Smiddy: "Thank you David_Jay for putting the Jewish prespective on my post .I was going by memory that the Society said something to that effect that Jesus was a greater Moses but I cant be 100% sure ,"
Smiddy: "Thank you David_Jay for putting the Jewish prespective on my post .I was going by memory that the Society said something to that effect that Jesus was a greater Moses but I cant be 100% sure ,"
Hebrew 3:3 certainly featured in the JW storytelling. And, from time to time, the term 'the greater Moses,' was used to describe Jesus.
Hebrews (another anonymous document) also introduced the concepts of 'shadow' (and reality), and 'type' (and antitype) which were once so popular among the JWs (see: You May Survive Armageddon into God's New World).
Of course, the author of Hebrews was, most likely, borrowing an idea from Greek philosophy, that of Plato's "theory of Forms or theory of Ideas (which) argues that non-physical (but substantial) forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate depiction of reality."
As to Moses, I think its fair to say that its difficult to make known history fit the Biblical narrative. Of course, for an Egyptian Prince to turn against his own elite is not an abnormal situation. (Lots of historical dynasties have been overturned by dissident royalty) So the Moses of Acts 7 could be real from the viewpoint of vs 22:
"Moses was educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action."
The other details merely reflecting the mythical aspects of the Moses story, that enable Stephen (or the author of Acts) to tell a good story.
If as many scholars suggest, much of the OT was put together by the exiled elite in the Babylonian captivity we might find (in the storyies) all kinds of details that reflect notions copied from other religious backgrounds.
For example, think of these claims:
"Despite the imposing fame associated with Moses, no source mentions him until he emerges in texts associated with the Babylonian exile. A theory developed by Cornelius Tiele in 1872, which had proved influential, and still held in regard by modern scholars, argued that Yahweh was a Midianite god, introduced to the Israelites by Moses, whose father-in-law Jethro was a Midianite priest. It was to such a Moses that Yahweh reveals his real name, hidden from the Patriarchs who knew him only as El Shaddai.
Against this view is the modern consensus that most of the Israelites were native to Palestine. Martin Noth argued that the Pentateuch uses the figure of Moses, originally linked to legends of a Transjordan conquest, as a narrative bracket or late reductional device to weld together 4 of the 5, originally independent, themes of that work. Manfred Görg, and Rolf Krauss the latter in a somewhat sensationalist manner, have suggested that the Moses story is a distortion or transmogrification of the historical pharaoh Amenmose (ca. 1200 BCE), who was dismissed from office and whose name was later simplified to msy (Mose). Aidan Dodson regards this hypothesis as "intriguing, but beyond proof."
(Wikipedia entry on Moses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses )
And somehow we have to fit into this story, the very real fact that Palestine was for centuries part of the Egyptian Empire.
