VLVL2 (3): The Temptation of Zoyd

[Tim Strzechowski]

An excerpt discussing the story of Christ's Temptation as it appears in the various gospels:

from The Literary Guide to the Bible.  Ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode.  Harvard U Press, 1987.

"Matthew enforces upon us in various ways the themes of excess, transformation, and the authority by which excess is demanded and transformation achieved. [...]  Immediately after the Baptism Jesus is forty days in the wilderness and tempted there.  Mark disposes of this episode in two verses (1:12-13): 'And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness.  And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts: and the angels ministered unto him.'  Mark then proceeds with his narrative: the imprisonment of John and the beginning of Jesus' ministry.  Matthew and Luke are much more extensive [...]  From Matthew we learn that the temptation was triple: to turn stones into bread, to throw himself off the pinnacle of the Temple, to receive the kingdoms of the world in all their glory.  Jesus rejects all three, each time with an apt quotation from Deuteronomy.  Luke spreads the temptations over the forty days, whereas Matthew puts them all at the end.  Luke reverses  the order of the second and the third.  He omits the ministrations of the angels, common to Matthew and Mark, saying instead that Satan, defeated on this occasion, left Jesus 'for a season' (4:13) or 'until the proper time,' meaning the Passion.

"Mark is, as so often, enigmatic; presumably he is suggesting some sort of trial or initiation experience.  Matthew augments this bare statement with material based on Old Testament texts.  That the time in the wilderness was forty days must already have been traditional, and the number echoes that of the years spent in the wilderness by Isreal, whose original temptation occurred at a place known as Temptation or Testing.  Here are types and antitypes, fulfillments; the angelic ministrations recall the manna of the original, and the rejection of the temptation echoes the shema, prescribed in Deuteronomy, and ever since prayed daily: its triple commandment is to love God with heart, soul, and might.  We see Jesus, like the centurion later, under authority, tested by authority before he begins to assert authority.

"Luke is less interested in making explicit the biblical references, and he wants a more flowing narrative.  He changes the order of the temptations to get the most violent at the end.  He powerfully links the Temptation with the climax of the whole story, the Crucifixion, so decisively that in later times the first was called Christ's victory over sin, and the second his victory over death. (Satan reappears in Luke 22:3 to renew his assault.)  Moreover he affirms the totality of the temptations [...] Jesus' resistance thus becomes exemplary [...] and James 1:12 confirms it by saying that he who endures temptation will receive the crown.  It is hardly to be wondered at that Milton, in Paradise Regained, based his own interpretive narrative mainly on Luke's. [...]"

(pp. 394 - 97)

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