Jesus’ Temptations in the Wilderness
The first problem in trying to make the case for a physical manifestation of the devil resides in the very first temptation. “The tempter came to him and said, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread'” (Matthew 4:3). Luke, in 3:3, writes, “The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Clearly the implication in both verses suggests an actual physical being. David Friedrich Strauss, however, makes an interesting point. “If, it is said, there be a personal devil, he cannot take a visible form; and if that were possible, he would hardly demean himself as he is represented to have done in the gospels.” He goes on to write, “Even admitting the existence of a devil, a visible and personal appearance on his part, such as is here supposed, has its peculiar difficulties.” These difficulties arise from the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any other case in either the Old or New Testaments where the devil assumes a visible and personal shape.
In his book the The Mind of Jesus, William Barclay offers an explanation he discovered from a man named Bengel that Satan always worked through “human agencies, and who imagined that what happened was that some emissary or some deputation of the Sanhedrin followed Jesus out into the desert, and attempted to persuade him to embark upon the role of the conquering Messiah.” Barclay then goes on to dismiss this idea and suggests that we should take the story as an inner struggle within the soul of Jesus.
Barclay is completely dismissive of the idea of the second and third temptations taking place in temporal reality. “In the second temptation Jesus in his imagination saw himself on ‘the pinnacle of the Temple.'” “In the third temptation Jesus saw himself on a high mountain from which all the kingdoms of the earth could be seen.” For him, the fact that the temptations took place in Jesus’ mind is so firm that he never even bothers to explain his position on the subject again.
That the temptations did not take place in time and space with a physically existing tempter should seem an easy enough conclusion to come to even for fundamentalist believers. Matthew 4:5 says, “Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.” This statement seems innocuous enough on the surface. If you don’t believe in it physically, there’s no problem. If you do believe in it physically, you can explain it by the devil having supernatural powers.
But there’s the rub.
Luke writes, “The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple” (4:9). Strauss writes that “Even the orthodox hold this change of place was effected quite naturally, for they suppose that Jesus set out on a journey and that the devil followed him.” But the scripture itself is quite clear: The devil “took” Jesus, and the devil “led” Jesus and the devil “had” Jesus stand on the temple. The devil seems to be the one in control here. Well, sure. After all, “The devil too can perform miracles. To appear in corporeal form to transport a burden through the air to the top of a tower-all this is child’s play,” explains R.L. Bruckerberger.
But even supposing that there was a devil there and that he could perform miracles, would Jesus have let him? Most biblical scholars and fundamentalists agree that it doesn’t reconcile with Jesus’ dignity that he would led the devil perform magical powers over him. In the temptation of the stones and in the temptation at the Temple, Jesus refuses to engage in magical demonstrations of His power. So why would Jesus have taken part in demonstrations of magical powers utilized by the devil? It seems unlikely to the point of ridiculous, something that fundamentalists would be likely to question and reject, and yet the literalists remain convinced that it did happen; that Jesus willingly let the supernatural powers of the devil guide him.
Bruckerberger offers an interesting solution to this riddle. He writes that Satan seized Jesus in a “sacrilegious abduction,” embracing Jesus tightly against him during the ride through the sky to the temple. He offers an explanation that would warm the hearts of most fundamentalist believers. Jesus was engaging in teaching by example. If He could hold the devil closely and not give in to temptation, why couldn’t they? A comforting thought, perhaps, but one that flies in the face of reason.
Literalist reason dictates that if what is described in the Bible actually happened, then it must have happened naturally and for all to see. If this is so, then wouldn’t people have been shocked to see Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, standing on the highest point of the Temple? Would word not have gotten around and wouldn’t Jesus’ standing in the community have been dictated by such a miraculous appearance?
Nowhere is it mentioned, however, that his appearance created a stir and lifted him significantly above the pack of other would-be messiahs running around at the time. Also to consider is the mountain mentioned in the final temptation. “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Matthew 4:8). Even if we accept Luke’s less explicit version: “The devil led him up to a high place” (4:5), we are still left with the nagging question of just where was this magical mountain or place from which Jesus could see all the kingdoms of the world.
Once again we must go back to the fact that Jesus allowed the devil to use magical powers on him and even, perhaps, created a magical mountain or place. It must have been magical because it doesn’t exist anywhere on earth today. Or, perhaps, it wasn’t magical at all, perhaps it’s just the case that the devil’s domain-“it has been given to me” (Luke 4:6) wasn’t particularly expansive. Maybe the devil was only granted a very small kingdom. Either way, problems certainly exist in a literal reading of the text. By far, the best way to read the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness is as an inner struggle taking place within Jesus’ mind and soul.
Unfortunately, this raises the question of whether they were really temptations at all. How much is it really worth to deny temptation that only occurs inside your head? I would argue that such a temptation can be as real and as difficult to overcome as one presented physically. All temptation eventually must be dealt with inside the mind, even one in which a bank teller discovers a ten dollar overage in his tray. He can physically take or turn down the opportunity to enrich himself by ten dollars, but the decision to give in to temptation or defeat it all takes place inside the mind. I have no trouble with Jesus facing temptation only inside his soul. I do not feel that makes the temptations any less difficult to overcome or in any way denigrates the moral of the story.
