Moses and Christ

Michael Hollerich, who has done some superb revisionist work on Eusebius of Caesarea, explains in a 1990 article from Church History that Eusebius employed a “similar situation” form of typology that focuses on similarities rather than differences between type and antitype, and draws out the similarities in great detail. He summarizes Eusebius’ discussion of the parallels of Moses and Christ:

“The parallelism is quite close, except that Jesus worked on a worldwide scale by spreading the gospel of monotheism and the godly polity to the gentiles. Jesus and Moses, Eusebius continues, agreed substantially in their teaching on the origin of the world, the immortality of the soul, and ‘other doctrines of philosophy.’ Furthermore, they both authenticated their proclamations with miraculous works. Moses liberated the people from slavery in Egypt; Jesus Christ summoned the whole human race to freedom from their ‘Egyptian’ bondage to idolatry . . . .”

“Moses promised a holy land and a blessed life for those who kept his laws; so did Jesus when he promised the meek that they would inherit the earth, meaning a heavenly country. Besides these, Eusebius notes, Jesus performed other works which were greater than those of Moses and yet resembled his, such as fasting forty days, feeding a hungry people with miraculous bread, leading the people safely through the sea (matched, ‘only more divinely,’ by Peter’s walking on water), calming the waters, being transfigured before their followers, cleansing a leper, commandeering the finger of God (Moses for the writing of the tablets of the Law, Jesus for exorcism), and lastly the ignorance of Moses’ death or burial, said to resemble the lack of witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection into the divine. Throughout this litany of sixteen distinct parallels, while routinely saying that Jesus’ deeds were grander in scope and power, Eusebius is at pains to demonstrate their essential resemblance, even to the point of equating the anonymity of Moses’ death with the absence of witnesses to the Resurrection.”