Jesus' Temptation in the Wilderness

• The story of Jesus'temptation is found in its most primitive form in Mark. Mark's account is stylised and can be constructed purely from Old Testament passages and what the early Christians believed need to happen to the Messiah.
• The addition to the story by Matthew-Luke is clearly mythical embroidery and cannot be historical.
• Mythologies of the surrounding cultures have stories of similar tests of their religious heroes. Which shows that such motifs are common and are expected.
• Finally we look at some liberal interpretations of such obvious myths.

Mark 1:12-13 At once the spirit sent him out into the desert, and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals and the angels attended him.

• Firstly, forty is a symbolic number, we find that the great flood lasted forty days (Genesis 7:4), that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years (Numbers 14:33) and that it took forty days to embalm the body of Jacob (Genesis 50:3).
• Secondly, the wilderness is, according to Jewish tradition, the abode of evil spirits.
• It was the contemporaneous Jewish belief that the messiah will appear in the last days of the world to take on Satan and win. Thus the passage in Mark could have simply been made up by early Christian tradition since it was expected of the messiah to overcome temptation by the evil one. [1]

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The Additions by Matthew-Luke

Matthew 4:1-11 (Luke 4:1-13) Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, �If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.� Jesus answered, �It is written: �Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.��. The devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. �If you are the son of God,� he said, �throw yourself down. For it is written: �He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.� � Jesus said, �It is also written: �Do not put the Lord your God to the test.� � Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour. �All this I will give to you,� he said, �if you will bow down and worship me.� Jesus said to him, �Away from me, Satan! For it is written: �Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.� � Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him.

It has also been pointed out by some scholars that the Old Testament quotations [a] mentioned by both Jesus and Satan agree with the Septuagint or Greek version of the Bible. [3] It is highly unlikely that this would be the version Jesus, a Galilean Jew with probably no knowledge of Greek, would quote from.

The information about Jesus fasting for forty days in Matthew is not only not found in Mark but actually contradicts the latter. For the tense of the Greek verb in Mark shows that the ministry of the angels is continuous and must have consisted of the angels supplying him with food as the angels did with Elijah (I Kings 19). [4]

The idea that Jesus fasted for forty days probably came from the Old Testament. [5] There we find that Moses fasted for forty days on Mount Sinai:

Deuteronomy 9:9 �When I went up the mountain to receive the tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you, I remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread not drank water.�

I Kings 19:8 And he arose and ate and drank and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.

Comparative Mythology

It is not asserted here that the Matthean passage was directly influenced by the above myths (although that is not impossible). The point is that the idea of a holy man being tested by personifications of evil is not a foreign one and was, in fact, rather a common one in the socio-religious environment of the evangelists and could have resulted in such myths gaining currency among the early followers of the religion.

Thus we find a simple account in Mark, which itself could be derived from contemporaneous Palestinian beliefs, being added to and expanded in the passage found in Matthew-Luke. We also find that the addition could be derived purely from the socio-religious context of the times. These in themselves made the historicity of the passage suspect. The presence of mythical creatures like Satan and angels confirms the doubt. In short, the story of the temptation in the wilderness is not historical.

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An Endnote on Liberal Interpretations of Myths

I find such explanations lame and uncritical. Nowhere in Mark, Luke or Matthew are we given even a hint that the story is not to be taken in the literal sense. Furthermore, if myth is the method to convey �spiritual truths�-what is the message anyway? Theologians find different meanings in the same passages: for instance, G.B. Caird take the third temptation (in Matthew-the second in Luke�s) to mean that Jesus rejected the worldly kingdom as it does not lead to God [7]; C.J Cadoux on the other hand argues that it was not the worldy kingdom that was rejected by Jesus but Satan�s method of attaining it-by waging war! [8] From this example it looks like �spiritual truth� if it exists, is not an easy message to decipher!

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Notes

References

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