Roger Aus sows the seed of the New Testament Jesus tradition into the fruitful soil of midrash/ haggadah and harvests a fascinating new understanding of age-old narratives. -- Peter von der Osten-Sacken, Professor Emeritus of New Testament and former director of the Institute for Church and Judaism at the Humboldt University of Be Roger Aus reads a bewildering variety of texts relating to Moses and Jesus creatively. Fresh exegetical insights and interpretive suggestions challenge conventional readings and advance the scholarly debate on disputed cruxes. This book exemplifies critical scholarship at its best. It shows how the masterly reading of Jewish, especially Rabbinic, texts can inform-and enrich-the New Testament and Christian origins. -- Carl R. Holladay, Charles Howard Candler Professor of New Testament, Emory University It's always a pleasure to read such a careful and well researched book. But it's a special pleasure to read Roger David Aus's brave and interesting setting of the Gospel narratives in their early Jewish context. It heralds a promising new direction in scholarly investigation of the Gospels which finally takes Jewish, especially Rabbinic sources seriously. -- Alan F. Segal, professor of religion; Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University There has been plenty of analysis of the resurrection and empty tomb story this past decade, and this one by Aus is the most learned and the most convincing I have come across. -- James Crossley, University of Sheffield * Review of Biblical Literature, (Rbl), June 2009 * Who was Jesus? The earliest people to ask that question were all Jews, and naturally enough they tried to answer it by ransacking the scriptures stored in their memories-not the Bible in the "original" settings of its sources so eagerly sought by moderns, but the living, multiple, open-ended word reverberating in the complex echo chamber of traditional interpretation. To re-hear some of those echoes today requires meticulous study of difficult texts-looking for deposits, often centuries later, of those traditional readings. Not many students of the New Testament have made the attempt; fewer have succeeded. Roger Aus has devoted great energy and skill to this task for many years. The result has been a series of books that seek to embed episodes of the Gospel stories in that rich haggadic matrix known to the first tellers of the Jesus tales. This latest volume brings us to the most central and generative story of all: Jesus' death and resurrection. Those who first asked the meaning of that paradox, Aus shows, turned for the formative motifs of their narrative answer to the accounts of Israel's primal hero, its First Redeemer, Moses. -- Wayne Meeks, Yale University