THE
TRANSFIGURATION ON THE MOUNT OF SINAI
The
Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke talk about a meeting
that took place on a holy mountain between Jesus, Moses and Elijah.
Although Mount Tabor to the east of Nazareth in Galilee is reputed
as the site of this event, which has become known as the Transfiguration,
the tradition at St. Catherine confirms that it took place at
the same scene as the Burning Bush on Mount Sinai.
The area
at the foot of Mount Sinai, where the Monastery of St. Catherine
now stands, is what tradition holds to be the biblical Burning
Bush, which according to Exodus 3:2, "burned with fire, and the
bush was not consumed." This is the same spot from which God spoke
to Moses, commanding him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.
In the biblical Book of Exodus, Mount Sinai is also the spot where
God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.
The
mountain, nearly 7,500 feet high, is one of many peaks in the arid
southern Sinai peninsula that forms the wilderness through which
Moses tried to lead the Israelites on their journey to the Promised
Land thirteen and a half centuries ago. From its earliest history,
this area around the foot of Mount Sinai has drawn pilgrims from
far and wide, and became a haunt of hermits. The long tradition
of this mountain as a place of such pilgrimage is clear from inscriptionsin
Nabatean, Greek, Latin and Arabicon the rocks of Wadi Haggag,
the Ravine of the Pilgrims, a narrow valley on the major road that
led from Eilat at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba south to the Mount
Sinai area. At a meeting in 1966 Archbishop Damianos of St. Catherine's
monastery confirmed that this was the site of the Transfiguration.
Evidence
from both archaeological finds and classical authors also confirm
that this spot was the main site for early Christian pilgrims, who
came from all parts of the Roman Empire, for the first four centuries
of the Christian era. The situation changed only in AD 325 when
the Emperor Constantine, who had recently converted to Christianity,
gave Bishop Makarios of Jerusalem permission to dig up the tomb
of Christ, believed to be underneath the Temple of Aphrodite. When
it was declared that the tomb of Christ was finally brought to the
surface, pilgrims instead flocked to Jerusalem from all over the
Christian world. Nevertheless, Mount Sinai remained the central
location for Christian hermits who lived there unprotected in the
wilderness. It was the Byzantine emperor Justinian who, 1,470 years
ago, ordered the Monastery of St. Catherine to be built around the
site of the Burning Bush.
Although
the Glory of Christ appeared to his disciples in the early part
of the 1st century AD, historical Jesus lived and died 14 centuries
earlier than when his disciples claimed to have seen him. This throws
new light on events described in the New Testament gospels of Matthew,
Mark and Lukethe meeting of Jesus and Moses at the time of
what has become known as his Transfiguration: "And after six days
Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James and John, and leadeth them
up into an high mountain apart by themselves: and he was transfigured
before them."We are told that in an attempt to remove him, at least
temporarily from the scene, that Joshua (Jesus) "the son of Nun,
a young man, departed not out of the tabernacle" (Exodus 33:11).
Immediately after the return of Moses with the new tablets, however,
we learn that the Lord was inside the tabernacle of worship Moses
had built at the foot of Mount Sinai, and Moses went in and out
a number of times, serving as a go-between for his Israelite followers.
During these proceedings, when "all the children of Israel saw Moses,
behold, the skin of his face shone . . . and till Moses had done
speaking with them, he put a veil on his face. But when Moses went
in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the veil off until
he came out. And he came out, and spake unto the children of Israel
that which he was commanded . . ."(34:30,34-35). Support for the
view that this is where and when Joshua (Jesus) met his death is
to be found in rabbinical tradition, which says of the occasion:
"According to Bava Batra (121a) it is the day on which Moses came
down from Mount Sinai with the second tablets of the law." *
Up
to the 16th century AD, when the Old Testament books were translated
from the Masoretic Hebrew text into modern European languages, Joshua
was the name of the prophet who succeeded Moses as leader of the
Israelites in Egypt. Since the 16th century we have had two names,
Jesus and Joshua, which confused people into the belief that they
were two different characters. All those who spoke of Jesus in the
early history of the church recognized in this name only one person,
who (according to John 1:45) was the name "of whom Moses in the
law, and the prophets, did write."As this Jesus of history was put
to death at the foot of Mount Sinai, at the same position as the
present monastery of St. Catherine, his followers kept his memory
alive over the centuries, awaiting his return. And he did return
when he appeared in his glory to his disciples in Egypt and Palestine
in the early years of the 1st century AD.
Unlike
the confrontation with Satan, when Jesus was alone with a fallen
angelic being, the Transfiguration cannot be interpreted as symbolic
or a description of a vision. Here we have three disciples who are
said to be witnesses to a meeting between Joshua/Jesus and Akhenaten/Moses,
an event that is the only clue in the gospels to the era in which
Jesus lived.
With
the discovery of his tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, Tutankhamun
returned to us 2,000 years after the appearance of Christ. Like
Jesus he was killed for religious reasons. When he attempted to
reconcile those who believed in one God without an image, and those
who needed an image to mediate between them and the unseen deity,
he was accused of being a deceiver who tried to turn the Israelites
to worshipping other gods, and was hanged on a tree (according to
ancient Israelite law) at the foot of Mount Sinai by Panehesy, high
priest of Aknenaten/Moses.
That
an Israelite leader was killed in Sinai about this time is not a
new idea. It was voiced by Sigmund Freud, who identified Moses as
the victim. The same is true of Ernest Sellin, the German biblical
scholar. In his book, Moses and His Significance for Israelite-Jewish
Religious History, he described the killing as "the scarlet thread"
running through Israelite history. Sellin based his conclusion on
a chapter in the Book of Numbers that features Phinehas/Panehesy.
The
Commentary on Habakkuk, one of the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls,
tells us that after The Wicked Priest had killed The Teacher of
Righteousness, he (the Teacher) appeared before them. As for the
appearance of the Teacher after death, the Hebrew verb used here
may also be translated as "he revealed himself to them"indicating
a spiritual rather than an historical/physical appearance.
*
The New Jewish Encyclopedia
Ahmed
Osman
Historian,
lecturer, researcher and author, Ahmed Osman is a British Egyptologist
born in Cairo
His
four in-depth books clarifying the history of the Bible and Egypt
are:
Stranger in the Valley of the Kings (1987) - Moses: Pharaoh of
Egypt (1990) -
The House of the Messiah (1992) - Out of Egypt (1998)
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