One of the most dramatic stories in the New Testament is the confrontation between Jesus and the devil known as the temptation, or testing, of Jesus. Immediately following Jesus’ baptism by John, the devil leads Jesus from the Jordan River into the wilderness. For 40 days and 40 nights, Jesus prays and fasts. Finally, when Jesus is famished, the devil challenges him to a series of tests: “If you are the Son of God,” he demands in the Gospel of Matthew, “command these stones to become loaves of bread.” Jesus refuses. The devil then leads Jesus to Jerusalem and directs him to throw himself from the Temple, to see whether God will save him. But Jesus declines to test God. Finally, the devil brings Jesus up a high mountain and promises him that if he worships Satan, he will gain dominion over all the world. Steadfast, Jesus spurns the devil’s enticements, crying out, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
The scenario is so divorced from reality that it is easy to entertain doubts about its literal truth. It makes a highly dramatic story. But is that all there is? Did anything really happen?
Some scholars would say no. But I believe that there is a historical substratum to the testing of Jesus. Each test, I will argue, represents a real struggle that Jesus faced in his lifetime.
The earliest Christians understood Jesus to be human in the same sense that they were, and they recognized that as a man, Jesus faced very human trials: They 036attractions of wealth and power, and how he steeled himself against the natural instinct for self-preservation. As we shall see, it is this human side of Jesus that lies behind the extraordinary tale of his testing.
To reach this historical dimension of Jesus’ three tests, we must begin by looking carefully at the texts themselves. We must consider how the authors worked with earlier sources, deftly quoting Hebrew Scripture. We must determine what these quotations would have meant in Jesus’ time and how and why they were applied to him.
The testing is reported very briefly by Mark: “And immediately the Spirit drives him [Jesus] out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness 40 days being tested by Satan. And he was with the wild beasts. And angels ministered to him” (Mark 1:12–13).
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke provide much more elaborate accounts, satisfying the reader’s curiosity by giving explicit details of each test (as quoted in the sidebar to this article). The testing is not recounted in the Gospel of John.
Although Matthew and Luke include much of the same information, even a superficial reading reveals differences, the most significant being in the order of the second and third tests. Matthew and Luke agree that the first test takes place in the wilderness, but in Matthew the second test occurs at the Temple in Jerusalem and the third on a mountaintop, whereas in Luke the second is on the mountaintop and the third in Jerusalem.
Scholars generally agree that Matthew’s ordering is the more original.a Of all the evangelists, Luke exhibits the greatest interest in Jerusalem. His gospel is centered on the journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51), and in Luke’s second work, the Acts of the Apostles, the mission of the church radiates out from Jerusalem (Acts 1:8). It would be entirely in keeping for Luke to modify the order of the tests so that the climax is set in Jerusalem.1
But in so doing, Luke disrupts the careful design of the passage in Matthew, which exhibits a degree of literary sophistication that is unique in the New Testament.
As we look closely at Matthew’s text, we begin to detect a number of patterns that tend to confirm that this gospel’s version of the testing story was composed before Luke’s. On the simplest level, the three tests in Matthew take place at progressively higher altitudes. For the first test, Jesus is “led up” from the Jordan River “into the desert.” He then rises to the crest on which Jerusalem, the site of the second test, is built. Finally, the story concludes on “a very high mountain.”
Further, in Matthew’s version the devil prefaces the first two tests with the words “If you are the Son of God” (Matthew 4:3 and 4:6). In addition to sharing this formula, these tests are also thematically linked. Both invite Jesus to probe the divine intentions regarding himself: Will God provide food for Jesus and save him from bodily harm? With the third test, we move into a different domain, in which the devil demands that Jesus reject God completely. It would be difficult to imagine a more dramatic climax.
Matthew’s subtle literary skill is further revealed in Jesus’ responses to the devil’s tests. Each time the devil challenges him, Jesus answers with a quotation from the Book of Deuteronomy. When challenged to turn stone into bread in the first test, Jesus responds, “No one shall live on bread alone” (Matthew 4:4). His cryptic response might seem evasive, until we realize that Jesus is quoting Deuteronomy 8:3:
And [the Lord] humbled you and let you hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that no one shall live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
When urged to throw himself from the Temple in the second test, Jesus answers, “You shall not test the Lord your God” (Matthew 4:7), quoting Deuteronomy 6:16:
Do not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.
And finally, Jesus turns aside the devil’s third and final challenge—to worship Satan in return for dominion over all kingdoms—by saying, “You shall worship 038the Lord your God and him alone shall you serve” (Matthew 4:10), which is based on Deuteronomy 6:13:
The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by his name alone you shall swear.
This is something more than coincidence: The author of Matthew is sending a clear signal to his sophisticated readers that the key to the testing narrative lies in Deuteronomy 6 and 8, the two chapters from which the quotations are taken (in reverse order).2
In addition to these direct quotations, several words from Deuteronomy 6–8 are scattered throughout the account of Jesus’ tests. For example, the italicized words in the following passage from Deuteronomy 8 also occur in the story of the first test (Matthew 4:1–4):
You shall remember all the ways which the Lord your God has led you these 40 years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments. And he humbled3 you and let you hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that no one shall live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. Your clothing did not wear out upon you, and your foot did not swell, these 40 years. Know then in your heart that, as a person disciplines a son, the Lord your God disciplines you.
Deuteronomy 8:2–5
Matthew’s first test (4:1–4) must be understood within the context of Deuteronomy 8, which it quotes. Clearly, the gospel’s author intends to present Jesus as reliving the experience of Israel in the desert, in 40 days rather than 40 039years.b Like Deuteronomy 8, Satan’s first test of Jesus (to turn stone into bread) is concerned with the satisfaction of hunger in the wilderness. During the Exodus, Yahweh, as a faithful partner in the covenant, provides for his people. Nevertheless, the people are not content: “They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved. They spoke against God, saying, ‘Can God spread a table in the wilderness?’” (Psalm 78:18). The Israelites’ sinful craving is portrayed as a lack of trust, a type of unbelief. In Exodus, God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites, who have been complaining of hunger, that “the Lord will give you meat and you shall eat…until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you. For you have rejected Yahweh who is among you” (Numbers 11:18–20). The Israelites were believers insofar as they had followed Yahweh into the desert, but at the same time, they were unbelievers because they refused to trust him completely and to believe that Yahweh would satisfy their hunger. With this attitude, the people showed their hearts to be divided.
Jesus, on the contrary, exhibits a “whole” or “perfect heart” (compare Psalms 24:4, 78:72; 2 Kings 20:3; Isaiah 38:3 et al.). During his first test, Jesus makes no move to satisfy his hunger but waits patiently for the food that he knows God will give him when his fast is over.
In the second test in the Gospel of Matthew, the devil leads Jesus to Jerusalem and instructs him to throw himself from the Temple to see whether God will save his life in accordance with the covenant promise. Jesus is invited to demand evidence that God can be trusted, not merely to provide sustenance (as 040in the first test), but to save Jesus’ life. To fully understand the second test, we must turn to Deuteronomy 6:16—“Do not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah”—which Jesus quotes in response to Satan’s challenge.
The story of the Israelites at Massah, referred to in Deuteronomy 6, is told more fully in the Book of Exodus: Dying of thirst in the wilderness, the Israelites complain to Moses, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” (Exodus 17:3). They force Moses to perform a miracle to satisfy their thirst: Moses strikes a rock, and water miraculously gushes out. He names the site Massah (in Hebrew, “to test”) because here “the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’” (Exodus 17:7).c
Jesus, standing on the wingd of the Temple, refuses to make the same type of demand: He does not quarrel; he declines to test the Lord; he will not ask for a miracle to save him.4
The Gospel of Matthew does not locate “the very high mountain” that is the setting of the third test (Matthew 4:8). Long ago the Belgian Benedictine scholar Jacques Dupont pointed out that the mountain should not be sought in the maps of Palestine but in Deuteronomy.5 Indeed, there are striking parallels between Jesus on the mountain and Moses on Mt. Nebo (Deuteronomy 34:1–4). God “shows” Moses the Promised Land, whereas the devil “shows” Jesus all the kingdoms of the world. The devil says to Jesus, “All these things I will give you,” whereas God says to Moses “I will give” this land to Israel.
In Deuteronomy the accumulation of land and wealth constitutes a danger for the Israelites. Deuteronomy 6:13, which Jesus quotes during the third test, is part of a longer warning to the Israelites, reminding them not to forget God as they prosper in the Holy Land:
When the Lord your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors…a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you have eaten your fill, then take heed lest you forget the Lord, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by his name alone you shall swear.
Deuteronomy 6:12–13
041
The message is repeated again and again in Deuteronomy 6–8, the chapters from which Jesus’ three responses are taken: “When you have seen your flocks and herds increase, your silver and gold abound, and all your possessions grow great, do not become proud of heart. Do not then forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 8:13–14). To ignore the true God, Deuteronomy warns, is but one step away from the worship of false gods (Deuteronomy 6:14, 8:19). Later in the Book of Deuteronomy, idolatry is equated with the worship of demons (Deuteronomy 32:17; cf. Psalm 106:36–37).
Unlike the Exodus Israelites, who grew fat and turned to other gods, who despised the Lord and broke his covenant (Deuteronomy 31:20, 32:15), Jesus, in his third test, is not distracted by wealth and power; he refuses to worship a false god or a demon as he resolutely affirms his allegiance to the one true God (Matthew 4:10).
042
Jesus’ three tests were composed by an author of extraordinary subtlety. Each test is recounted with the minimum of words, but the words have been selected so skillfully that they evoke webs of associations. Readers who know sacred Scripture are led from one text of Deuteronomy to another and yet another. As they are drawn deeper and deeper into the world of the Exodus from Egypt, they are invited to compare the comportment of the Exodus Israelites with that of Jesus.
These readers recognize that Jesus, by declining to change stone into bread during his first test, proves that he is not like the Israelites of the Exodus, with their divided hearts; rather, his whole heart is devoted to God. In the second test, on the wing of the Temple, Jesus again proves himself to be unlike the Israelites, by trusting his physical well-being to God and refusing to ask for a miracle to save him from a life-threatening situation. In the third test, on a mountain overlooking all the kingdoms of the world, he affirms his allegiance to God by denying himself the very wealth and power that had tantalized the Israelites.
The sophisticated author who expended such artistry in shaping these tests would not have left the overall arrangement to chance. A very definite principle must have governed the number and types of tests. To discover this ruling principle, we must turn once again to Deuteronomy 6, where we find the most fundamental commandment of all, traditionally known in Hebrew as the Shema:6
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.
Deuteronomy 6:4–5
As we shall see, this critical passage provides the structure for the three tests of Jesus, who proved that he loved God with all his heart, all his soul and all his might.
But how was the Shema—the most essential statement of monotheism—understood in Jesus’ time? The answer may be found in the Mishnah tractate Berakoth,e which first quotes the biblical text and then explains what each passage means. In Berakoth we read:
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might”:
“With all your heart”—[which means] with both your impulses, your good impulse and your evil impulse.
“With all your soul”—even if he takes away your soul.
Let us look briefly at these three points. The normal Hebrew spelling for “heart” is leb, but in Deuteronomy 6:5 it is written lebab, with two b’s.f To the rabbis quoted in the Mishnah, this spelling suggested a duplication, a heart with two impulses: a good impulse, or inclination, which tended toward 043perfect obedience to God’s commandments, and its antithesis, the evil inclination. God had to be loved with a heart undivided, and thus with both impulses. To us, this might seem nonsensical—the two impulses would seem to cancel each other out. But the Semites and the Greeks of Jesus’ time expressed totality as the combination of opposites;8 for them, the point was to have a heart totally dedicated to God. In the first test, as we have seen, Jesus proved that he loved God with his whole heart, in counter-distinction to the Exodus Israelites, with their divided hearts.
The second test involves a threat to life. That is clearly the meaning of “with all your soul.” A beautiful illustration is the account of the martyrdom of Rabbi Aqiva by the Romans in 135 A.D. When his disciples could not understand his serenity under torture, he said to them, “All my days I have been troubled by this verse, ‘with all your soul,’ [which I interpret as] ‘even if he takes your soul.’ I said, when shall I have the opportunity of fulfilling this? Now that I have the opportunity shall I not fulfill it?”9 Jesus was also prepared to accept death as part of God’s plan, but he refused to endanger himself simply to test God.
The Hebrew term translated as “with all your might” also carries the connotation of “abundance” and may be applied to material possessions. (The point was made by Rabbi Eliezer with some humor: “Should there be a man who values his life more than his money, for him it says ‘with all your soul’; and should there be a man who values his money more than his life, for him it says ‘with all your might.’”10) That is why the devil, in the third test, offers Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” (Matthew 4:8).
The traditional understanding of the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4–5), therefore, explains both the order of the tests undergone by Jesus and their content.11 Jesus is the perfect Son, who, in contrast to the Exodus Israelites, scrupulously observes the triple imperative that accompanies the fundamental statement of monotheism, the Shema. The testing narrative in the Gospel of Matthew is a vivid parable of adherence to the most basic obligations of the believer, the demands of the Shema.
It would have been unthinkable for the gospel writer to associate Jesus with the possibility of failure—which is implicit in the notion of a “test”—unless Jesus had confided to his disciples that he had experienced the tension of temptation. He need not have gone into any detail, but at a minimum he had to have said to his disciples the equivalent of “I was tested, as you will be tested.”
This explains why Mark’s cursory account simply says that Jesus was tested. This alerts us to the possibility that Jesus’ disciples created the testing narrative based on their own knowledge of Jesus and the trials that they saw him undergo.12
As we have seen, the purpose of the first test—changing stone to bread—was to determine whether the heart of Jesus was whole or divided. To find the historical event in Jesus’ life behind this test, we need to look for episodes where Jesus was pulled in two directions—situations where he was forced to make a choice, not necessarily between good and evil, but perhaps between a lesser and a greater good.
One indisputable example of such tension is Mark 3, in which Jesus finds himself at odds with his family:
He went into a house. And the crowd came together again so that they could not eat. And when his family (hoi par’ autou)13 heard it they went out to seize him, for they said, “He is out of his mind (exestê)!”…And his mother and his brethren came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brethren are outside asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brethren?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brethren! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister, and mother!”14
Mark 3:19–21, 31–35
Jesus’ relatives want to “seize,” or “arrest” (Greek, krateô) him because they believe he is “out of his mind”—that he is mentally ill.15
This episode reveals the hostility of the family of Jesus to his mission. The disbelief of the brothers of Jesus is noted explicitly in John 7:5: “For not even his brothers believed in him.” From the family’s perspective, Jesus was an embarrassment who had to be removed from public view.
The authority of the family, and particularly the mother, in traditional Middle Eastern households was strong. Jesus must have felt a powerful pull to accede to his mother’s demands. Yet he rejected his family’s demands and identified those who accepted his mission as his true “brother, sister, and mother” (Mark 3:35). He thereby showed that in his commitment to following the will of God, his heart was undivided.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus faces a similar internal conflict. In the account of the finding of Jesus in the Temple (Luke 2:41–51a), Jesus is once again on the horns of a dilemma—being pulled in one direction by his parents and in another by what he conceives as his mission from God.16 According to Luke, when Jesus was 12 years old, he traveled with his family to Jerusalem for Passover. Following the festival, his parents left town 048without realizing they had left Jesus behind. After returning to Jerusalem and searching for three days, they found Jesus in the Temple, “sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions.” Amazed, Jesus’ parents ask, “Son, why have you done this to us?” And Jesus responds, “Why is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” But Jesus’ parents “did not understand the statement that he spoke to them.”
Today, Jesus’ reply, “I must be about my Father’s business,” is easily understood as foreshadowing his ministry. But what did it mean to Jesus? I can only think that Jesus was searching for light on his vocation. He turned to the experts in the Law, who taught in the porticos of the Temple, for guidance on what God expected him to do with his life. In Jesus’ mind, the urgency of this quest must have outweighed the worry that he knew he would cause Mary and Joseph. Here, too, his filial piety was challenged by a higher obedience.
Jesus’ awareness of how affective familial ties could divide the heart is evident in the message he gave his disciples. When one disciple said to him, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father,” Jesus responded, “Follow me and let the dead bury their dead’” (Matthew 8:21–22=Luke 9:59–60).17 Jesus impressed upon his disciples that obedience to his word was a higher imperative and that they must love God with all their hearts.
To find the historical event hidden in the second test, in which Jesus refuses to throw himself from the Temple, we must examine Jesus’ response in situations in which his life was at risk.18 The instinct for self-preservation is so strong that it would be unreasonable to assume that death threats did not give Jesus pause for reflection.
The Gospel of Luke records that Jesus, when traveling through Galilee to Jerusalem, was explicitly threatened by Herod Antipas: “Some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you’” (Luke 13:31).19 Jesus’ response—that he will continue to do the will of God—is magnificent in its defiance: “Go tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. Nevertheless I must journey today, tomorrow and the day following, for it cannot be that a prophet should perish outside Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!’” (Luke 13:32–33). In other words, Jesus will continue to do his work in answer to a higher authority even if it means he must die in Jerusalem.
Jesus’ prediction of his death is eminently plausible (see also Luke 9:22).20 Jesus and all his Jewish contemporaries would have been aware that many prophets had died violent deaths in Jerusalem.21 In John 11:8, Jesus narrowly escapes a stoning. Moreover, Jesus would have known of the execution of John the Baptist (Mark 6:17–29=Matthew 14:3–12; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 18.116–119).g Indeed, Jesus lived a life oriented towards death, which is why Paul describes Jesus’ existence as a long, drawn-out “dying” (2 Corinthians 4:10). Jesus must have been in great pain as he confronted the very human fear of death. Yet he never deviated from his mission, even when the fear almost overwhelmed him at Gethsemane.h Despite this most severe test, which touched the core of his being, Jesus remained true.
Just as Jesus cautioned his disciples not to deviate from their mission, not to have divided hearts, so, too, he warned his followers that they would be tested just as he had been tested, “You will be hated by all for my name’s sake, but those who endure to the end will be saved” (Mark 13:13).22 He had to prepare them for a test whose severity he knew from experience.
Finally, we come to the third test (Matthew 4:8–10). To find the historical event behind this test, we must look for an episode in which Jesus rejects wealth and prestige in order to pursue his mission.23
In the Gospel of John, Jesus miraculously feeds a crowd gathered on the shore of the Sea of Galilee with only five loaves of bread and two small fish. “When the people saw the sign which he had done,” John tells us, “they said, ‘This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world!’ Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew to the hills by himself” (John 6:14–15).24
Given the revolutionary temper of the Galileans, this story carries the clear stamp of plausibility. It would explain why Herod Antipas wanted to kill Jesus, as we saw earlier (Luke 13:31). And Jesus’ response—his repudiation of all efforts to promote him to political leadership—would explain why Herod later lost all interest and released Jesus when he was brought before him (Luke 23:8–12). The implication for us, however, is that at least once, Jesus was forced to evaluate the relationship of his ministry to political power, and he refused prestige and wealth for the sake of his mission.
Here, too, Jesus’ test was transmuted into a warning for his disciples: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon [wealth],” he told them (Matthew 6:24=Luke 16:13); “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25= Matthew 19:24=Luke 18:25).
As we have seen, Jesus, like any human being, suffered situations in which he was pulled in two directions. We know how Jesus responded to these trials because he articulated them in warnings to his disciples. In the account of the testing of Jesus, these very events have been turned into parables. Perhaps Jesus himself parabolized his own experience in order to impress his followers with his warnings. No one can deny that Jesus was capable of such subtlety.
But if Jesus had parabolized his experiences and put them in the context of the Exodus by quoting Deuteronomy, then Mark would have known the whole story. Mark would not have simply borrowed the Exodus motifs of the wilderness and the 40 days without including the details of all three tests. Thus, it is more probable that Mark, by making a discrete evocation of the Exodus, parabolized Jesus’ remark that he had been tested and that later Christian theologians produced the extraordinary narrative we find in Matthew and Luke.25
The early Christians understood Jesus to be human in the same sense as they were. He was not totally other or inexplicably alien. Those who had lived with him, or who knew those who had done so, considered it entirely natural to use their own experience as human beings—often pulled in two directions—in order to penetrate and explore the insight that Jesus had given them regarding his own struggle to remain faithful to what he had come to recognize as his destiny and vocation. Jesus, too, had to contend with the demands of family and friends. He had to brace himself against the instinct for self-preservation. He had to remain alert to the insidious attractions of wealth and power. He was given a mission, but he was not granted immunity from the pressures that complicate human life.
Three gospels tell of the devil testing Jesus in the wilderness, an incident so remarkable as to seem almost certainly unreal. But is it? Our author suggests a historical core to the tale, a substratum reflecting struggles Jesus faced in his lifetime.
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When Matthew and Luke share material that is lacking in Mark, the common assumption is that Matthew and Luke depend on a now-lost source that scholars call Q (see Stephen J. Patterson, “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Q,”BR 11:05). When, as in this case, the shared material is presented differently, the question that immediately arises is, Which gospel most accurately represents the hypothetical source Q?
2.
The difference in duration is explained by the principle that a day in the life of an individual is equivalent to a year in the life of a people. This principle emerges from a number of texts, e.g., “According to the number of the days in which you [the spies] spied out the land, 40 days, for every day a year, you [the people] shall bear your iniquity 40 years” (Numbers 14:34); “I assign to you a number of days, 390 days, equal to the number of years of their punishment, and so you shall bear the punishment of the house of Israel. When you have completed these, you shall lie down a second time, but on your right side, and bear the punishment of the house of Judah: 40 days I assign you, one day for each year” (Ezekiel 4:5–6).
3.
In Exodus 17:7 Moses also names the site Meribah (from the verb “to find fault”).
4.
Where exactly did the second test take place? The Greek has to pterygion tou hierou (Matthew 4:5), which is variously translated as the “pinnacle of the temple,” the “parapet of the temple” or the “highest point of the temple.” This is the only appearance of the term pterygion (literally, “winglet,” or “little wing”) in the New Testament.
A fundamental theme of the Exodus is Yahweh’s protection of Israel. In the most dramatic and memorable of these texts, Yahweh is compared to an eagle protecting its nest: “As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young, as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions, the Lord alone guided them…he set them atop the heights of the land” (Deuteronomy 32:11–13). Apparently the term “winglet” was used in the second test because it evoked divine protection. For the rabbis, the Temple was the center of God’s protection because the divine presence was concentrated there.
5.
The Mishnah is a collection of rabbinic oral teachings written down in about 200 A.D.
6.
On the meaning of leb, see Robert North, “Did Ancient Israelites Have a Heart?” sidebar to “Ancient Medicine”BR 11:03.
André Feuillet, “Le récit lucanien de la tentation,” Biblica 40 (1959), pp. 613–631. Similarly, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 507–508; W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), vol. 1, p. 364.
2.
See in particular Jacques Dupont, “L’arrière-fond biblique du récit des tentations de Jesus,” New Testament Studies 3 (1956–57), pp. 287–292.
3.
Birger Gerhardsson points out that the “the verb ain-nun-hey (pi’el) not only has the general meaning ‘to humble’ but also the special meaning ‘to humble (oneself) by fasting’” (The Testing of God’s Son (Matt 4:1–11 & Par) [Lund: Gleerup, 1966], pp. 41–42).
4.
For a variety of opinions on where the second test took place, see Joachim Jeremias, “Die ‘Zinne’ des Temples (Mt 4.5; Lk 4.9),” Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins 59 (1936), pp. 195–208. The Greek to pterygion tou hierou is not an architectural term. Apparently “wing” was chosen precisely because it evoked divine protection (Gerhardsson, Testing of God’s Son, p. 59).
5.
Dupont, “L’arrière-fond biblique,” p. 296.
6.
The discovery of this principle must be credited to Gerhardsson, who also tracked down the interpretation in Mishnah tractate Berakoth (Testing of God’s Son, pp. 71–76). The skepticism shown by Davies and Allison (Matthew, p. 353) is unjustified. Doubts regarding other hypotheses of Gerhardsson regarding the use of the Shema as a structural principle elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel in no way impugn the accuracy of his insight here.
7.
Mishnah, Berakoth 9.5. Translation adapted from Herbert Danby, The Mishnah (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), p. 10.
8.
For example, “I form light and create darkness. I make weal and create woe” (Isaiah 45:7) simply means that God is all powerful. See in particular Gustave Lambert, “‘Lier-délier’: L’expression de la totalité par l’opposition de deuz contraires,” Vivre et Penser 3 (1943–44) [=Revue biblique 52], pp. 91–103.
9.
BT, Berakoth 61b, trans. Maurice Simon, in Babylonian Talmud, vol. 1, Seder Zerai’im (London: Soncino Press, 1948), p. 386.
10.
Simon, BT, Berakoth 61b, p. 385.
11.
This is a further argument for the originality of the structure of Matthew’s narrative.
12.
This approach was first developed by Hans Holtzmann (Hand-Kommentar zum Neuen Testament, 3rd ed. [Tübingen, 1901], vol. 1, bk. 1, pp. 45–48), who found the reality behind the three tests (in the order of Matthew) in three episodes of chap. 8 of Mark’s gospel (vv.1–9, vv. 11–13, vv. 31–33). Some 40 years later, Herbert Preisker revived this line of thinking, but he identified the three tests with episodes in John’s gospel (John 4:31–34, 6:15, 7:2–6) (Preisker’s study was published in 1939 in an obscure festschrift that was not available to me; his conclusions were reported in Philippe Menoud, L’évangile de Jean d’aprés les recherches récentes [Neuchätel-Paris, 1947], p. 29). Raymond Brown (“Incidents that Are Units in the Synoptic Gospels but Dispersed in St. John,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 23 [1961], pp. 152–155) preferred John’s version of the multiplication of the loaves (6:26–34) as the real parallel to the first test.
All these suggestions are far wide of the mark. The two points of contact with the multiplication of the loaves are (a) a miracle, and (b) bread. These are purely material. Jesus refuses a miracle in one case but performs one in the other, which involves the multiplication of bread not the transformation of a stone. Brown goes a step further by evoking the discussion that followed the miracle, in which a contrast is drawn between ordinary bread and God’s teaching as the bread of life (John 6:22–59). Jesus, Brown maintains, is virtually commenting on Deuteronomy 8:3. True, but this proves no more than a common use of Deuteronomy 8:3. Moreover, there is no hint in the multiplication of the loaves that Jesus is being tested. On the contrary, he exhibits sovereign power.
13.
The apparent ambiguity of hoi par’ autou, literally, “those with him” (Mark 3:21), has been exploited by those who are unhappy with the negative picture of Jesus’ family painted here. (Presumably the same motive explains the omission of this incident by both Matthew and Luke. The fabrication of this event at a later stage, when the mother and brothers of Jesus were prominent disciples [Acts 1:14], is impossible.) In terms of Marcan narrative technique, however, it is certain that “those with him” are those later explicitly identified as “his mother and his brothers” (Mark 3:31). See the discussions in Vincent Taylor, The Gospel According to Mark (London, 1963), pp. 235–237; and in Brown et al., eds., Mary in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars (Philadelphia, 1978), pp. 55–56.
14.
Crucial to the understanding of this episode is Mark’s technique of structuring a narrative in an A-B-A’ pattern, in which two parts of a single story are separated in order to bracket an entirely different narrative (as in Mark 5:21–43, 6:7–30, 11:12–25, 14:1–11). In this case, the intrusive element (B) is made up of the two accusations of the scribes and Jesus’ responses to them in inverse order (Mark 3:22–30). If we leave these verses out of consideration, we find a coherent narrative.
15.
The fact that Mark inserted the accusations of the scribes—“He is possessed by Beelzebul!” and “It is by the prince of demons that he casts out demons” (Mark 3:22)—at precisely this point clearly indicates how the evangelist understood “he is out of his mind.” Further, krateô means “arrest” in Mark 6:17, 12:12, 14:1, 44, 46, 49, 51. These two points effectively refute attempts to water down the obvious meaning of the accusation, such as that by Marie-Joseph Lagrange, who wrote that Jesus was in such an exalted state that he forgot to eat his meals (Évangile selon saint Marc [Paris, 1911], p. 64), or Henry Wansbrough, who argued that it was the crowd that was out of control with enthusiasm (“Mark iii.21: Was Jesus Out of His Mind?” New Testament Studies (1971–72), pp. 233–235.
16.
Like Mark 3:20–21, this episode is not a late redactional creation. It antedates the composition of Luke 1–2 because (a) it does not know of the virgin birth—note “his parents” (v. 43) and “your father and I” (v. 48; contrast “the supposed son of Joseph” in Luke 3:23); and (b) the parents have not profited (v. 50) by the revelations of Luke 1:32–35, 2:11, 17, 19 regarding the identity of Jesus. See in particular Baas Van Iersel, “The Finding of Jesus in the Temple: Some Observations on the Original Form of Luke ii 41–51a, ” Novum Testamentum 4 (1960), pp. 161–173. This is not to say, however, that the editor of the gospel did not make additions.
Commentators are extremely coy about the historicity of this event. Fitzmyer is typical in concentrating exclusively on the role of the episode in Luke’s framework (Luke I-IX, pp. 434–39). As far as I am concerned, there is nothing implausible in the basic elements of the story, particularly if it is conceded that the source may have heightened the dramatic effect of certain aspects, e.g., lost for three days rather than a couple of hours.
17.
On the question of authenticity, see Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York, 1976), p. 144.
18.
As regards the reality behind the second test of Jesus (Matthew 4:5–7), Holtzmann suggests Mark 8:11–12, while Preisker and Brown propose John 7:1–4. Neither hypothesis has any real merit.
In Mark 8:11–12 the Pharisees demand a sign from heaven, but the only point in common with the second test of Jesus is the fact that they were “testing” him. The episode takes place in Galilee, and no one would have ever thought of it in terms of the second test were it not the immediate sequel of the multiplication of the loaves, with which Holzmann, as we have seen, mistakenly associates the first temptation.
In John 7:1–4 Jesus’ skeptical brothers suggest that he should cease embarrassing the family in Galilee and go and perform his miracles in Jerusalem. The mention of the Holy City does furnish a link with the second test, but that is all. There is a radical difference between Jesus working a miracle for another’s benefit and God working a miracle in favor of Jesus by saving his life.
19.
On the historicity of this episode, see in particular John B. Tyson, “Jesus and Herod Antipas,” Journal of Biblical Literature 79 (1960), pp. 239–246.
20.
Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, p. 779.
21.
The references are assembled in Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV, Anchor Bible 28A (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), p. 230.
22.
The full references are Mark 13:9–13 = Matthew 24:9–14 = Luke 21:12–19.
23.
Holtzmann’s suggestion that it corresponds to Peter’s reaction to the first prediction of the passion (Mark 8:31–33) is based purely on the material correspondence of the phrases “Begone, Satan!” and “Get behind me, Satan!” Apart from the name Satan, the two narratives have nothing in common.
24.
This passage was first proposed by Raymond Brown.
25.
This conclusion is made all the more probable by the fact that Jewish theologians created the same sort of story. According to the Babylonian Talmud, God tested Abraham with many trials. In one such trial, Satan and the patriarch trade texts from Scripture, exactly as Satan and Jesus do in the gospels (BT, Sanhedrin 89b, which is quoted in Davies and Allison, Matthew, p. 352).
