In the prologue to his Gospel, John states that the law was given through Moses, grace and truth through Jesus Christ. The verse sets up some of the tensions which were to come to characterise Christian understanding of the figure of Moses. It both accepts his significance as a recipient of the law at Mount Sinai and the author of the Pentateuch, but also indicates the superiority of Christ and by extension of the Christian revelation to that of the ‘Mosaic dispensation’. How Christians negotiated that tension, itself a synecdoche of the difficulties that they encountered in interpreting the whole of what they called the Old Testament, is in part the subject of this volume.

The essays, as one would expect, given the length of time they seek to cover, range widely. Daniel Boyarin, in what was the opening paper at the 2012 conference on which the volume is based, produces a typically thought-provoking piece in which Jesus’ comment in Mark vii.15 about what comes out of one being more important than what goes into one is shown to be entirely consonant with biblical law, and thus no rejection of the kashrut laws, but simply an extension of Jesus’ dispute with the Pharisees about the authority of their own oral law, which the verse contradicts. Jesus, then, contrary to what became standard Christian interpretation, reflected in Paul in Romans xiv, is portrayed by Mark as a defender of Mosaic law in spite of v. 19c, which is probably an interpolation. Dulcinea Boesenberg shows how Luke in two passages in Acts (ii.22; vii.27-8), by subtle changes in his use of scriptural texts, seeks to co-opt Moses for the Christians and to indicate that non-Christian Israel is rejected. Emmanuel Nathan argues that the best way to understand Paul's engagement with Exodus xxxiv in his famous passage about the veiled Moses in 2 Corinthians iii.7–18 is to read it in relation to Paul's own life in which an aspect of Moses’s life becomes instrumental. Virginia Weyland explores the way in which in 1 Clement incidents from Moses's life become a means of constructing apostolic authority. David A. Smith helpfully compares Hebrews and 1 Clement's understanding of Moses, noting that Clement, who may not have known Hebrews, but witnesses to a shared set of biblical testimonies, presents Moses in an entirely non-supersessionary way, suggesting that attempts to divide the latter text from the Roman Jewish community, a standard practice among commentators, look at best misconceived. Richard A. Layton, in a subtle piece, shows how Stoic ideas of law have influenced Clement of Alexandria's approach to Mosaic law in which the latter points to Christ and is fulfilled by him but has an ongoing role as revealed Scripture. Michael Hollerich examines the different uses to which Eusebius puts Moses, showing how these intersect with his ideas of history, politics and his complex understanding of Judaism, seen in his interpretation of Moses as both Hebrew and Jew. Ellen Muehlenberg, in a careful examination of Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses, suggests that it is a set of guidelines for an ascetic leader based on the example of Moses, and this against the standard view that it is about individual mystical experience. Ann Conway-Jones examines Gregory of Nyssa's engagement with the tabernacle imagery as this is found in the same Life of Moses, playing up, along lines set out by Bernard McGinn, the importance of seeing Christian mysticism as drawing on the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, in which ideas of ascent to the heavenly realms play an important part. Robin Jensen looks at a series of images of Moses in Christian art from the fourth century as these relate to the stories in Exodus about Moses receiving the law, striking the rock and crossing the Red Sea. In the process she shows up the difficulty of interpreting the varied images that she discusses, not least against well-known exegetical traditions, though in the end she sees such traditions as significant insofar as they help to show how these visual images were ‘complex and suggestive rather than simple and direct’. Naomi Koltun-Fromm examines some Syriac interpretations of Moses at Sinai, pinpointing the broadly positive vision of Moses entertained by most of these authors in spite of their vision of the lawgiver's inferiority to Jesus. Paula Fredriksen discusses the dispute between Faustus the Manichean and Augustine, showing how Faustus’ dualism renders Moses a totally negative entity, and how Augustine's response to Faustus in complex ways affirms both the prophetic status of Moses and the Jewishness of Jesus in which the Law and the Gospel become identified. ‘Moses’ law does not just lead to the Gospel: the Law is Gospel.’ Lee Blackburn shows how Cyril of Alexandria's exegetical works on the Pentateuch, amongst his earliest creations, are distinctive in the negative way: ‘they interpret the law as a herald of its own soteriological limitations or so frequently construed Moses as emblematic of the salvific inadequacy of the Law’. He explains this distinctiveness partly by referring to Julian's critique of Christians in Against the Galileans where their failure to observe the law, their disdain for Scripture's words, plays a significant role, and in part in relation to his context in fifth-century Alexandria where Jewish-Christian conflict was intense. Michael Müller looks at the role of Moses in some later Christian writers of Latin epic. Sedulius, for instance, omits any reference to Moses, while Juvencus and Arator appropriate him for Christianity, while others present him as a holy man. Vadim Prozarov looks at the Christian tradition of Moses as a good ruler and its early medieval manifestation, attributing much significance to Gregory the Great's understanding of Moses as someone who united in one person ‘the vigour and discipline of governance and the ministration of piety’; and in a final wide-ranging essay, John C. Reeves looks at variant Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions relating to Moses's mysterious death as this is or is not recorded at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, interestingly exploring how this relates to Moses as a marginal figure.

All of these essays, at whose erudition and originality my passing comments have only hinted, do not, inevitably, add up to any kind of a sustained thesis. They hint at broad usage of the figure of Moses, whether polemical, typological, allegorical, exemplary, political, mystical/theological. In some senses this simply reflects the uses to which ‘Old Testament’ Scripture was put by Christians over many centuries – above all else Moses was a figure within Scripture and indeed an author of a major section of that holy collection. At one level, for Christians, Moses was a persistently ambivalent figure, not only because aspects of his life, in particular his strikingly intimate relationship with God, as exemplified in his experiences on Sinai, made him a figure not so distant from Jesus, but also because he was the giver of the law, which Christians, from the time of Paul, found themselves ambivalent about. What is perhaps most striking about these essays is how, against such a background, Moses is not generally the victim of polemic or rejection. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Faustus and Cyril appear as exceptions in this respect. True, Moses plays a role in a developing anti-Jewish ideology among Christians and he rarely stands as an exemplar of Jewish history plain and simple; but he remains a figure of endless fascination to Christians, a point which this collection richly demonstrates.