Did Moses Come Before Jesus? Yes, by About 1,300 Years

Moses came first. The Exodus he led came about 1,300 years before Jesus’ birth, or 1,450 on an older dating. The New Testament measures Jesus by Moses’ own promise: “The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken” (Deuteronomy 18:15).

The book that records that promise ends without seeing it kept. “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10). Christians read that line as a door left open. Jewish teaching reads it as a verdict: Maimonides, the great medieval rabbi, made it a principle of faith that Moses is “the father of all the prophets before and after him, all of whom were beneath him in stature.” Centuries after Moses, Peter stood in the Temple in Jerusalem, quoted Moses’ words back to the crowd, and told them the prophet had come (Acts 3:22). Stephen said the same before the council (Acts 7:37). For the first Christians, comparing Moses and Jesus was never a game of matching stories. It was the way they understood who Jesus is: the one Moses was waiting for.

Who came first, Moses or Jesus?

Moses. Scripture gives no year for him, so the date has to be worked out. One reckoning starts from 1 Kings 6:1, which puts the Exodus 480 years before Solomon began the Temple; that gives about 1440 BC. Most historians prefer a later date. Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that the store cities the Israelites built, “Pithom and Raamses” (Exodus 1:11), lay in the Nile delta, where no pharaoh of 1440 BC was building, and that the Canaanite cities fell about 1250 BC, not 1400. It reads the 480 years as twelve generations counted at forty years each; at a truer 25 years a generation, the Exodus falls about 1290 BC, under Ramses II. Jesus was born around 6 to 4 BC, so the Exodus came about 1,300 years before him on the later date, and about 1,450 on the earlier one. Most historians place Moses’ life in the 1300s or 1200s BC.

Moses lived a long life. “And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated” (Deuteronomy 34:7). No evidence outside the Bible confirms that he lived, as the biblical scholar Jeffrey Stackert notes, and Britannica’s article admits that the sources are so sketchy that “the man Moses can be portrayed only in broad outline.” Jews revere him as the greatest of the prophets and teachers, and Christians honour him as the lawgiver God spoke with “face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Exodus 33:11).

Where does the New Testament compare Moses and Jesus?

In more places than most of us notice on a first reading. Some comparisons are spelled out; others come in the very words the Gospel writers chose. These are the ones the New Testament points to:

How does Matthew tell the story of Jesus like the story of Moses?

He borrows the words of Exodus. Pharaoh had ordered, “Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river” (Exodus 1:22), and a mother hid her baby in a basket by the Nile. Herod, hearing of a newborn king, “slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under” (Matthew 2:16), and Joseph took the child to Egypt by night. When it was safe, the angel told him, “for they are dead which sought the young child’s life” (Matthew 2:20). Those are almost the words God spoke to Moses in Midian: “for all the men are dead which sought thy life” (Exodus 4:19). Matthew then quotes the prophet Hosea, “Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Matthew 2:15). Hosea had been speaking of Israel itself. In Jesus, Israel’s story is lived again, and this time it is lived faithfully.

The wilderness comes next. Moses stayed on the mountain “forty days and forty nights; he did neither eat bread, nor drink water” (Exodus 34:28). Jesus “fasted forty days and forty nights” (Matthew 4:2), and when the tempter told him to turn stones into bread, he answered with Moses’ own words to Israel: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4; Deuteronomy 8:3). Then “he went up into a mountain” (Matthew 5:1) and taught. Moses had brought the commandments down from Sinai. Jesus sat on the mountain and spoke as their Lord: “Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill… But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment” (Matthew 5:21–22).

What does John say about Moses and Jesus?

John puts it in one line near the start of his Gospel: “For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). He does not set the two against each other. The Law of Moses was God’s gift, and John hears it pointing forward. “Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me,” Jesus tells his critics, “for he wrote of me” (John 5:46).

The clearest case is the bread. After Jesus fed five thousand people, the crowd said, “This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world” (John 6:14), and the next day they reminded him that their fathers ate manna in the desert. Jesus answered, “Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven… I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger” (John 6:32–35). Israel ate the manna and died in the wilderness. The bread Jesus offers is himself.

John sees the cross in Moses too. When serpents bit the people in the wilderness, Moses set a bronze serpent on a pole, and “if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived” (Numbers 21:9). Jesus told Nicodemus, “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up” (John 3:14). We look to the one lifted up, and we live.

Why did Moses appear at the Transfiguration?

To speak with Jesus about what lay ahead. On the mountain, as Jesus’ face shone, “there talked with him two men, which were Moses and Elias: Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:30–31). The word Luke uses for that decease is exodos, a going out, a departure. The man who led Israel out of slavery spoke with Jesus about the greater exodus he was about to lead, through death and out the other side.

Then a cloud covered them, and a voice said, “This is my beloved Son: hear him” (Mark 9:7). Moses had told Israel of the prophet to come, “unto him ye shall hearken.” Now God himself pointed to that prophet, with Moses standing beside him.

How is Jesus different from Moses?

The Letter to the Hebrews answers with an image of a house. “Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant… But Christ as a son over his own house; whose house are we” (Hebrews 3:5–6). Moses served in God’s household, and served well. Jesus is the son of the house, and we are the house he builds.

The differences run through their stories. Moses’ face shone after he met God, and he covered it with a veil (2 Corinthians 3:13); when Jesus’ face shone, the disciples “saw his glory” (Luke 9:32). Moses spoke with God face to face, yet John writes, “No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). When Israel sinned with the golden calf, Moses begged God to forgive them and offered himself in their place: “if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written” (Exodus 32:32). God did not take the offer. What Moses offered, Jesus did: he gave himself for us, and at the Last Supper he took up the words Moses spoke over the sacrifice at Sinai, “Behold the blood of the covenant” (Exodus 24:8): “For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28).

And the endings differ. Moses was told he would not lead Israel into the land (Numbers 20:12), and the story of why Moses never entered the Promised Land is one of the saddest in the Old Testament. He died on a mountain in Moab, and God buried him, “but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6). The women watched where Jesus was laid (Mark 15:47), and on the third day his tomb was empty.

What parallels did later Christians find?

The early Church kept looking, and found more than the New Testament names. Around AD 315 the historian Eusebius of Caesarea gathered a long list in his Proof of the Gospel. Moses sent twelve men to spy out the land; Jesus sent twelve apostles to the nations. Moses appointed seventy elders; Jesus “chose out His seventy disciples.” Moses led Israel through the sea; Jesus walked on it. Moses gave Joshua his new name; Jesus gave Simon the name Peter. The Law was written “with the finger of God,” and Jesus cast out devils “by the finger of God.” Eusebius knew the list could go on, since “it is possible for any one who likes to gather instances at his leisure.”

These are Eusebius’s comparisons, not the Bible’s, and some are stronger than others. But he drew the same conclusion the apostles did, from the same line in Deuteronomy: no prophet after Moses was like him until Jesus came.

On the evening of the first Easter, two disciples walked to Emmaus with a stranger who asked why they looked so sad. He did not begin by showing them his hands. “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).

Related reading

• What is the Law of Moses?
• Why was Moses not allowed to enter the Promised Land?
• Did Moses go to heaven?
• How many times is Moses mentioned in the Bible?
• What is the New Covenant?
• Can Jesus be tempted?