Two verses about Moses in the Bible have been the subject of debate since the first century. In Exodus 33:20, God tells Moses that no one can see God and live, but Numbers 12:8 says that Moses sees the form of the Lord. How does one reconcile these two opposing statements? Did Moses see God, and who gets to decide? The Christian Moses investigates how ancient Christians from the New Testament to Augustine of Hippo resolved questions of who can see God, how one can see God, and what precisely one sees. Jaeda Calaway explains that the decision about whether and how Moses saw God was not a neutral exercise for an early Christian. Rather, it established the interpreter's authority to determine what was possible in divine-human relations and set the parameters for the nature of humanity. As a result, Calaway argues, interpretations of Moses' visions became a means for Jews and Christians to jockey for power, allowing them to justify particular social arrangements, relations, and identities, to assert the limits of humans in the face of divinity, and to create an Other. Seeing early Christians with new eyes, The Christian Moses reassesses how debates on Moses' visions from the first through the fifth centuries were, in reality, debates on the boundaries of humanity.

As it developed an increasingly distinctive character of its own during the first six centuries of the common era, Christianity was constantly forced to reassess and adapt its relationship with the Jewish tradition. The process involved a number of preoccupations and challenges: the status of biblical and parabiblical texts (several of them already debatable in Jewish eyes), the nature and purposes of God, patterns of prayer (both personal and liturgical), ritual practices, ethical norms, the acquisition and exercise of religious authority, and the presentation of a religious “face” to the very different culture that surrounded and in many ways dominated both Christians and Jews. The essays in this volume were developed within that broad field of inquiry, and indeed make their contribution to it. For, among the many issues already mentioned, there was also that of persons. What was Christianity to do, not just with Adam or Noah, say, but with Abraham, David and Solomon, the great prophetic figures of Jewish history—and, of course, with Moses? As we move, chapter by chapter, across the early Christian centuries, we see Moses gradually changing in Christian eyes, and at the hands of Christian exegetes and theologians, until he becomes the philosopher par excellence, the forerunner of Plato, the archetype of the lawgiver, the model shepherd of the people of God—yet all on the basis of a scriptural record that Jews would still have been able to recognize. Written by a range of established scholars, younger and older, many of them highly distinguished, The Christian Moses will appeal to graduate and senior students, to those rooted in a range of disciplines—literary, historical, art historical, as well in theology and exegesis—and to everyone interested in Jewish-Christian relations in this early era.