More Case Studies of the ‘Hermeneutic of Suspicion’: The Temptations in the Desert (Part 17)
We continue our survey of the stumbles of contemporary scholarship in the search for the historical Jesus. Here we will look at what Dale Allison has to say in his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (2009) about the gospel stories of the temptations of Jesus in the desert. Allison writes:
Although I may be wrong about this, the temptation narratives in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 do not strike me as sober history. For one thing, as Origen already observed, there is no high place from which one can see the whole world. For another, doubting the historicity of similar dialogues between the rabbis and Satan strikes me as sensible, and turnabout is fair play: why should I evaluate the Synoptic encounter differently? In any event, I concur with many that our story is a product of a sophisticated Christian scribe who spun a delightful haggadic tale out of Deuteronomy and the Psalms: The Son of God repeats the experience of Israel in the desert, where people were tempted by hunger and idolatry. Having passed through the waters of a new exodus at his baptism, Jesus enters the desert to suffer a time of testing, his forty days of fasting being analogous to Israel’s 40 years of wandering. (p. 25)
Let’s now attempt to unpack this treatment of the Temptation narratives.
We have two gospel witnesses to this story, St. Matthew and St. Luke, and while some historians would argue that Luke simply adopted and edited Matthew’s account, it is not entirely clear that Matthew was Luke’s only source for the tale, given that the latter recounts the three satanic temptations in a different order. Thus, it is possible that here we have two at least somewhat independent sources for this event, sources whose honesty and sincerity should be presumed from the start, until proven otherwise.
In religious literature, especially Jewish literature, high mountain places were believed to be places where Moses and the prophets received special, divine revelations. Part of Satan’s strategy here may have been to “ape” the divine pattern, bringing Jesus to a sacred height, and then offering him from there — as if with divine sanction — a mystical vision of all the kingdoms of the world, and a share in Satan’s power and authority over them. Thus, the passage need not be interpreted to mean that Jesus literally saw all the kingdoms of the world because of the height of the mountain; this may very well have been a visionary aspect of the event rather than a literal one. In any case, only Matthew reports that Jesus was taken to the top of “a very high mountain” for this vision (4:8), so this might be another example of his penchant for haggadic embellishment of the basic historical facts ( see article 6 in this series).
Just about all commentators would agree that the Temptation story was included in the gospels in order to show that Jesus renews and fulfills in himself the vocation of Israel, successfully overcoming the kind of temptations that the Israelites had failed to overcome themselves in the desert, and in their subsequent history as a nation. However, the fact that the gospel writers included this story in their accounts for good theological reasons does not necessarily imply that they invented the account. How would they pass off such an invention as true in the mid-first century, when some of the apostles who knew Jesus were still alive, and when multitudes were alive who knew the apostles personally, and heard them preach? In such circumstances, it seems more likely that the evangelists preserved and passed down the Temptation story because of its profound theological ramifications, rather than that they invented a legend in order to illustrate a theological point.
Again, from the perspective of historical research, it is at least possible that the beginnings of haggadic fiction were making their way into the Christian community’s story of Jesus at the time the gospels were written (we considered some likely candidates in article #6 in this series), but the mere fact that a story in the gospels has a theological meaning is not strong evidence that it is dogmatically-driven fiction. After all, the whole point of the biblical faith is that God really acts in history, and thereby reveals his nature, character, and saving purposes for us through real historical events. Unless you start with the presupposition that historical events cannot have deeper, God-given, symbolic and theological meaning, then finding such meaning in an account is, all by itself, not a cause for historical scepticism.
Another reason it is not likely that the early Christians and the Evangelists invented the Temptation stories is that they are not carefullyenough written to be religious propaganda or devout fiction. Someone who wanted to invent a story about Jesus sojourning in the wilderness for forty days as a parallel to Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness for forty years would have had Jesus do this before, not after he passed through the waters of the Jordan in his baptism, just as Israel passed through the Jordan only after their time of testing in the desert was complete.
Moreover, none of the early Fathers of the Church read this as a “delightful haggadic tale” spun out of Deuteronomy and the Psalms. Did Matthew and Luke write in a haggadic genre that so quickly became unrecognizable to the wider Christian community? How probable is that?
Furthermore, the fact that the story seems to have roots in Deuteronomy and the Psalms, which Jesus quotes, is actually more a mark in favour of its historicity than otherwise. A general study of the books of the Old Testament that Jesus most often quoted throughout His Galilean ministry shows that Deuteronomy and the Psalms stand at the top of the list. Why then should it be strange that Jesus also turned to those books to fend off the temptations of Satan?
If acceptance of the reportage value of the Gospel accounts of the Temptation in the Desert requires us to treat more fairly the somewhat similar stories of reported dialogues between the Devil and the ancient Jewish rabbis, why should that disturb us? Can we doubt that the most devout shepherds of God’s chosen people have sometimes come face to face with Satan and his deceptions? The Jews worship the same God that Jesus worshipped, and similar phenomena of encounters with the Devil also occur in the lives of some of the Christian saints. All this makes it more plausible, not less plausible, that Jesus may have encountered something similar. At the same time, the gospel accounts cannot simply be copies of the Jewish stories about the rabbis because they have important, distinctive elements. Jesus alone is tempted as the one whom Satan knows to be the Messiah: “If you are the Son of God….” Again, all this surely lends more credibility to the accounts in the gospels, rather than undermining them.
Finally, let us consider an initially plausible, sceptical scenario: (a) the real historical core of the Temptation story is preserved in the very brief account in St. Mark’s Gospel (MK 1:12-13); (b) St. Matthew and St. Luke simply elaborated on this core story with haggadic fiction intended to underscore their theological perspective on Jesus as the fulfilment of the vocation of Israel and as the true Messiah; and (c) the largely fictional literary genre they were using here fairly quickly became unrecognizable to the early Christians because by the end of the first century the vast majority of Christians were no longer from Jewish but from Gentile backgrounds — and the Gentile Christians mistook this Jewish fable for fact.
On the other hand, (a) it is not certain that St. Mark wrote his gospel before the other two, and that the other two then relied on him –the “synoptic source problem” is far from resolved (see article #9 in this series); besides, (b) if St. Matthew wrote first (as all the early Christian writers attest), then St. Mark may have refrained from telling the whole story of the Temptations in the desert because it conflicted with his literary purpose of manifesting “the Messianic secret” (i.e., how Jesus showed that he was the true Messiah) only later in his work; (c) we can still set against this sceptical theory numbers 1, 3, 6 and 7 above; (d) there were friends of the apostles, or those at only one remove from the apostles, living right up through the end of the second century. (Again, St. Clement of Rome, who died 96-100 AD, according to the early Fathers sat at the feet of the apostles themselves, and “still had the apostles teachings ringing in his ears,” while St. Ireneus of Lyons, who died ca. 198 AD, had learned the faith from St. Polycarp , martyred in 156 AD at the age of 86, who had known the apostle John personally. The evangelist St. Luke, who clearly had strong Gentile roots and knew the converted Pharisee and apostle St. Paul personally, had researched his story about Jesus with Palestinian “eyewitnesses.” St. Mark wrote his gospel to a largely Gentile-Christian audience in Rome, based in part upon the testimony of the apostle Peter.). In short, to draw a sharp line of demarcation between Jewish and Gentile communities and mindsets within the mainstream Church at this stage of its life (ca. 60-200 a.d.) simply makes no sense. Once the question of circumcision and adherence to the Mosaic Law had been settled at the Apostolic Council (See Acts 15) the two groups were ever more deeply enmeshed in the Body of Christ. When a Gentile majority arose in the early Church in the latter part of the first century, it still included a large number of Jews of the diaspora, who straddled both cultures. Thus, to make a sharp distinction between Jewish and Gentile Christians as an explanation for an alleged misreading of the literary genre of central gospel texts such as the Temptation story, by the beginning of the second century, is fairly implausible.
In short, the burden of proof remains on those who doubt the Matthew-Luke account of the Temptation of Jesus in the Desert, and it is far from clear that this burden has been met. Allison’s objections certainly are not very convincing, much less decisive. On balance, the historical evidence still points in favour of the general historical authenticity of the story.
Next Time: More Case Studies of the ‘Hermeneutic of Suspicion’: the Trial and Condemnation of Jesus
Robert Stackpole, STD
©The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017
