explicit parallels is a major method used in texts, but another major method is looking for a similar narrative structure. The Gospel of Matthew organizes the account of the life of Jesus as a recapitulation of Israel’s history, in which Jesus replays major historical individual roles such as Moses (Leithart 2). Dale Allison adds to this observation by creating the following chart on page 268 of his book, The New Moses:

The typological structure of Matthew has also been recognized for being analogous to the five books traditionally attributed to Moses. This structure was first recognized by English biblical scholar, J. Rendel Harris, and then rediscovered by theological historian, B.W. Bacon (Allison 295). In the sixteenth century, Harris wrote, “Matthew curbs the insolence of the Jews, as with bridles muzzling them in five books,” but Bacon is mainly acclaimed for linking these five books with the five major discourses in Matthew. These five discourses are listed as such: The Sermon on the Mount (5:1-7:28), The Missionary Discourse (10:1-42), The Parable Discourse (13:1-53), The Community Discourse (17:22-18:35), The Apocalyptic Discourse (24:1-25:46). Bacon wrote that the five discourses correspond “to the codes of the Pentateuch, each introduced, like the Mosaic codes, by a narrative section.” (Allison 294) Many scholars see this organization as an intentional allusion to the five books of Moses and another attempt to directly appeal to a Jewish audience. The typological structure could show that Moses delivered the law in five books like Jesus, the new Moses, delivered his teachings in five sections, each culminating in a major sermon (Griffin 2018).

In this blog, I of course could not touch on every argument for Jesus being the new Moses, but I find it important to list a few more symbolic connections. All of the previous parallels I listed take place in the early chapters of Matthew, and I wanted to make it clear that the parallels between Jesus and Moses do not end after the Sermon on the Mount. These are a few parallels I took from a larger list written by Tyler Griffin, a past associate teaching professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University:

• Jesus echoes Moses’s miraculous crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus by crossing the Sea of Galilee in Matthew 14.
• After leading the children of Israel out of Egypt, Moses fasted for forty days on Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:28), and Jesus fasted for forty days in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–2).
• Heavenly bread and miraculous loaves were provided in abundance for both Moses’s and Jesus’s followers (Exodus 16:16; Matthew 14:19–21; 15:32–39).
• Both were repeatedly questioned on points of the law and their authority for carrying out their missions (Numbers 12:1–2; 16:1–3; Matthew 22–23).
• Moses and Jesus both instituted a richly symbolic meal for their people to perpetually remember their deliverance from captivity and bondage (Exodus 12; Matthew 26:26–30).

Overall, the Gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus as the new Moses in an overwhelming number of ways, establishing a strong connection between the two figures. While the Gospel does not explicitly state, “Jesus is the new Moses,” it subtly weaves these parallels throughout its narrative. Matthew’s choice to employ implicit comparisons is indicative of his audience and thematic emphasis on fulfillment. The implicit parallels between Jesus and other figures, such as John the Baptist, suggest a deliberate compositional habit by the author, emphasizing Jesus’ significance. Despite some scholarly debates and differing interpretations, the overwhelming evidence in Matthew’s Gospel, the historical context, and the Church’s recognition support the idea that Jesus is portrayed as the new Moses. The typological structure of Matthew’s narrative, resembling the five books attributed to Moses, further solidifies this connection.

So, is Jesus the new Moses? Well, that claim is still only a theological interpretation. Although highly embraced, interpretations can vary. However, are both Jesus and Moses historically shown as great leaders and teachers for their people who emphasize the continuity of God’s plan? Yes. The comparison between the two helps underscore the significance of Jesus in the Christian faith as well as highlights themes of deliverance, guidance, and divine revelation found in both the Old and New Testaments. There is no denying that the Gospel of Matthew presents the reader with numerous comparisons between Jesus and Moses, but “Is Jesus the new Moses?” That question is left up to the interpreter.