A Canadian correspondent writes :
In your note on Mk. 1:13 in the September Testimony you say, “The record seems clearly to mean that there were other temptations during the forty days that Jesus sojourned in the wilderness, tempted of Satan.”
Then you say, “We who favour the subjective nature of the three recorded temptations may well believe that other subjective temptations must have come to Jesus during the sojourn.”
So you imply that we are at liberty to choose whether or not to believe that Jesus was subjected to temptation by an outside source (that is, by “the devil”), or whether he subjected himself to temptation.
Do you mean, when you say “We who favour, etc:”, that this applies to Christadelphians as a whole? There are two viewpoints on this matter, and I would appreciate a clarifying of your note.
Reply :
There are among Christadelphians, as among the members of all denominations, differing views regarding the nature of the temptations of our Lord:
The narratives in Matt. 4 and Luke 4 are both put in the objective form: “When the tempter came to him, he said . . . . Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him . . . . Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain . . . and saith unto him . . . Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan . . . Then the devil leaveth him : . . ” and so on.
Only a conviction that the objective view of the tempter is untenable has impelled some Bible students to adopt the subjective theory as the only one which, to them, seems to fit the circumstances:
But some Bible students hold firmly to the objective view, even though they do not believe in a personal Devil: For example, we have ourselves heard it suggested that the “devil” who offered to give “all the kingdoms of the world ” to Jesus was none other than the reigning Roman Emperor.
This tempter may have been the Roman Emperor, but we ourselves do not think it at all likely. This temptation came before the actual ministry began, and Jesus was then almost unknown in Palestine itself, and was almost certainly unknown outside Palestine. Yet we are asked to believe that a pagan Emperor came secretly from Italy to Palestine, made his way surreptitiously to Galilee, and offered to abdicate in favour of this obscure Jew if only he would give him a moment’s reverence. Some of us, but not all of us, feel that this is well-nigh incredible. A typical pagan emperor would not care a fig for the adoration of a Jew, and to suggest that a Roman Emperor was prepared to abdicate seems quite outside the realms of probability. In any case, it is most doubtful if a Roman Emperor could bestow his dominions on a foreigner.
The statement in Luke 4:5 that “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time” seems to us to point strongly to a mental view, not a physical one.
Again, Jesus–who “knew what was in man” (Jno: 2 : 25)—would realise at once if another person tried to tempt him, that an evil motive lay behind the temptation. He would realise this immediately it was suggested by some other person that he should fall down and worship such person; he would at once see the infamy which prompted the suggestion that he should throw himself from a pinnacle of the temple, or turn stones into loaves of bread, and the invitations would straightway lose all their attractiveness:
Some of us feel that such a man as Jesus could not possibly be tempted from outside, and therefore incline strongly to the subjective view of his temptations. But this conviction is not shared by all, and therefore we find in the Brotherhood two points of view.
And inasmuch as the New Testament itself does not come out strongly on either side, it seems quite legitimate that Christians may choose between these views according to their own convictions after studying the evidence for both theories.
The Solution