Judson Greene

The transfiguration is tethered to Sinai in ways I hadn’t before appreciated.

In Exodus 24, following Israel’s commitment to be faithful to God’s covenant, Moses ascends Sinai and God’s glory cloud covers the mountain for “six days” (Ex 24:16). There Moses remains for forty days and forty nights. During that time, God has some important things to tell him, primarily concerned with the construction and furniture of an ornate tent and the outfits of its attendents. This tent is designed to be the meeting place between God and Israel. Meanwhile, Israel is busy breaking the covenant they’d just agreed to, making a golden-calf that resembles one of the gods of Egypt.

In Matthew, the transfiguration occurs “after six days” (Matt 17:1). Jesus appears to his inner circle shining like the sun. Moses and Elijah appear. Moses, one assumes, is reminded of his past mountain top experience of seeing Yahweh on Sinai. Perhaps Elijah remembers seeing fire from heaven while he had a face-off with Baal’s priests on Mount Carmel. Together, Moses and Elijah represent the Law and the Prophets, who now stand and talk with Jesus.

(Side theory, perhaps best kept to myself: It’s interesting that both Moses and Elijah appear to not have had a normal burials. Elijah ascends to heaven in a chariot of fire. Moses body… well, it’s not quite clear, but apparently it caused a dispute between the archangel Michael and the devil [Jude 9]. Since no burial place is given for Moses, perhaps his body was taken up after his death. Perhaps there is some motivation here for why these individuals appear with Jesus?)

Peter sees all of this—Jesus appearing in all his glory—and says that it is good for Jesus that he and the other disciples are there. He suggests making tents for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses—one a piece. Might the suggestion of tents (same word for tabernacle in Greek) be reminiscent of Exodus and the instructions on Sinai? God the Father interrupts Peter “while he was still speaking” in a glory cloud like that of Sinai and announces, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matt 17:5).

This response seems to correct Peter on three accounts. First, instead of suggesting what Peter can do for Jesus, he should listen up. Does the one shining like the sun need Peter’s help building a tent? This also recalls Israel’s failure to listen while Moses was atop Sinai. Second, a tent per person misses that Elijah and Moses are the supporting characters and Jesus is the star of the show. Peter, like Elijah and Moses, should listen to God’s beloved Son. Third, as God overshadowed the tabernacle in the Shekhinah glory cloud throughout the Pentateuch, now he overshadows Jesus. It is not that Jesus needs a tabernacle. He is God’s tabernacle (John 1:14). God is with humanity in the person of Jesus.

My PhD thesis dealt a lot with Hebrews 12:27. I sent my supervisor around six 10,000 word papers on it, trying and trying again to get it right.

At one point, I got interested in a grammatical question that hadn’t been discussed in scholarship much since the 1800s. I had this idea that if I resurrected the old view I might chart a new path forward on the verse in question. I was reading Bengel’s Gnomon on the Bible (1742) and Grotius’s Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (1641–1650) and Lünemann’s handbook on Hebrew (1882)—stuff that’s old enough that no one cites it anymore. The question was whether two words—ὡς πεποιημένων (“as having been created”)—attach grammatically to the previous or following clause. I talked to a random friend about it who is a Manuscripts Guy during a research library’s coffee break. He wondered if the manuscripts punctuated it, noting that most of our manuscripts of the NT are punctuated (since they’re written later—the original autographs very likely were not). So I looked up the manuscripts and tallied if they added in any punctuation before or after (I found mixed reviews). I wrote up the findings here. It appears that the old view was very unlikely in light of the manuscript evidence. No contribution here.

Now, to be clear, this question I had and the rabbit hole I fell into (my PhD path was a venerable warren) were not the sorts of questions or the sorts of answers that a more senior scholar would have pursued. There was no warrant in current scholarship to pursue the question. Scribal habits just aren’t great evidence to solve the question anyway. My supervisor said to cut all of the resulting material I’d written. Yes, sir.

But as I was looking at manuscripts, one caught my attention. I can’t really read Greek minuscules (cursive used in later Greek—I once saw a unicode font for it with around 1,000 different characters), but I noticed that one of the MSS had surrounding commentary with the words φθορά and ἀφθορά in it—“corruption” and “incorruption” (pictured). This interested me. I tracked down the passage and it turned out to be a commentary by someone I’d never heard of: Euthymius Zigabenus. He was an 11th century Byzantine monk who was a prolific commentator. His interpretation of Hebrews 12:27 made some assumptions about a Greek word that were counter to most modern treatments. For him, the word μετάθεσις meant “transformation,” not “removal.” I then looked at all the church fathers and later Greek interpreters I could find and they appeared to make a similar assumption—though the case wasn’t iron clad. I then did an thorough analysis of μετάθεσις in a corpus of 25 million words plus papyri and inscriptions. Applying cognitive linguistics to lexicography, I demonstrated (in my view) that μετάθεσις cannot mean “removal” which is how it is almost always translated by modern bibles and scholars. “Transformation” is a much better option in context. That led me to a new reading of Hebrews 12:27 that is likely the most significant contribution of my PhD thesis (alongside some stuff about Platonic and Valentinian cosmology).

That is to say, the journey to the new contribution was the opposite of what one could have charted out ahead of time. AI would never have referenced any of the materials that I was interacting with. Indeed, it would have told me it was a poor use of time to look at manuscript punctuation or obsolete monk’s commentaries. I just wonder: if I had been an avid AI user during this time, would I have gotten out of that rabbit hole too soon?