Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ. This will eventually be a years long project that I hope will be called "the most intensive study of The Gospel ever written." If you are here for your first time, avail yourself of the introductory posting, which can be found here. It explains broadly what we hope to achieve here.
Please note that I have (finally) gotten around to creating the separate page for the running list of Jesus' sayings. That page can be found here. There will also always be a link to it at the bottom of each study entry. It looks very simple, but it will allow for precise exploration of Jesus' philosophy later on. Please familiarize yourself with its parameters.
We have little time to waste, so today we're jumping right into our Gospel reading.
Matthew 4:1 through Matthew 4:2
1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.
2 He fasted for forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry.
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*** The period of time between The Old Testament narratives and The New Testament.
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I don't know if you see what I see, but there is so much here.
We are about to spend a couple of study sessions with this "devil" character, so things may get strange for a while.
Recall that Jesus has just been baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist, and, immediately, a voice came from the sky with praise for Jesus. Now, the narrative takes one of its many sideways jerks and Jesus is, straight away, led by the Spirit (of God) out into the middle of the desert specifically "to be tempted by the devil."
What follows is nine verses during the course of which Jesus Christ interacts with and talks exclusively to "The Devil."
To get through these verses with our understanding of Christ intact, we need to work our minds around the Christian conception of The Devil, "Satan," and evil in general. That will be the work of the next couple of sessions here. Before we dive resolutely into that dark subject matter, though, let's focus in on Matthew 4:2 for a moment.
Here, The Man is recorded as having fasted for forty days and nights in the desert away from civilization. This is an amazing feat. Beyond amazing, this is the kind of feat we could call quintessentially ascetic and shamanistic. John the Baptist can be imagined doing such a thing. (Let's concede here that the forty-day figure was an exaggerated one, but that the fasting did last for a significant period of time.)
Fasting as a mechanism of communion with the divine predated Jesus by millenia. It has been long known that ritual fasting can lead to hallucinations or "visions" or "spiritual experiences," brought on, at least in part, by the brain's reaction to a nutrient-deprived, stressful environment. Throughout history, mystics from innumerable faiths and world-views have availed themselves of the mind expanding nature of fasting to get closer to their myriad Gods or Nirvanas.
For anyone who doubts the mind altering effects of fasting, I challenge you to - after first consulting with your doctor to see if it is safe for you to do so - fast for just forty-eight hours. No calories for forty-eight hours. In my experience, the mind without calories for forty-eight hours is, frankly, not itself. The mind, in that state, behaves the way it does on various psychoactive compounds.
I focus in on Matthew 4:2 because it says a lot about Jesus, if he actually did this thing. Jesus would have known that forty days without food were going to make him hallucinate and open his mind up. So, if he deliberately wandered out there, he did so deliberately to "trip," for lack of a better word. He went out to seek special knowledge through an altered state, perhaps in the exact way that, for instance, shamans in Peru today seek revelation through altered states induced by entheogenic teas.
Why is it important to consider Jesus' altered state here?
The reader will recall that I work to reconcile the story of Jesus with what the senses tell us about reality. Given that it is certainly the capacity of the human mind, under duress, to produce demons of hallucination, we can easily see anything "supernatural" occuring to Jesus in the desert as the result of the hunger-and-heat-stroke visions he would have likely endured during a spiritual quest of this nature. So, where literalists see a literal demon talking to Jesus, I see a self-inflicted hallucination.
You are welcome to see it either way.
You are welcome to see it either way.
The wandering in the desert, a feat of extreme asceticism, occurs in slightly differing forms in all three of the Synoptic Gospels. It does not occur in The Gospel According to John. Since the wandering in the desert for forty days is "triple tradition*," we lean towards accepting it as historical.
Immediately subsequent to the forty days in the desert, in all three Synoptics, is the "Beginning of the Galilean Ministry." Can we thus look at the forty days as the gestation period for the coming ministry? Can we see it as a period of revelation for Christ during which his understanding of the world and his philosophy began to coalesce (or finished coalescing) from experience, sense, and self-reflection?
Yes, we can.
Do we have to read the following passages against our senses, believing that an ill-defined figure called "The Devil" is literally visited upon Jesus during his forty day ordeal?
No, we do not.
We will be back over this tricky ground again, of course. Let's move forward for now, knowing that there are multiple ways to interpret the passages we are shortly going to study.
Today, we need to briefly introduce The Devil, aka Satan, aka Beelzebul, aka The Prince of Darkness. As I said, we will be with this figure for a few installments, and we will be using those installments to delve deep into its origins and evolutions. For now, we will start with a very broad aperture look at belief in The Devil.
The word "satan" was a noun before it was a proper-noun. Satan is originally Hebrew, and means "adversary" or "opponent." The word "devil" comes from the ancient Greek "diábolos," meaning "accuser" or "slanderer.” Beelzebul is from the Hebrew "ba‘al-z'vúv" meaning "Lord of the Flies."
Modern understanding of Satan comes not from scripture but from the writings of later Christians who were, generally, trying to understand the Problem of Evil in the context of a perfect God. The Devil does not occur in the five books of The Pentateuch**, and it is arguable that he doesn't occur in The Old Testament at all outside the Books of Job and Zechariah. Certainly, Satan is not defined in The Old Testament, nor is he given a back-story or biography.
The New Testament does not help us much in defining or giving biography to this evil figure, either. He is mentioned there in several books, including those of The Gospel, but knowledge of him is always presupposed in The New Testament, the same way it presupposes the knowledge of Mammon, one of the other demons mentioned in The Gospel.
The near absence of thought in the ancient Jewish scripture about The Devil followed by the numerous mentions of a devil in The New Testament which presuppose common knowledge lead one to believe that something changed in the way Jews understood their cosmology during the Intertestamental Period***. We will spend time looking at what exactly happened during that period, in regards to cosmological beliefs.
This is all to say, though, that the half (or slightly more than half) of the population of modern America that believe in The Devil cannot have gotten their common concepts about him from scripture.
What's the common concept of The Prince of Darkness, then?
The Devil is frequently portrayed in Christian art and writing as being red or darker in skin-tone, having hairy or animal legs and cloven hooves, having horns on his head, and carrying a pitchfork which he uses to torment the damned in hell. All of these attributes have multiple precedents in ancient pre-Christian mythologies.
Common tradition sees The Devil as a powerful angel, once favored by God in heaven, who had sinned in pride and was therefore exiled out of heaven to a realm of torture called "hell." Common tradition says that Satan holds dominion over Earth, and is the source of sin and human folly. Somehow, Satan balances the power of God on earth, despite the fact that God is understood to be singularly omnipotent. Common tradition literally believes that this malevolent being called Satan is present in all places and at all times in the earthly realm, and constantly works to cultivate pain and turmoil for all of humanity.
Responsibility for all evil deeds, evil people and calamities of all sorts may and should, ultimately, according to the common concept of Satan, be attributed to this dark figure.
I must reiterate: this stuff is not in The Bible. These concepts came either from intertestamental apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, or were among many invented between the dawning of the Imperial Church in the fourth century and the modern era. The Bible features various demons and devils, but doesn't offer the specificity on this topic that later evolved in Christian thought. Over the next few sessions, we will study the origins and the evolution of these concepts.
Today, I just want to leave you with this question: if you believe in The Devil, who exactly gave you those beliefs, and where did they get them?
Think it through to the end.
Think it through to the end.
We hope to see you next time, when we will discuss the concept of demons and spirits as they pre-dated even the Jewish thought systems. Until then, please share this writing.
Love.
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* "Triple Tradition" means "occuring in all three Synoptic Gospels," and is a good sign that a passage contains some historicity.
** 'The Pentateuch" is the name given to the first five books of The Old Testament. It includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
*** The period of time between The Old Testament narratives and The New Testament.
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