Book Notes

The New Moses: A Matthean Typology

Dale C. Allison, Jr. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 412 pp., $25

Just as Christians model themselves on Jesus and look to his authority as a basis for their lives, so Jews in the first century, including the author of the Gospel of Matthew, looked to Moses as leader, intermediary with God, teacher, prophet and hero. Though Christian interpreters have often denied or downplayed parallels between Moses and Jesus in order to protect Jesus’ status and uniqueness, Allison reviews in great detail all the allusions to Moses in Matthew and in biblical and early Jewish literature. His approach allows the reader to see the Bible as a whole, appreciate the dependence of the New Testament on the Hebrew Bible and see the symbolic imagination of an early Christian author making sense out of God’s activity and self-revelation in the lives of Israel and early Christians. Allison claims that the author of Matthew was addressing different levels of readers, and though some of the connections among passages are intricate and scholarly, so is Allison himself.

Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship

Marcus J. Borg (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994), 224 pp., $16