It is said in Matthew's account of the transfiguration that Jesus took Peter, James, and John up into a high mountain "and was transfigured before them." The record continues, "And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking with him."
Moses and Elias had left the earth scene hundreds of years before that time, and it is to be presumed that after their departure they continued to progress in their understanding of the true facts of being. For this reason, according to the teachings of Christian Science, it would have been impossible for them to have returned to a material place or to a finite sense of things. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes in the chapter called "Christian Science versus Spiritualism," in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 74,) "In Christian Science there is never a retrograde step, never a return to positions outgrown." On the same page she says, "No correspondence nor communion can exist between persons in such opposite dreams as the belief of having died and left a material body and the belief of still living in an organic, material body;" and she continues, "The so-called dead and living cannot commune together, for they are in separate states of existence, or consciousness."
It seems fairly obvious to those who view the transfiguration in the light of Christian Science that Jesus was at that time so exalted spiritually that he reached the altitude of thought where he was able fully to realize the omnipresence of divine Mind, and this realization removed the barrier of finite time and space. Thus it will be seen that Jesus lifted his consciousness to the level on which Moses and Elias dwelt rather than that those prophets descended to a finite, material level.
