Bible Review

Midrash Shohar Tov, which is the midrash on Psalms. See the midrash to Psalm 43.

It should be noted that the Messiah is only referred to in the allusion to Isaiah 42:1.

The best discussion of the rabbinic passages dealing with Elijah and the Messiah remains that of Louis Ginzberg, An Unknown Jewish Sect (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1976), chap. 6 (reprint). On page 212, he lists 14 places where Elijah will come to resolve halakhic doubts. On page 242, he discusses the sources in which Elijah and the Messiah are mentioned together.

Although the rabbis recorded their ideas in writing after the first century, it can sometimes be shown that these ideas were in circulation hundreds of years earlier. In the case of the Transfiguration we deal with here, as in many other gospel traditions, it can be shown that rabbinic literature preserves material that New Testament writers later used.

The term synoptic, from the Greek for “seeing together,” refers to the fact that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke share so much material that when they are printed in three parallel columns, their correspondences can be “seen together” at a glance.

This was already discerned by Karl Elliger in Studien zum Habakkuk-Kommentar vom Toten Meer (Tubingen: Mohr, 1953).

See Shemaryahu Talmon, “Oral Tradition and Written Transmission, or the Heard and the Seen Word in Judaism of the Second Temple Period,” in Jesus and the Oral Gospel Tradition, ed. Henry Wansbrough (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 121–158, and “Die Gemeinde des Erneuerten Bundes von Qumran Zwischen rabbinischen Judentum und Christentum,” in Zion-Ort der Begegnung, ed. Ferdinand Hahn et al. (Bodenheim: Athenaum Hain Hanstein, 1993), pp. 295–312.

George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927), p. 307.

See Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner, Judaism in the New Testament (London: Routledge, 1995), p. xviii.