Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Musa, and the Prophet the Three Faiths Share

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Musa, and the Prophet the Three Faiths Share

Moses is the rare figure the three Abrahamic traditions all hold as central, and each reads him toward its own concerns.

In Christianity he is the giver of the Law that the New Testament sets in a relation, of fulfilment, of contrast, or of both, depending on the writer, to Jesus. Matthew shapes Jesus as a new Moses, delivering teaching from a mountain; the Gospels place Moses beside Elijah at the Transfiguration, representing the Law and the Prophets; and Paul argues at length about what the Law can and cannot do.

In Islam he is Musa, and he is named in the Quran more often than any other prophet. The Quranic Musa confronts Pharaoh, receives revelation at the burning bush, is given the Tawrat (the scripture Islam associates with him), and leads his people out of Egypt, a narrative broadly parallel to the biblical one but told for its own purpose, as a sign of God's deliverance and of Pharaoh's arrogance. One striking episode has no biblical parallel: in Sura 18 Musa journeys with an unnamed servant of God, traditionally identified as al-Khidr, whose baffling acts teach him the limits of human understanding.

That the same prophet anchors the law of Judaism, prefigures the teacher of Christianity, and is the most-mentioned messenger of Islam is a fact about the shared descent of the three, and a reminder that holding a figure in common has never meant reading him the same way.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.