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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
Some of the articles in this collection of nine essays by one of our leading Jesus scholars (and BR columnist) are new, but most were published elsewhere over the past decade. As with many such collections, the overall structure of the book is artificial and somewhat arbitrary; Borg’s three broad divisions (“Jesus Scholarship in the 1980s,” “Issues in Contemporary Jesus Research” and “Contemporary Jesus Scholarship and the Church”) are too loose and overlapping to be of much help in guiding the reader. Each essay, however, adds something new to our knowledge of the historical Jesus and his significance for modern Christian faith. Perhaps the most important contribution Borg makes is to force scholarship to rethink the possibility of a non-eschatological Jesus, one who is fully focused on the politics, social dynamics and spiritual realities of his own day rather than on some future other-worldly utopia. This new angle of vision reveals a historical Jesus who is exciting, engaging and more relevant to our own times. Borg is blessed with clarity of thought and expression; his lucid analyses of complex issues, his concise summaries of other scholars’ contributions and his ability to relate ancient history to modern faith make this book a vauluable rresource for courses on Jesus, Christology and the Gospels.
The New Moses: A Matthean Typology
Dale C. Allison, Jr.
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 412 pp., $25