The transfiguration of Jesus: what exactly is revealed?

The third “epiphany miracle,” after the two sea miracles, is the transfiguration or “metamorphoses” (metemorphēthē) of Jesus in the presence of Peter, James, and John, on the mountain.

1. Pitre begins by noting the important parallel between the account of Jesus’ transfiguration or metamorphosis and the story of Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai in Exodus 24. Moses is told by God to go up the mountain with three “confidential friends” (Strauss), Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. They all see the numinous place where God stands, but Moses is told to ascend further to receive the stone tablets (Exod. 24:1:1, 9-14).

In the Septuagint translation, he goes up with Joshua or “Jesus” (Iēsous)—odd that!—and the cloud of God’s glory descends on the mountain and covers (ekalypsen) it for six days. On the seventh day, the Lord calls Moses from the cloud, and the “appearance of the Lord’s glory was like a flaming fire on the top of the mountain before the sons of Israel” (Exod. 24:17 LXX).

The similarities with the transfiguration story are obvious, but the significance is less so. If “the purpose of Moses’s actions on Mount Sinai and Jesus’s actions on the mountain of transfiguration are strikingly similar” (89), why are we not just saying that Jesus is another Moses?

2. Pitre has found two texts in which the garments of God are said to be brilliantly white:

I kept watching until thrones were set, and an ancient of days sat, and his clothing was white like snow, and the hair of his head was like pure wool… (Dan 7:9 θ)

And I observed and saw inside it a lofty throne—its appearance was like crystal and its wheels like the shining sun…. And the Great Glory was sitting upon it—as for his gown, which was shining more brightly than the sun, it was whiter than any snow. (1 En. 14:18-20)

He says: “This strongly suggests that Peter, James, and John’s vision of the transfiguration of Jesus’s clothing is likewise both apocalyptic and theophanic” (91). The meaning of the transfiguration scene is that Jesus is a divine figure, who “temporarily lifts the visible appearance of his humanity to give his disciples a glimpse of his invisible heavenly glory.”

Whereas other people in Jewish literature become luminous only after they have been raised from the dead (Dan. 12:6-7) or transported to heaven (T. Abr. 11:4-9), Jesus is shown to be already a divine person.

3. The presence of Moses and Elijah, in Pitre’s view, reinforces the theophanic aspect of the story. Both figures experience theophanies on Mount Sinai, in which they hear the voice of God but cannot see his face (Exod. 33:18-23; 1 Kgs. 19:9-14). But in the transfiguration story, Moses and Elijah are finally allowed to see the face of God. Jesus is not merely a heavenly being who has come to earth. “He is also implicitly identified as the same heavenly being whose face Moses and Elijah were once unable to see but upon whom they can now gaze” (93).

4. Peter offers to make “tabernacles” for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah for the same reason that the Israelites responded to the appearance of God to Moses on Mount Sinai by constructing a tabernacle to house the presence of God. However, he “does not grasp the difference between Jesus on the one hand and Moses and Elijah on the other. He seems to place them on par with each other” (94).

5. The cloud and the voice are “perhaps the most explicitly apocalyptic and theophanic” elements in the story (94). They confirm that Jesus is not just any heavenly being, he is the Son of God, whose origins are heavenly. His “secret” or “apocalyptic” identity is that he is “a divine being walking the earth” (96, emphasis removed).

My overall reaction here is that this is a remarkably weak set of arguments. Isn’t it obvious that Jesus is identified with Moses, not with the God whom Moses encounters? Isn’t it obvious that the “beloved Son” is a person quite distinct from God—and, therefore, not himself an epiphany of God? But let’s go through the details.

The controlling story of the Son of Man

In the first place, again, Pitre fails to take the narrative context into account. There are several ancient Jewish backgrounds that could be brought to bear on the passage, but the context in the Gospel exerts a crucial selective pressure.

The metamorphosis of Jesus comes directly after the affirmation that Peter is correct in affirming Jesus as the messiah, the one who will deliver and lead Israel, the warning that the Son of Man must suffer, and the promise that he will vindicate his persecuted followers when he “comes in the glory of his Father” (Mk. 8:27-38). Within the lifetime of some of the disciples, the kingdom of God will come “in power” (9:1), which is exactly the point that Jesus will make to the council: he is the messiah, the Son of the Blessed, and they will live to see “the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mk. 14:62).

The metamorphosis, therefore, is a revelation of the glory that the Son of Man will receive from the Father and which will become manifest to Israel at some point in the future, within a generation. He will be seated at the right hand of Power and will be bathed in the glory of the enthroned Ancient of Days. It is in this specific regard that he will be differentiated from other heavenly beings. No angel is seated at the right hand of God to judge and rule, only the Son of Man who suffered many things at the hands of an “adulterous and sinful generation” of Jews (8:38).

We were eyewitnesses of his majesty

No doubt 2 Peter stands at some remove from the apostle, but someone saw fit to attribute to Peter this reflection on the significance of the transfiguration:

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honour and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Pet. 1:16-21)

In the context of the letter, the passage has a clear forward-looking orientation. What they saw was not the concealed original divinity of the divine Jesus but a manifestation of the “honour and glory” that he received from God the Father. The “prophetic word” may be the divine affirmation about the beloved Son, some contemporary prophetic statement associated with it, or an Old Testament prophecy understood to refer to the outcome which the writer has in view, when the day dawns, when “the day of the Lord will come like a thief,” etc. (2 Pet. 3:10). So the whiteness of Jesus’ garments equates to the glory that is bestowed on him by God at that moment in anticipation of the glorious kingdom that the Son of Man would receive in the future.

The three heavenly figures

The Son of Man narrative, therefore, fully accounts for the context and details of the transformation of Jesus’ appearance. But we also have to explain the presence of Moses and Elijah.

The story of Moses’ ascent of Mount Sinai with three associates must be relevant, and we have seen already that Mark thinks of Jesus as a successor to Moses—one who will lead his people on a journey of redemption and be a shepherd to them. Elijah is the type of the prophet with whom Jesus is sometimes mistakenly identified (Mk. 6:15; 8:28). Quite possibly they are both regarded as heavenly figures. 

They appear initially as peers, in casual conversation together with Jesus—that hardly sounds like they are looking on the face of the living God; and as Pitre observes, Peter proposes to treat them equally. Notice, too, that he addresses the radiant Jesus as “Rabbi.” But the voice from the cloud sets Jesus apart as the beloved Son, which takes us back to Jesus’ baptism: ‘and there was a voice from the heavens: “You are my Son, the beloved, with you I was well pleased”’ (Mk. 1:11*).

This, I think, identifies Jesus with the servant of Isaiah 42:1: “Jacob is my servant; I will lay hold of him; Israel is my chosen; my soul has accepted him; I have put my spirit upon him” (Is. 42:1). He is the Son who is sent to the derelict vineyard of Israel to do the work of a servant and demand the fruit of righteousness. But he is rejected, becoming the Son of Man who suffers and who will receive glory from the Father. Luke adds, significantly, that Moses and Elijah are talking with Jesus about “his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Lk. 9:31).

The metamorphosis, therefore, is apocalyptic in that it reveals the future glory of the Son of Man, and theophanic inasmuch as this future glory is devolved from the throne of the Ancient of Days. That is, the future rule of Jesus over the nations of the Greek-Roman world—what we have come to know as Christendom—will express or reflect the glory of the God of Israel.

Bart Ehrman was right

Pitre concludes the chapter with a quotation from Bart Ehrman, who argues that the earliest sources did not take the epiphanic miracles as signs that Jesus was God. “They were the sorts of things Jewish prophets did. Jesus simply did them better than anyone else” (107).

Pitre thinks he has shown that Ehrman is wrong. It seems to me, however, that Ehrman is closer to the truth. What is revealed in these “apocalyptic” narratives is not the underlying divinity of Jesus but the exceptional authority that he has received and will receive as the Son of Man—as the leader like Moses, the Davidic king, the servant-Son, who is rejected by the Jerusalem elites and executed by Rome.