The Transfiguration of Christ

Abstract

This thesis will argue that the senses and emotions in Matthew 17:1-9 play a key role in communicating the message of Christ’s transfiguration and the believers’ transformation in a holistic way, and stress the positive role of embodied and sensory experience in contemplating the transfiguration narrative. This thesis seeks to shed more light on the important role played by all human senses and emotions in perceiving Christ and his messages posed by the Gospel. Human sense and emotion show the depth of our embodied experience of God. It will demonstrate how Matthew’s transfiguration narrative brings vivid, holistic, and positive messages to readers in a way that can be very powerful in its effects on their ways of contemplation and transformation. In Matthew, the extraordinary event of the transfiguration is described by the means of the concrete, sensory, emotional experiences of the characters.