According to the first three Gospels, following a forty-day fast, Jesus was tempted of the devil. First of all, Mark’s account is extremely abbreviated when compared with that of Matthew and Luke. He merely notes that the Spirit “immediately drove” Jesus into the wilderness, the verb suggestive of a having been “thrown,” the very same as used in Mark’s exorcism narratives. In Matthew and Luke the solicitations of Satan begin with the temptation to turn stones to bread, an obvious opener in view of the forty-day and night fast, after which Jesus was “famished” (Matthew 4:2; Luke 4:2). In Matthew the second temptation consists of the devil’s taking Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and urging him to prove his sonship with God by throwing himself down, and the third of the devil’s showing him all the kingdoms of the world, promising to give it all away on the condition of Jesus’ worship. In Luke the sequence of the second and third temptations is reversed, with the promise to give Jesus all the world’s kingdoms in second place. For Luke and Matthew the temptation to turn stones to bread logically follows Jesus’ exhaustion at the forty day fast, but Luke’s assigning the temptation to assume the glory and authority of all the kingdoms of earth to the next position might match his interest in accenting the story of Jesus within a world-historical context.
Attempts on the part of scholars to wrest meaning from this narrative as “in some measure” corresponding to real experience, as symbolic, denoting a “conflict of soul,” or as an encounter and a conquest of ideas unworthy of Messiahship in Jesus’ own mind, only indicate anguish at having to deal with the narrative. Naturally, questions arise. If there were no witnesses to the event of the struggle, how did the news of it get out? Is it at all reasonable to suppose that Jesus told his disciples of it? Or, is the entire scene to be put down as legend, to which each of the evangelists adds his nuance? As will soon be shown, in Mark, for all its brevity, the narrative serves as engine for an activity threading through his Gospel. In Luke the event ends with the devil’s departure till “an opportune time,” (4:13), the time when “Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot” (22:3). If Luke does not intend that those comments serve as an “inclusion,” bracketing his Gospel as an extended passion narrative, then at least as omen of the passion to come. In addition, if the evangelists did not compose their writings simply to furnish their readers with factual knowledge, but to invoke faith, then the dialogue between Jesus and Satan, in each instance concluding with a Deuteronomic text, is calculated to remind the reader about the one from whom strength to endure in the hour of temptation derives. Thus Matthew and Luke 4:4 read: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God;”16 Matthew 4:7 and Luke 4:12 read: Do not put the Lord your God to the test,”17 and finally Matthew 4:10 and Luke 4:8 read: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.”18
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov, with its story-poem entitled “The Grand Inquisitor,” may be among the most thoughtful of expositions on the temptations. The story is told by Ivan, suspected atheist, to his brother Alyosha, a novice monk, with its setting in Seville, the city to which Jesus comes down after almost a hundred heretics have been burned at the stake. Everyone recognizes him. An old man blind from childhood cries out for healing, and the scales fall from his eyes. At the cathedral steps weeping mourners bring in a little white coffin containing a child of seven. The child’s mother throws herself at his feet, and at Jesus’ word the little girl rises and sits up. At that moment the Grand Inquisitor arrives, sees everything, orders the guards to take him, and shuts him up in prison. In the darkness the prison door suddenly opens, the Inquisitor enters, and proceeds to list his prisoner’s errors at the temptation. Only three powers, says the cardinal, are able to conquer and hold captive—miracle, mystery, and authority—but his prisoner rejected them all, and gave a freedom no one understands, only fears and dreads. If he had given men bread, they would have run after him like a flock of sheep. Next, refusing to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple, he had rejected miracle, and finally, spurning the royal purple with which he could have founded a universal state, he had asked only for the free verdict of the human heart. Admitting he had once prized that freedom, the Inquisitor confesses he had awakened, and joined with those who had corrected Christ’s work.19 This story-poem, to say nothing of the interpretation of the evangelists from which it takes its origin, deserves hurling against the suspected historicity of the event. In the last century, and well into the present, we have witnessed what can only have been transcendent, from hell, not simply from an aggregate of human error. As for Jesus, the temptation never left him: “Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross now, so that we may see and believe” (Mark 15:32; cf. Matthew 27:42–43).
Calling of the Disciples
Similarities and differences exist in the Gospel narratives of the calling of the disciples. In Mark and Matthew, Simon and Andrew, James and John, in Luke, Simon, James and John are first to be summoned. All three Synoptists record Jesus’ calling of Levi (Matthew), all three give a list of the twelve, including Thaddaeus in Mark and Matthew, Judas of James in Luke, and end with Judas Iscariot. The same list as appears in Luke’s Gospel appears also in his second volume (Acts 1:13). While Mark and Matthew describe the other Simon as a Galilean or Canaanite, Luke describes him as the zealot. In John, the calling of the disciples is more complicated. First, Peter nnd Andrew are introduced to Jesus by the Baptist, and in the same phrase he had used earlier to announce him to the crowd (“Here is the Lamb of God”). But only Simon, “son of John. . .to be called Cephas (translated Peter),”20 and Philip, both of Bethsaida in Galilee, are summoned to follow. Nathanael, the hardest to convince, ultimately acknowledges Jesus as Son of God, King of Israel, following their dialogue. In Mark, Matthew and Luke the lists of the disciples are virtually alike, whereas in the Fourth Gospel the number is drastically reduced to two, Simon Peter and Philip.
Could the slight differences existing between the three Synoptists derive from later remembrance of the number of the Twelve, a remembrance absent or deliberately erased by the time the Fourth Gospel was composed? Or, are the listings simply trajections into the record of traditions that took on life in the communities from which they derived? In view of the four evangelists’ agreement, as well as the priority they give to the one they first name, whatever may have been the role of the others, Simon Peter must surely have belonged to the first company of Jesus’ followers, and, if the Synoptists are to be credited, Andrew, and the Zebedees, James and John, together with the tax-collector Levi or Matthew, belonged to it as well.
The appellation “zealot,” attached to the second Simon named by Luke in his Gospel and Acts, has suggested to some that among Jesus’ followers at least one disciple belonged to a group involved in resistance to Rome. The conclusion drawn is that the revolt by Judas of Galilee gave birth to a Jewish freedom movement which developed into the Zealots by the time Jesus lived and worked, and that “Simon Zelotes” belonged to this movement. The suggestion that the title “Iscariot” naming Jesus’ betrayer is a transliteration of the Latin sicarius, that is, “dagger man,” thus that Judas was also a guerrilla whose betrayal was actually a move intended to force Jesus to assume power, puts a considerable strain on the imagination. The most plausible explanation is that “Iscariot” is a Greek transliteration of a Hebrew name, consisting of two elements, the first a common noun meaning “man,” and the second denoting provenance, the place from whence, hence “the man from Kirioth,” that is, from a town in south Judea. Of all those called to follow, Matthew (Levi) was the most despised. His ilk put in bids with the local governor for the opportunity to collect taxes among their own kind, notoriously bilking them in excess of the amount bid along with their expenses. For all intents and purposes the “publican” was a minion of the hated conqueror. The assortment of disciples was thus a “mixed bag,” comprised of Galilean fisherfolk, one, if not two. possibly resistance or protest types, and a hated lackey of the Roman rule. But it would not do to set the aggregate down as simple, unlearned country bumpkins, particularly in light