Note 29 — Chapter X · THE TRANSFIGURATION OF JESUS, AND HIS LAST JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM.

By the transfiguration on the mount Jesus was brought into contact with his type Moses, and as it had entered into the anticipation of the Jews that the messianic time, according to Isa. lii. 6 ff., would have not merely one, but several forerunners,29 and that among others the ancient lawgiver especially would appear in the time of the Messiah:30 so no moment was more appropriate for his appearance than that in which the Messiah was being glorified on a mountain, as he had himself once been. With him was then naturally associated the prophet, who, on the strength of Mal. iii. 23, was the most decidedly expected to be a messianic forerunner, and, indeed, according to the rabbins, to appear contemporaneously with Moses. If these two men appeared to the Messiah, it followed as a matter of course that they conversed with him; and if it were asked what was the tenor of their conversation, nothing would suggest itself so soon as the approaching sufferings and death of Jesus, which had been announced in the foregoing passage, and which besides, as constituting emphatically the messianic mystery of the New Testament, were best adapted for the subject of such a conversation with beings of another world: whence one cannot but wonder how Olshausen can maintain that the mythus would never have fallen upon this theme of conversation. According to this, we have here a mythus,31 the tendency of which is twofold: first, to exhibit in the life of Jesus an enhanced repetition of the glorification of Moses; and secondly, to bring Jesus as the Messiah into contact with his two forerunners,—by this appearance of the lawgiver and the prophet, of the founder and the reformer of the theocracy, to represent Jesus as the perfecter of the kingdom of God, and the fulfilment of the law and the prophets; and besides this, to show a confirmation of his messianic dignity by a heavenly voice.32