After six days in Caesarea Philippi, Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a “high mountain.” This resembled the significant mountain ascensions recorded in the Hebrew Bible: Moses had ascended a high mountain with a group of seventy elders; Elijah also ascended a mountain with Elisha. These stories were common knowledge among Jews and carried significance for being encounters with God that non-prophet bystanders witnessed.
The prototype for Jesus’s transfiguration episode was that of Moses in Exodus 24 when he ascended Mount Sinai with Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. In Jesus’s story, Jesus replaces Moses; Peter, James, and John replace Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu; and the disciples replace the seventy elders. Exodus 24 describes Moses ascending further than the rest after a cloud covered the mountain, and God’s glory having the appearance of a consuming fire, and Moses entering the cloud and remaining there for forty days. Just before ascending the mountain, Moses and the elders made an altar and twelve pillars, one for each tribe of Israel.
The pericope of the transfiguration mentions Jesus’s raiment becoming glistening and “white as snow” and a cloud overshadowing Jesus, Peter, James, and John. When the three noticed Jesus speaking with Elijah and Moses, they became afraid and didn’t know what to say. Peter apparently thought of Abraham who was visited by heavenly messengers and made tabernacles/shelters/tents for them. He suggested they make a dwelling each for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses. And then a voice came out of the cloud saying, “This is my beloved Son: hear him.” Suddenly, Elijah and Moses were gone, and they saw themselves alone with Jesus. As they descended the mountain, Jesus admonished Peter, James, and John to tell no one about what had happened until after “the Son of man were risen from the dead.” Between themselves, the three questioned what that meant, especially the rising from the dead part.
If this transfiguration episode were something to do with Moses’s encounter with God on Mount Sinai and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu being witness to God speaking with Moses, then Peter, James, and John witnessed a transition for Jesus—whereas by this point Jesus had been actively teaching and healing people throughout Galilee, now he had ascended to God’s presence and been in company with Moses and Elijah. The significance of Moses and Elijah had to do with their status as the two most prophetic figures in Jesus’s time of speaking for God not just to a part of Israel or just as prognosticators of future events, but to all of Israel. Their message specifically was against Israel assimilating into occupying nations like Egypt and Assyria. Peter, James, and John probably had a sense that Jesus stood in line with Moses and Elijah, and now had for himself a superseding commission: God was with Jesus and Jesus as God’s son now had the task of fulfilling what Israel hoped for in the Son of Man.
Latter-day Saints, like so many Bible-reading Christians, have sometimes wanted to find esoteric meanings in this story. Some began to speculate in the 1800s about how the transfiguration was Jesus’s temple endowment. But that notion had more to do with an expectation of Jesus complying with certain ordinances than with the account itself. The context and the text make strong associations of the episode with something far removed from the temple setting of Jesus’s time (to say nothing of Joseph Smith’s time). The narrative conspicuously alludes to Exodus 24 and God’s invitation to Israel to hear a new gospel and become a kingdom of heaven; the people preferred to remain bound by laws and commandments, and the prophetic dynamic of hearing God’s word through a messenger persisted. Jesus, however, descended the mountain and invoked God’s word directly. He presented himself as the direct-line interface for anyone around him whereby they could hear and learn the words of God without an intermediary. For common Jews like Peter, James, and John, the experience reaffirmed how Jesus was no mere provincial prophet but rather a living revelation of God and a voice calling for God’s kingdom on the earth, not simply a reconstituted nation of Israel that would subdue their occupiers.
Elijah
Peter, James, and John continued to ask Jesus questions while descending the mountain. They asked about Elijah: why did the scribes say Elijah must come before the Son of Man should arise? Jesus explained that Elijah was expected to “restore all things” and then the Son of Man would “suffer many things and be set at nought.”
What’s curious here is how the original text says “restore everyone,” as in, restoring people. This alludes to a rabbinical teaching at the time about the loss of northern Israelites when there were two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. Jesus and his contemporaries were the Judaean survivors, still hanging together despite successive invasions by empires like Assyria, Babylonia, and Rome. But the northern Israelites had been invaded and dispersed, and their community scattered. Judaeans anticipated Elijah, the famous prophet who had single-handedly confronted Ahab, Jezebel, and the priests of Ba’al and reclaimed Israel from apostasy, would do for their time what he had done anciently. Jesus mentions what rabbis had taught, that Elijah’s work was not finished, and people, those lost Israelites, would be restored to their homelands and would live no longer as refugees abroad.
Jesus also mapped Elijah’s work onto John the Baptist, saying “Elias [Elijah] is indeed come, and they have done unto him whatsoever they listed, as it is written of him.” When we examine John the Baptist’s ministry, we can see John denying an association with Elijah. When asked point blank by a group of Pharisees, “Are you Elijah?” John replied, no. When asked, “Are you the Prophet [Moses]?”, again, no. When asked, “Are you the Messiah?” also no. And then John replied that he was the “voice crying in the wilderness” that Isaiah had prophesied about. We can see here a shift in perspective from John’s disciples and Jesus’s disciples. John’s disciples avoided the apocalyptic overtones of associating oneself with Elijah (or Moses or Messiah, for that matter). Jesus’s disciples embraced it, and even mapped it: John = Elijah, Jesus = Messiah.
We might ask, how did John fulfill the work of Elijah? From what has survived of his teachings, it’s clear John called for a return to a holy community, a lifestyle predicated on Torah but not mediated by the priests and the temple. The wilderness, he said, was where such a project could happen, as a return from exile to the exodus, when Israel lived together in the desert, led by a prophet speaking directly for God. As I posted about earlier, John was keen on wilderness purification, the miqveh practice of cleansing oneself in living waters according to the purification codes of the Torah. But John also layered new meanings onto miqveh practice: don’t do this simply to cleanse yourself like a kind of Israelite hygienic ritual, but do this as an Abrahamic covenant, a return to life in Israel. God could make stones into children of Abraham; you embrace God’s covenant and live it, not simply claim it as a status symbol.
In the context of transfiguration, Peter, James, and John had just seen Elijah physically appear, and they seem to have wondered whether this meant such prophecies of Elijah’s coming had been fulfilled. For Jesus then to ascribe a connection between John and Elijah—a connection John himself repudiated—indicated how the conventional expectations and readings of exilic prophecies had been incorrectly imagined: Elijah wasn’t going to throw down idols like he had done in the temple of Ba’al in the Kingdom of Israel during the reign of Ahab; Elijah was, intead, a wilderness prophet, a priest of miqveh purification, who called upon Israelites to prepare themselves for the coming kingdom of God. So, it would seem, John shared with ancient Elijah the prophetic style of walking into the halls of Israelite power and forcefully calling for a return to God, particularly in the context of Israelite leaders having cozied up to the worldly power of occupying nations.
The Ahab dynasty sought Elijah’s life, driving Elijah into the wilderness during a great famine, another similarity between Elijah and John. And from the wilderness, God signaled to Elijah that the time had come to make for Zarephath and then eventually to the court of Ahab and call down fire from heaven. The Herodians sought John’s life, chased him from the wilderness before eventually arresting him and executing him. Jesus apparently drew connections at least this way: what Elijah did physically, John did figuratively (or spiritually). I’m struck by a saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: “I have cast fire upon the world, and behold, I’m guarding it until it blazes.” If John had called down fire from heaven like Elijah, then that fire must have been Jesus.