The Temptations of Jesus

[Trivia: Can you name the 10 films directed by Quentin Tarantino?]

A couple of months ago I reread Matthew’s account of Jesus being tempted in the desert. It’s a really good episode; where Mark’s succinct gospel merely notes that after Jesus’ baptism, “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him,” (Mark 1, ESV), Matthew relates what happened in detail (Matthew 4, quotes below are ESV).

Jesus experiences three temptations at Satan’s hands: the loaves of bread, which Jesus answers with Scripture; then Satan daring Jesus to throw himself down from a high place because “‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone,’” but Jesus answers his perversion of Scripture with “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test”; then finally the promise of the kingdoms of this world if only Jesus worshipped Satan, answered not only with the quote “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve,” but with the commandment “Be gone, Satan!”

I really like the progression of the account—especially the way Satan is showcased as a wily adversary, regrouping and deciding to use Scripture as a weapon against Jesus, and when that doesn’t get him what he wants abandoning it altogether. I also like the way that the narrative functions as a self-aware reminder that the Bible knows that bad-faith people can rip lines from it out of context and use them to advocate things contrary to God’s will.

But then a few days ago I reread Luke’s recounting of it. Which is extremely similar (as you’d expect) except that the second and the third are switched in the retelling. Which surprised me.

So first of all, the question arises, is there inconsistency?

I first checked Wikipedia, which, slanted towards secularism though it is, is generally good at least as a repository or sink of knowledge. Wikipedia says,

In Luke's (Luke 4:1–13) and Matthew's (Matthew 4:1–11) accounts, the order of the three temptations differ; no explanation as to why the order differs has been generally accepted. Matthew, Luke and Mark make clear that the Spirit has led Jesus into the desert.

Weird.

The next thing I checked was Bible Difficulties and Seeming Contradictions, a multi-authored volume from Concordia Press that is extremely meticulous in aggregating accusations of inconsistencies of history and doctrine from Scripture and painstakingly parsing things through in an elucidating manner. I love this book. Interesting cross-references and valid points leap off the page; in the course of flipping through it just now, I encountered the point that Matthew brings up Jesus’ (and Mary and Joseph’s) flight into Egypt because Matthew is specifically drawing parallels between Jesus and Moses for his Jewish audience, something that is of less concern to the other gospel writers with their different audiences. (This is also part of why Matthew’s gospel opens with a long genealogy—his Jewish audience, who were well familiar with those individuals, would have found that a meaningful intro in a way that the Greeks to whom Luke primarily addressed his gospel would not have.) Anyway, this book didn’t even mention it.

And for what it’s worth, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov’s famous chapter on The Grand Inquisitor takes the three temptations as the framework for his discourse, and orders them like Luke’s gospel does.

So I returned to the Greek text to do the detective work myself. Here’s the punchline: the conjunctions used by Matthew typically denote time (or order, or sequence), while Luke’s really don’t need to.

Here’s where I’ll show my work: Matthew recounts the stone temptation, and then in 4:5 says “Τότε παραλαμβάνει αὐτὸν ὁ διάβολος εἰς τὴν ἁγίαν πόλιν, καὶ ἔστησεναὐτὸν ἐπὶ τὸ πτερύγιον τοῦ ἱεροῦ . . .” (“Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple . . .”) The bolded word (“tote”, with two syllables) is defined by the LSJ Greek dictionary as

Adv. at that time, then, corresponding to Relat. ὅτε or ὁπότε (infr. 1.5), and to interrog. πότε; mostly of some point in past time, opp. νῦν, Il.15.724, etc.: c. gen., “τ. τοῦχειμῶνος” Th.7.31: also of a future time, “τότε κέν μιν . . πεπίθοιμεν” Il. 1.100, cf. 4.182; “λέξεις καὶ τότ᾽εἴσομαι” S.OT1517 (troch.) (or of imagined circumstances, in that case (cf. “νῦν” 1.4), Pl.R. 334c); sts., then, next . . .

Thus the pinnacle temptation is recounted. Afterwards, Matthew says in 4:8, “Πάλιν παραλαμβάνει αὐτὸν ὁ διάβολος εἰς ὄρος ὑψηλὸν λίαν, καὶ δείκνυσιν αὐτῷ πάσας τὰς βασιλείας τοῦ κόσμου καὶ τὴν δόξαν αὐτῶν,” (“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory.”) In the New Testament this word (“palin”) is pretty consistently translated “again” but can also mean, say, “one more time.” Then after the kingdoms temptation, Matthew writes (4:11) “Τότε ἀφίησιν αὐτὸν ὁ διάβολος, καὶ ἰδοὺ ἄγγελοι προσῆλθον καὶδιηκόνουν αὐτῷ.” So there’s our initial “then, next” again. This is a fairly sequential chronology.

Luke, on the other hand, does not use these words for his transitions. When Luke’s done talking about the bread, he says (4:5) “Καὶ ἀναγαγὼν αὐτὸν ἔδειξεν αὐτῷ πάσας τὰς βασιλείας τῆς οἰκουμένης ἐν στιγμῇ χρόνου” (“And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time”). The word here, kai, is just the Greek word for “and”—6.6% of all the words in the New Testament are just this word. So Luke recounts the story of the kingdoms, and introduces the pinnacle temptation thus (4:9): Ἤγαγεν δὲ αὐτὸν εἰς Ἰερουσαλὴμ καὶ ἔστησεν ἐπὶ τὸ πτερύγιον τοῦ ἱεροῦ, καὶ εἶπεν [αὐτῷ]: (“And he took him to Jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him”). The connective word here is “de,” a word that I’ve actually talked about before—it’s another common word (accounting for 2% of the words in the New Testament) that just means “and” (or, logically equivalently, “but”). And then, finally, after the last temptation, Luke writes (4:13) “Καὶ συντελέσας πάντα πειρασμὸν ὁ διάβολος ἀπέστη ἀπ᾽ αὐτοῦ ἄχρι καιροῦ.”

All that to say, Matthew’s wording strongly suggests that he recounting things in sequence, whereas Luke is giving us a sequence of episodes that have an internal chronological integrity to them (Satan tempted Jesus, and then Jesus answered him) but that isn’t implying that each episode must have happened in sequence. (Looking over Luke’s whole chapter, it looks like he confined himself to “kai” and “de” all throughout rather than the stronger sequential “tote” and “palin” that Matthew uses. That’s not particularly remarkable, since the formulation “and Jesus answered him” is extremely common throughout Luke’s gospel—if anything, it just reinforces the idea that “tote” claims semantic weight in a way that the typical “kai” doesn’t.)

And I think all of that is strongly corroborated with the aforementioned imperative: Matthew mentions that Jesus tells Satan to depart as He is answering the kingdoms temptation, and Satan does leave him. Luke doesn’t include the imperative anywhere. Even before checking out the specific conjunctions, that fact should incline us to expect Matthew’s to be the more chronological account—so the pattern that his language implies chronology while Luke’s really doesn’t, in concord with Matthew including the imperative, puts together a harmonious picture that Matthew related the events in order while Luke took creative liberties.

So, running with that analysis, is there any significance to that?

I think that Matthew’s history does showcase Satan’s wiliness—trying new tactics, and dropping them (and the Word of God) when they fail. I think it’s also interesting in showing that Jesus was the one who decided when the temptations were done, and that the “line” was not twisting Scripture (with the pinnacle example) but with a point-blank blasphemous exhortation to worship Satan.

But really the question would be, what motive does Luke have for switching #2 and #3? I think that there’s a dramatic escalation in his ordering: in the rule of threes, we see 1 and then 2 and then a variation on the established pattern for the third. So maybe that was what he had in mind, a narrative surprise that Satan, too, can quote Scripture for his purpose.

That’s just speculation. Anyway, having exhausted my copy of Bible Difficulties and also Wikipedia, I checked plain old Google for other ideas, and found this on the Christianity Stack Exchange (this commenter first makes much the argument that I have, that Matthew implies chronology in a way that Luke does not):

To wonder why Luke may have reversed the potential chronological order of Matthew's account we can only make an educated guess. The 'education' part in a good guess is that we do know that Luke was thinking more of a Gentile audience whereas Matthew was minding a Jewish audience . . . I can see one plausible explanation. For a Jewish audience they might instinctively understand that the temptation to 'throw himself down' or to become like a powerful Lord of the earth, are both increasing degrees of the same temptation to obtain a Messianic dream the easy way. That is to prove or force his kingdom without suffering or being rejected by his people. To a Gentile, this order of increasing temptation might go right over their heads. Without digressing and explanation the whole context, possibly Luke was satisfied in getting a less 'deep' understanding of the temptation that might be more applicable to a Gentile audience and their temptations. The First . . . temptation is just to satisfy hunger, without any direct religious significance in the desire. The Second is then to a Gentile application, to satisfy a desire for raw power (neglecting the Messianic motive to have that power and fulfill the Jewish expectation of the Messiah's rule according the the flesh). Finally to satisfy a desire for renown recognition and fame, which seems the ultimate dream of stardom like the gods of Greece and Rome we find the grand temptation (again avoiding the complexity of the Messianic nuances of the chronological order). Maybe Luke switched the order of these temptations so as to better connect and apply more aptly the gist of the narrative to a heathen audience entirely ignorant of the Messianic nuances that the chronological order introduces.

I don’t know, maybe.

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Unrelated to all of that, I was reading about presidential assassinations and assassination attempts (probably for a future list or 2) and came across this description from Wikipedia (criminal’s name removed), which strikes me as hilarious for several different reasons:

September 6, 2017: [Redacted], a 42-year-old man from North Dakota, attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump in Mandan, North Dakota, while Trump was visiting the state to rally public support. [Redacted] stole a forklift from an oil refinery and drove toward the presidential motorcade. After the forklift became jammed within the refinery, he fled on foot and was arrested by the pursuing police. While interviewed in detention, he admitted his intent to murder the president by flipping the presidential limousine with the stolen forklift, to the surprise of authorities, who suspected he was merely stealing the vehicle for personal use.

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Trivia answer: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003) and Volume 2 (2004), Death Proof, Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Once upon a Time in Hollywood.