On Matthew 4:7 through Matthew 4:9

Hello, friend, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.  This will be the most intensive free-form Gospel study ever written.  Each time we meet, we digest a tiny part of the Gospel of Christ in succession - no more than three verses.  Our focus is to perceive the truest, most intellectually honest Jesus Christ that we can, and to try discern from that perception the actual moral positions and teachings of The Man.  If you'd like to start from the beginning, click here.

Today, we continue a multi-part study designed to help us understand how the concept of a "capital-S" Satan evolved from being non-existent in the Biblical Hebrew tradition to being a cartoonish super-villain that balances the power of the Almighty here on earth in the modern day.

After that, we'll study Matthew 4:7 through 4:9, wherein we will find Jesus Saying Number 3, as he continues to interact with Satan in the desert.

Please don't forget that we at The Moral Vision are of the opinion that Jesus is not interacting with a literal devil, but rather that he is experiencing a kind of vision or hallucination brought on by forty days of deliberate fasting.  Also, please don't forget that we are compiling a separate page containing a running list of Jesus' sayings as they appear to us during the course of our study.  That page can be found here. 

Alright, let's get going.

Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity

Part III

The Book of Enoch and the Intertestamental Period

When last we met, we excluded The Old Testament as the source of the modern conception of Satan by looking at the various uses of the Hebrew word "satan" found therein.  We discovered that "satan," in The Old Testament, is not used as a name but a term meaning, generally, "adversary."  Knowing that Satan is used as the capitalized name for The Devil in The New Testament, we have been left wondering: when did satan become Satan?  The answer is "during the Intertestamental Period."

We may have defined "Intertestamental Period" before, but in case we missed it, the "Intertestamental Period" is that period of time between the closing of The Old Testament Canon around 420 BC and the first-century-AD writing of The New Testament works.  Another phrasing used for this period is "deuterocanonical."  Here we will use both words, in order to increase familiarity with the terms.

Some might think by merely reading the modern Bible that, during the Intertestamental Period, all significant writing and prophesying stopped within the Jewish tradition.  This would be short-sighted.  The period of time in question, rather than being a period of silence as some have termed it, was actually a period of great clamor for Judaism.  All the major divisions and sects of Judaism we've discussed to date had foundational roots in the Intertestamental Period.  The Essenes, The Sadducees and The Pharisees all came to exist as divisions of Judaism during the Intertestamental Period.

The unique literature found at the Qumran caves in The Dead Sea Scrolls represent a portion of what we call "intertestamental apocrypha," that is, religious texts written during the Intertestamental Period that are not accepted as canon.  Other intertestamental apocrypha include The Book of Tobit and The Book of Judith (both excluded from Jewish Canon but later accepted into Roman Catholic Canon).  We introduce these terms and examples to give context to a particular piece of intertestamental apocrypha, a fragment of which was indeed found among The Dead Sea Scrolls: The Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch is a multi-part text that was likely written over a period of some lifetimes by several different authors.  The book claims to be authored by Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah.  Jews reading Enoch when it was first widely in circulation - the second and first centuries BC - would have believed this authorship claim and thus understood Enoch as being far more ancient than modern scholarship tells us it is.  Modern scholarship points to Enoch's authorship between 300 and 100 BC, roughly.

The book was likely excluded from The Tanakh* and The Septuagint** because concepts in Enoch were thought to be blasphemous at the time of the formation of these canons.  Particularly blasphemous, it seems, may have been the idea, presented in Enoch, that a group of God's heavenly angels had staged a rebellion against him.  This idea is not in keeping with Jewish tradition, which holds that God is in total control of all things in Heaven as well as on earth.  Dividing the power of God by writing that his own minions had rebelled against him would have been blasphemous, indeed.

The Book of Enoch was widely known, read, and circulated during the early years of Christianity, and there are examples of ancient Church Fathers having quoted from or otherwise having availed themselves of the text, despite the fact that it was not accepted into what would eventually become official Christian canon.  We see Augustine of Hippo, living between the fourth and fifth centuries, speaking out against the cosmology of The Book of Enoch, which indicates it was still being widely read at that time.  We must also note that The Book of Enoch was and is accepted as canon in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

So, why do we go to such lengths to introduce this "Book of Enoch" in the context of a study of Satan?  Well, as it turns out, The Book of Enoch may be the origin of a huge portion of the "cosmology" of Satan.

(We will undoubtedly need to return to The Book of Enoch at a later date for in-depth study outside of our current context, so do not fret today when we cherry-pick through the text for data pertaining to our devilish topic.)

Broadly, The Book of Enoch presents us with five distinct texts.  The first part of the Book of Enoch is known as The Book of Watchers.  The Book of Watchers describes, among other things, a "fall of angels" from Heaven, a hellish crucible designed to hold the fallen angels, and a particularly evil chief of these fallen angels, "Azazel."  The Book of Watchers is where we will focus all of our energy today.  For good measure, however: the second part of Enoch is The Book of Parables of Enoch, which we will find interesting later for its eschatological qualities.  The third part is The Astronomical Book, which describes the movement of celestial bodies and lays out a 364 day calendar.  The fourth part is The Book of Dream Visions, traditionally understood to be a dream-prophecy of Jewish history from a pre-Flood vantage point.  The fifth and last portion is The Epistle of Enoch, containing exhortations and fragmentary history.

The Book of Watchers is our primary focus because The Book of Watchers is the first place in Jewish literature or scripture that we find a character that could be roughly equivalent to the modern Satan.  The Book of Watchers tells the story of 200 angels in heaven who are watching humanity as it multiplies in its early days.  The angels (apparently all male) begin to talk amongst one another about how sexually appealing the human women had become over the generations.  They resolve to each go down to earth, pick out a woman, and impregnate her.  Before they go, there is discussion among them acknowledging the sinfulness of their desire.  They decide to do it anyway.

In 1 Enoch*** Chapter 7, the text refers to the women in question:

"And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells..."

So the result of the unholy union between these sinful, fallen angels and the human women is that the women become pregnant with a race of giants that would be, depending on how you convert from the ancient unit of measurement "ells," nearly a mile in height!  The narrative continues:

"...Who consumed all the acquisitions of men.  And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind."

Life on earth descends into chaos as the giants spread sin everywhere and consume mankind.  Then, in 1 Enoch Chapter 8, the fallen angel chief Azazel teaches humanity the ways of war and materialism****:

"And Azazel taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them, and bracelets, and ornaments, and the use of antimony, and the beautifying of the eyelids, and all kinds of costly stones, and all colouring tinctures.  And there arose much godlessness, and they committed fornication, and they were led astray, and became corrupt in all their ways."

Chapter 9 shows the top echelon of the loyal angels of Heaven, including Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, and Raphael, asking God why he has allowed Azazel and the other fallen angels to wreak havoc on earth.  It is a classic framing of the "question of evil."  To paraphrase, they ask God: "if you are all good, and you know all things, and are thus privy to the sin unleashed on earth, how is it that you allow that sin to occur?"

God responds by telling the angels to warn Noah that there would be a flood which would destroy the world.  He then tells the heavenly angels to cast the 200 fallen angels into what can be interpreted to be "hell."  From Chapter 10, the Lord is quoted:

"Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein.  And place upon him rough and jagged rocks, and cover him with darkness, and let him abide there for ever, and cover his face that he may not see light.  And on the day of the great judgement he shall be cast into the fire."

Resolutely, regarding the origin of sin, God says to his angels:

"And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught by Azazel: to him ascribe all sin."

It will be immediately clear to anyone familiar with modern Christian cosmology that Azazel and his comrades are the direct pre-cursors to the capital-S Satan that arrives in The New Testament.  For the first time, we see Jewish literature reflecting the rough outline of the "Satan" story.  A prideful angel(s) has fallen from the grace of the heavenly court and thus made earth its realm.  That angel has taken his opportunity of power on earth to corrupt humanity and to teach it all the wicked, lustful ways of the world.  The angel is then condemned to a special realm of punishment which is filled with fire.  These concepts are simply never spelled out in the canonical Jewish scriptures the way they are here in the non-canonical Book of Enoch. 

The Deuterocanonical Period, as one familiar with The Old and New Testaments would be bound to expect, proves to be absolutely transformational in terms of Jewish cosmology.  The shift that occurs during the Deuterocanonical Period is so important to our understanding of Jesus, going forward.  The shift was away from the thinking that God was personally responsible for all things, good and evil.  The shift was to the thinking that God never acted wrongly, but was balanced by an evil force that sat cosmologically external to him and begat all sin and suffering in the world.  The Book of Enoch articulates this shift very well.

The need to split the powers of the cosmos into a dualistic "good/evil" scheme probably arose during the Deuterocanonical Period because this was also the period during which Israel lived as a (grateful) subject of the Persian Empire.  As the cultures intermingled, The Jews would have been exposed to the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, and likely found the dualistic nature of that religion intriguing.  (You'll recall from a couple installments back that Zoroastrianism featured an omnibenevolent God, Ahura Mazda, balanced by a powerful, lizard-like force of pure evil, Angra Mainyu.)  

In addition to Zoroastrian influences from the east, Jews later in this era would have been introduced to Hellenistic philosophical concepts such as the "immortality of the soul," which led to increased speculation about the nature of some kind of final judgment, and the existence of a divided afterlife.  Wordly horizons, in many ways, very rapidly opened up to the Jewish community in Palestine during the Intertestamental Period, and this goes a long way in explaining a) where the dualistic cosmology of The New Testament comes from and b) why we suddenly see apocalypticism and cults of extremism abound during the late portion of that period.

Somewhere between The Book of Enoch and The Gospel, Satan was born.  Within context, his birth at that time makes perfect sense.

Next time, we will look at how Satan or "The Devil" is portrayed in The Gospel, and the rest of The New Testament.  

For now, let's get back to our regularly scheduled Gospel reading.

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Matthew 4:7 through Matthew 4:9

7 Jesus answered him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’” 

8 Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, 

9 and he said to him, “All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.” 

------------------------------

Recall that, last time, Satan preposterously challenged Jesus to jump off a high edge, because he thought that if Jesus was the Son of God (which he hasn't claimed to be), angels would swoop out and save Jesus before impact.  Today, in Matt 4:7, we get Jesus' snappy retort.  He says that scripture says "not to test God," so he's not going to test the "angels-protecting-him-from-a-fall" theory just on a whim, as it could be sinful.

In response to this, The Devil takes Jesus to a spot from which they can see all the kingdoms of the world.  He indicates the world and says to Jesus "worship me, and I will give you all of this."

Matthew 4:9 reflects perfectly the dualism that we've just been learning about.  Matthew 4:9 implies that all of the kingdoms of earth are under the influence and possession of The Devil because, after all, he could not offer these things to Jesus unless they were already his to give.  The cosmology reflected here is distinctly outside that of Biblical Judaism.  In The Tanakh, the world would never be anyone's to give aside from God's.

Do you think Jesus is going to prostrate himself and worship Satan in exchange for dominion over the world?

You'll have to tune in next time to find out, as Jesus' mystical experience in the desert continues.

Thank you for reading.  Please share this writing.  Until next time...

Love.

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* The Tanakh, remember, is the Hebrew Bible.

** The Septuagint is the earliest extant translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, created between the third and second centuries BC.

*** We call Enoch "1 Enoch" because there was another text written later, in the first century AD, which was called The Book of Enoch.  We call the second one 2 Enoch.

**** Azazel: The First American?

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 4:5 through Matthew 4:6

Welcome back to The Moral Vision, a comprehensive and ongoing gospel-study.  If this is your first time here, you might take a peek at the "Introduction" and move forward from there.  The Introduction can be found here.

Last week, we began a multi-part study of the origins of the modern conception of The Devil by studying some demons and devils that pre-dated Judaism (or were at least as old.)  This week, that study continues from where we left off, as we look at The Devil in The Old Testament.  We've taken this course of study because our narrative in The Gospel According to Matthew has Jesus currently out in the desert being tempted by Satan.

Belief in Satan is widespread in the modern United States.  Understanding of where the idea of Satan comes from is not.  Over time, we can remedy this with study.  Let's get to it.

Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity

Part II

Devils and Satan in The Old Testament

In Part I, we met some demons that all had motifs in common with the "Satan" modern Christians believe in today.  This gave us some literary context for Christ's encounter with Satan in the desert.  However, if we stopped there, our literary context would be woefully incomplete.  Of course, the most important context for Jesus, always, is the ancient Jewish context, so we must now peer through the Holy Scriptures of Judaism -The Tanakh, or "Old Testament,"- in search of Satan.

Modern believers in Satan believe that his first appearance is in Genesis, tempting Eve in The Garden of Eden.  In fact, Genesis only mentions a "snake" or a "serpent," depending upon the translation, and not a fallen angel named "Satan."  This occurs in Chapter 3, when Eve is having a talk with a snake in The Garden of Eden.

From Genesis, Chapter 3:

1 Now the snake was the most cunning of all the wild animals that the LORD God had made. He asked the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?” 

2 The woman answered the snake: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 

3 it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, or else you will die.’” 

4 But the snake said to the woman: “You certainly will not die! 

5 God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil.”

The snake is referred to as one among the several animal species existing in The Garden of Eden.  It is not described as being a fallen angel.  It is not described as being a demon, or as being possessed by a demon or The Devil.  The snake that tempts Eve in Genesis simply is not the modern capital-S Satan.

The serpent in Genesis is not associated with Satan anywhere in The Old Testament.  In fact, it is not associated with Satan anywhere in The New Testament.  The first time we see them associated is in writings from the second-century AD.

Satan, in Hebrew, means "adversary" or "accuser."  The word does occur a handful of times in The Old Testament as translated in The New American Bible, but the word is never used as a proper name anywhere in said text.  It always occurs with "the" or, less frequently, with "a" preceding it.

The word occurs most frequently, in The Old Testament, in the first two chapters of The Book of Job.  There "the satan" is described as one of a kind of council of divine beings.  In Job, Chapter 1, God prys at "the satan," unprovoked:

8 The Lord said to the satan, “Have you noticed my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him, blameless and upright, fearing God and avoiding evil.”

The satan suggests that Job is only blameless and upright because he has a big loving family and land and livestock and abundance.  The satan suggests that if these things were taken from Job, Job would curse God.  God tells the satan to go wreak havoc on Job's life, but that he may not touch Job.  The satan kills and destroys all that Job has, and waits to see him curse God.  Job does not curse God, and Chapter 1 ends.  Chapter 2 is a repeat of Chapter 1, only this time, God allows the satan to touch Job's flesh.  Job becomes afflicted with a skin condition that sounds just unbearable.

7 So the satan went forth from the presence of the LORD and struck Job with severe boils from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.

8 He took a potsherd to scrape himself, as he sat among the ashes.

Let the imagery sit with you for a moment.  Job, sitting in the very ashes of his life, scrapes at the boils on his skin with the sharp edge of a shard of pottery.  Brutal, eh?  Yet God allows it from "the satan," about whom The Book of Job offers no biography.

Past this point, some of Job's friends enter the scene as a kind of suicide watch.  They have some lengthy dialogues with him about life and the nature of suffering in relation to an omnibenevolent God.  Satan does not re-enter the scene.  So, to reiterate, the book of the Tanakh which contains the word "satan" most frequently is Job, and in The Book of Job we are given zero biographical information about this "adversary."

First Chronicles offers us another use of "satan."  In 1 Chronicles 21:1, where the text recounts part of the story of the reign of King David, we read the following:

1 A satan rose up against Israel, and he incited David to take a census of Israel.  

2 David therefore said to Joab and to the other generals of the army, “Go, number the Israelites from Beer-sheba to Dan, and report back to me that I may know their number.” 

3 But Joab replied: “May the LORD increase his people a hundredfold! My lord king, are not all of them my lord’s subjects? Why does my lord seek to do this thing? Why should he bring guilt upon Israel?”

Again, this is not Satan with a capital-S like modern Christians believe in.  This is "a satan," which means "adversary" or "accuser."

Interestingly, the parallel King David narrative in Second Samuel 24:1 replaces the satan inciting David with God himself.  How could the same character be God in one instance of scripture and, in another, a satan?  See for yourself, as in 2 Samuel Chapter 24:

1 The LORD’s anger against Israel flared again, and he incited David against them: “Go, take a census of Israel and Judah.” 

2 The king therefore said to Joab and the leaders of the army who were with him, “Tour all the tribes of Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba and register the people, that I may know their number.” 

There are two more possible references to check out.  First of all, Zechariah 3:1 and 3:2, which read as follows in The New American Bible:

1 Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the LORD, while the adversary stood at his right side to accuse him.  

2 And the angel of the LORD said to the adversary, “May the LORD rebuke you, O adversary; may the LORD who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?”

The word that was translated to "the adversary" here was, again, the Hebrew "satan." Not the capital-S Satan that modern Christians believe in. This "adversary" is a kind of faceless prosecutor in the court of God. Zechariah offers no biography for the entity, and no other reason for us to link this "adversary" entity with the capital-S Satan.

The last bit of the old scriptures we'll note here is Psalms 109, where "the accuser" again makes an appearance.  (Note that the King James Version takes a liberty here and uses the capital-S "Satan," which probably helped the notoriety of the capital-S Satan, but was not true to the original scripture, which meant, again, "accuser.")  

This is the pertinent text from Psalms 109 as it appears in the more linguistically accurate New American Bible:

6 Appoint an evil one over him,
an accuser to stand at his right hand, 

7 That he may be judged and found guilty,
that his plea may be in vain.

It is amazing to see this fact laid bare before us: there is no capital-S "Satan" in the Jewish Holy Scriptures.

This fact, it stands to reason, would surprise a great many of Satan's fervent believers today.  What may be more interesting is the sudden appearance of a capital-S Satan in The New Testament, which seems to come out of nowhere.  Next time, in part three of our study, we will dispel the sense that Satan's appearance in The New Testament is "out of nowhere" by identifying the origins of the New Testament Satan in the intertestamental period.

Now, let's get back to our gospel.

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Matthew 4:5 through Matthew 4:6

5 Then the devil took him to the holy city, and made him stand on the parapet of the temple, 

6 and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written: 

‘He will command his angels concerning you’
and ‘with their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.’”

------------------------------

Today, the devil tempts Jesus to try to kill himself with a fatal leap off of the high-spot of the Second Temple, because, he says, "if you are truly the Son of God, angels would catch you before you hit the ground."

Recall that Jesus has not said that he is the Son of God, to our knowledge.  These words are being put into Jesus' mouth.  Satan references Psalms 91 erroneously here, and will do the same again in Luke.

It is somewhat unclear why Jesus would find suicide tempting in that moment, or, more to the point, why Jesus would take the time and considerable risk to satisfy the whim of The Devil's curiosity.  This interchange really only makes sense in the context of a Gospel designed as a marketing tool. The third character in this interchange is the reader, for whom the conversation is being had.

I'll remind you that we are not taking the temptation in the desert as historical, except to acknowledge that Jesus went to the desert for an ascetic period of fasting during which it is possible he experienced altered states of consciousness due to exposure and lack of calories and water.

Next time, we will hear Christ's retort to this preposterous dare.

We'll leave it here for today.  Join us next time, and please share this writing.

Love.

-------------------------
To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 4:3 through Matthew 4:4

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.  If this is your first time, you may get oriented by the Introduction, here.

As you'll recall, last time, we left Jesus hungry in the desert where he had just fasted for forty days and nights.  He is in the desert "to be tempted by the devil."  Today, before we pick up that narrative, we're going to begin part one of a multi-part study of The Devil, aka Satan.  We'll call this short study "Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity."

First, allow me to reiterate what we learned last time, with a caveat: The Devil does not appear at all in The Pentateuch, and is not given a biography anywhere in the canonical Christian Bible.  The caveat: though we've not discussed it yet, there is some evidence of the devil in certain intertestamental apocrypha which did pre-date Jesus by at least a century.  However, it is not until the writings of the Church Father Origen in the third-century AD that we see the story of Satan as the fallen leader of angels within the Christian cosmology beginning to truly coalesce.  

It would be several centuries later that the pitchfork-jabbing, cartoonish Satan, which many Christians fear today, was fully formed.

Today, we will strive to bolster our understanding with some religious and literary context on devils and demons.  We have miles of ground to cover, so let's get started.

Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity

Part I

Devils before Satan

Today, for millions of Christians, "The Devil" is a supernatural entity that administers a fiery section of the afterlife known as Hell.  This being works constantly against God to incite sin and evil in humanity, so that they will ultimately be damned by God in some fantastical final judgment and forced to spend eternity in Hell as The Devil's subjects and eternal torture victims.

During the course of this study-within-a-study, we will cover several topics.  First, we will look at demons and devils in religion and literature pre-dating Judaism, for historical and literary context.  Second, we will look over the various references to demons, devils and monsters in The Old Testament.  Third, we will look at some particular intertestamental apocrypha.  Fourth, we will look at the New Testament references to The Devil and Satan.  Lastly, we will look at the major leaps that occurred over the centuries since the Apostolic Age to bring us to the modern, cartoonish conception of Satan, and of The Problem of Evil itself.

Today, we'll start basically as far back as we possibly can in history.  We will start in Mesopotamia around 2150 BC, when a story called "Ninurta's Exploits" was written by an author whose name is long since lost to time.

Ninurta's Exploits follows the Sumerian God-King Ninurta on an adventure, the main feature of which is the vanquishing of an epic demon-monster called Asag.  Asag, for the purpose of this study, is analogous to the Christian Satan.  This demon, at the beginning of the epic of Ninurta, is said to be leading successful armies against the cities of Sumeria.  His armies are unstoppable, as they are comprised of creatures made of stone - the result of the sexual union of Asag and the mountains themselves. Asag, as the story goes, runs amok across the Sumerian countryside. Ninurta, the God-King, is warned that:

[Asag] is confident that it can lay hands on the powers received by you in the abzu. Its face is deformed, its location is continually changing; day by day, the Asag adds territories to its domain. 

Ninurta, full of all things good, determines to go to the mountains to fight Asag. As Ninurta approaches the mountains, Asag jumps out to meet him in battle. Immediately subsequent to this comes the following epic description of Asag's might and wickedness:

For a club it uprooted the sky, took it in its hand; like a snake it slid its head along the ground. It was a mad dog attacking to kill the helpless, dripping with sweat on its flanks. Like a wall collapsing, the Asag fell on Ninurta the son of Enlil. Like an accursed storm, it howled in a raucous voice; like a gigantic snake, it roared at the Land. It dried up the waters of the Mountains, dragged away the tamarisks, tore the flesh of the Earth and covered her with painful wounds. It set fire to the reed-beds, bathed the sky in blood, turned it inside out; it dispersed the people there.

The vivid descriptions that we get in this ancient text are just phenomenal.  I particularly love "like a wall collapsing, the Asag fell on Ninurta," as well as "bathed the sky in blood, turned it inside out."  The entire text is relatively awesome like this, although patches of the text are entirely lost to history, making some sections difficult to comprehend at all.

The story of Ninurta vs Asag, which ends with Ninurta's smiting Asag with his talking mace, highlights a good-evil dualism that existed far in advance of the dualism of Greco-Roman Christianity.  Although the original purpose of this text is lost to us, it gives us a good idea of just how old the concept of a powerful supernatural evil force is.  This goes to show that there would have been a plurality of demons and devils in the summation of the middle-eastern pantheon throughout not only the Apostolic era, but the entire Biblical Era, too.

For our second demon of context, let's look at the Gorgons.  Grecophiles will recognize Gorgon as the name of the three creature-sisters from Greek mythology.  The Gorgons were (usually) hideous and (usually) threatening entities that, in the ancient cosmology, sat somewhere beneath the Greek pantheon of gods, but somewhere above humanity.  The most well known of the Gorgons was Medusa, because she was famed as having been killed by Perseus, a demigod, in a particularly memorable story.  The less frequently mentioned two Gorgons were Stheno and Euryale*.

Medusa is a well known figure, even in modern times.  Like her two sisters, Medusa was said to have hair made of snakes or interwoven with snakes, and her visage could turn a person to stone with just a glance.  The Gorgons appear in the work of the ancient poet Homer, as well as in The Aeneid of Virgil.  The word Gorgon is rooted in "gorgos," Greek for "grim or dreadful," and may be related to the Sanksrit "garjana," which meant "growling" and was probably onomatopoeic.

Images of Gorgons were used in ancient Greece to protect buildings and objects, which demonstrates that they were not understood as "purely evil," the way Satan is.  Like Satan, however, Gorgons were understood to be mortally fearsome and dangerous.  We might see Satan's later association with all things lizard-like or serpentine as related to the snakiness of the Gorgon sisters, which may relate to the slithery, snakey description of Asag all the way back in Sumeria.

For our third example of pre-Judaic devils, we will turn to the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism.  Zoroastrianism, an ancient monotheistic religion, was founded by a philosopher name Zoroaster as early as the middle of the second millenium BC.**  Zoroastrianism's one God was known as Ahura Mazda, and, like the Judeo-Christian God, Ahura Mazda was understood to be omnibenevolent.  Ahura Mazda had a rival called Angra Mainyu.  Like Satan, Angra Mainyu serves as the counterpoint to Mazda's omnibenevolence, and is represented as omnimalevolent.

It is thought that Ahura Mazda was one of a pantheon of gods that existed in the ancient middle-east prior to Zoroaster, and that Zoroaster simply elevated Ahura Mazda to a position of "not having been created," or singular Godhood above all others.

Angra Mainyu may be entirely Zoroaster's creation, as we first know of this creature of pure evil from Zoroaster's own writing. In Zoroaster's Gathas, the foundational religious texts of Zoroastrianism, Angra Mainyu is shown as being the originator of lies and of sin, and as being bent on damaging the spiritual well-being of humanity.

Of the three pre-Judaic demons we are looking at today, Angra Mainyu might have the most in common with Satan. Angra Mainyu was a kind of universal scapegoat for suffering and misfortune, or a stand in for any kind of evil, just like Satan is for his believers today. Rather than pray specifically for the end to all the various ailments they faced, Zoroastrians could just pray "for the displacement of Angra Mainyu with his creatures which are likewise evil as he is, for he is filled with death," as the Gathas say. It is in this same fashion that modern Christians might pray generally for protection against Satan and his minions, rather than praying for a long list of specific reliefs or safe-guards.

This whirl-wind tour of three pre-Judaic concepts of demons or devils has, as I mentioned before, all been to expose the historical context of the concept of Satan. Before we approach The Devil in The Bible, it is important to know that devils existed before The Devil. It is important to know that the idea of demons pre-dated Satan, and that the concept of supernatural evil sprang up in multiple thought systems and in multiple locations throughout ancient history. It stands to reason that these demonic concepts pre-date history.

Next time, we'll take a look at some of the references to devils and monsters that exist in The Old Testament, and I'll show you exactly what I mean when I say that Satan does not have a biography in the canonical Jewish scripture.

Now, let's get back to The Gospel.

------------------------------

Matthew 4:3 through Matthew 4:4

3 The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.” 

4 He said in reply, “It is written:
  ‘One does not live by bread alone,
   but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”

------------------------------

Here we have Jesus Saying Number 2.  The "tempter" in verse three is obviously Satan.  He approaches Jesus, who we are to understand is near death with hunger from not eating for forty days, and challenges him: "if you are the Son of God, eat some bread that you magically make out of these rocks here!"

In verse four, Shoehorn Matthew*** can be heard echoing in Jesus' reply.  As we have seen over and over again, the text relates directly and constantly back to isolated, out-of-context anecdotes from The Old Testament.  

Since Jesus will say this same thing again in the Luke version of the narrative, it looks like this is also a case of Shoehorn Luke, the less prominent cousin of Shoehorn Matthew.  And, since it's Shoehorns Matthew and Luke, then it very well could have been Shoehorn Q, too.

Oh well. Shoehorn Everybody, I guess.  Except John.  

I digress.

This second saying of Jesus begins what will be a long pattern of him narrowly dodging an awkward accusation or inquiry by quoting something from The Old Testament.  It begins a long pattern of other characters saying that he is, or might be, the Son of God, and him not quite agreeing with them, but not quite disagreeing either.  Jesus offers less moralistic prescription here, and more focused retort.

The saying in verse four relates to Deuteronomy 8:3.  In Deuteronomy 8:3, Moses is conveying God's law to the Jews and expounding upon it.  He tells the reader to remember when they had been hungry and God had nourished them with manna in the desert, "...so you might know that it is not by bread alone that people live, but by all that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord."

If we look for a moral take-away, here, we have to take it from the original Deuteronomical meaning of the saying, which seems to be that possession of material things, even those that are normally considered to be of life-or-death value, is subordinate in importance to matters of spiritual fitness.  This message certainly fits with the Jesus I know.

Join us next time, as the work continues.  Thank you for reading.  Please share.

Love. 

-------------------------
* Euryale.  Cool name!

** The span of time in which various modern historians contend Zoroaster may have lived is unusually large, with serious parties contending dates from 1500 to 500 BC!

*** I call him Shoehorn Matthew because he's always trying to shoehorn the Jesus story into a Jewish context.

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To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 4:1 through Matthew 4:2

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.

------------------------------

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.

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.

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.

-------------------------

* "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.

-------------------------
To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.
For the index of Christ's words, click here.

On Matthew 3:16 through Matthew 3:17

Hello, and welcome back to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ.

If you're not familiar with the nature of this study already, you may want to refer to the Introduction to this work, which you can find here.

The impetus for this writing is, of course, the apparent and innumerable contradictions between American Christian ideals (which include, primarily, violence and profit) and the words that Jesus actually spoke.  We work to shine a penetrating light at these contradictions in an effort to save the world from an otherwise inevitable thermonuclear war sparked by American militarism and greed.  The chasm between American Christian Conservatism and the actual Jesus Christ is so wide as to be unspannable by anything but a bridge of lies.  This study of Jesus' words will be the torch with which that epic bridge of lies is unceremoniously burned to the ground.

This is important, so let's get to it.

Last time, when Jesus first spoke, he insisted that John the Baptist baptize him, despite John's assertion that he was unworthy to.  Today, we will experience the moment immediately after the baptism, and the description of a miracle.  Before we go there, however, we need to revisit an old friend.  (I bet you can guess who...)

We mentioned, a couple of installments back, that one Flavius Josephus had some things to say about John the Baptist.  We glossed over that, at the time, but today's the day to reopen Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews.

Antiquities is, to my knowledge, the only text outside of The Gospels that offers a contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous account of John the Baptist.  Since The Gospels were all written by men who were attempting to proliferate The Jesus Movement, while Josephus had no interest in the spread of The Jesus Movement, the Josephus text can be seen as potentially the least biased and, thereby, most accurate of the accounts.

In Book 18 of Antiquities, near the beginning of Chapter 5, Josephus tells us what he knows about John.  He does so only to explain why Herod's army had suffered a loss at the hands of Aretas, an Arab king.  Josephus says:

Now some of the Jews thought that the destruction of Herod's army came from God, and that very justly, as a punishment of what he did against John, that was called the Baptist: for Herod killed him, who was a good man, and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism; for that the washing [with water] would be acceptable to him, if they made use of it, not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness.  Now when [many] others came in crowds about him, for they were very greatly moved [or pleased] by hearing his words, Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause, and not bring himself into difficulties, by sparing a man who might make him repent of it when it would be too late.  Accordingly he was sent a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious temper, to Macherus, the fortress I before mentioned, and was there put to death.  Now the Jews had an opinion that the destruction of his army was sent as a punishment upon Herod, and a mark of God's displeasure to him.

Josephus wrote this in retrospect, from Rome, in around Anno Domini 93.

Josephus writes almost as breathlessly as the evangelists, so there are a lot of data here.  We will definitely be revisiting this text, and its context, over the next several years.  Today, Josephus leads us to three considerations.  Number one: Josephus seems to disagree with Matthew regarding the nature of John's offered baptism.  Number two: Herod, a client king backed up by the might of Rome, was afraid of John the Baptist, and thought that John might, at any moment, become the leader of a full-scale rebellion.  Number three: philosophical innovation and political radicalism were inseparable in first century Palestine.

To the first point, we hone in on Josephus' statement that John's followers were going to him "...not in order to the putting away [or the remission] of some sins [only], but for the purification of the body; supposing still that the soul was thoroughly purified beforehand by righteousness."  The wording is tricky enough here that I availed myself of a couple of translations, but all of them that could be found retained the [awkwardness].  Josephus is saying "John baptized people to ritually purify their bodies, not to remit their sin, and believed that the soul could only be purified by right-living."  This stands in stark contrast to what Matthew told us recently: that John baptized for repentance, or the remission of sin.

Remember when we postulated that John the Baptist might have known The Essenes, or been an Essene?  Josephus' account of John fits right in with this theory, exactly because of how Josephus describes the baptism of John.  Again, he describes it as being for "purification of the body."  The Essenes, you will recall, bathed daily to maintain bodily ritual purity, which may not be a coincidence.  Either way, we have at least two different versions of John's baptism to reconcile here: the one in Matthew, that is designed to purify one's soul of imperfections caused by sin, and the one in Josephus, which is designed to purify one's body for the gratification of God.

Second, let's focus in on the statement that "Herod, who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion (for they seemed ready to do anything he should advise), thought it best, by putting him to death, to prevent any mischief he might cause..."  

While reading about how afraid Herod was of John, we must highlight the fact that Herod was a very powerful king.  Although known historically as being somewhat paranoid, Herod was in charge of enough territory and people that it would have taken something significant to draw his attention in the way John the Baptist apparently did here.  And, although the Jewish people were known to be prone to rebellion against foreign authority, it would have taken quite a crowd to have gotten the authorities worried about potential rebellion like Josephus says John did.  All this leads one to the understanding that the baptism at the Jordan was not a small thing.  There must have been a lot of folks going out to see this man.  One gets the sense, from the Josephus account, that John's name was well known throughout Palestine at the time.

Is it not fascinating how the actions of a holy ascetic mystic made him the enemy of The State, as if he was some kind of political radical?  This brings us to our third consideration, regarding the intermingling of ancient "church" and State.

The intersection of first-century faith and first-century politics is extremely apparent in Antiquities.  The constant threat of rebellion by religious atypicals (Zealots, Essenes, Sicarii, and others) in the region meant that a tremendous amount of political energy was exhausted trying to guide theological belief.  Public law and religious law were intertwined.  Innovative theological thought or philosophy were seen as threats to political stability.  Neither Jesus nor John would have been surprised at their respective death sentence.  People like John the Baptist and Jesus Christ would have known intuitively that their religious ingenuity would make them political enemies of the varying mechanisms of power and empire.

Here are your take-aways:

1) Josephus contradicts Matthew by saying that John the Baptist was not washing away sin, but bodily impurity, with his baptism.

2) Josephus says that Herod had John killed because he feared a revolution by The Baptist's followers.

3) Religious zeal and ingenuity in the first-century were inherently political and revolutionary.

Let's set Josephus down for today, and pick Matthew back up.

------------------------------

Matthew 3:16 through Matthew 3:17

16 After Jesus was baptized, he came up from the water and behold, the heavens were opened [for him], and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove [and] coming upon him. 

17 And a voice came from the heavens, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

------------------------------

So Jesus gets dunked.  This is a full submersion in the river Jordan.  According to Matthew, he comes up from the water and, in that moment, the sky cracks open.  The "Spirit of God" descends down upon him.  A voice we can only imagine as thunderous - not specified as that of God - comes from where the sky has cracked open, and tells everyone present that Jesus is its son, and that it is happy with him.

I'll reiterate that I do not personally believe in anything that cannot be borne out by sense.  When I read The Gospel, the "miraculous" parts must be historically discounted in order to reconcile my senses with the narrative.  The application of Christian morality, as we will show here over a series of years, does not require a profession of belief in anything metaphysical or extrasensory.

That said, one might wonder why we bother discussing passages like these.  Why not go the route of Thomas Jefferson, who cut all the miraculous stuff out of his Gospels with scissors?

The most obvious answer is that we want to be thorough.  We have precious little contemporaneous record of this man, Jesus.  No matter how dubious or fantastic, all first-century texts regarding Jesus are inherently valuable, because the body of work is so small.  

Studying the "miraculous" elements of these texts can also tell us a lot about the rapid evolution of Christian theology in the first and second centuries.  

The fantastic elements of The Gospels, despite their being fantastic, help us compare and contrast the literary styles, theological understandings, and narratives of our four evangelists.  We can use today's reading as an example of this.

Matthew 3:17's Marcan analogue, 1:11, reads "And a voice came from the heavens, "You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased."  So, the object to whom the voice is addressed changes between these Gospels.  As we mentioned before, the author of Matthew likely had a copy of Mark sitting in front of him while he penned his Gospel.  Why, then, would the evangelist in question choose to make this little change of the phrasing?  The author of Luke, after all, retains the Marcan phrasing in Luke 3:22.

We can postulate a couple of reasons for the disagreement.  The discrepancy could simply have been the result of an anomalous copying error.  Or, perhaps, the author of Matthew strayed from his two synoptic brethren because he had an alternative source for this material.  Perhaps the author just thought "if the voice was coming from the sky, then everyone would have been hearing it.  Let's make that totally clear."  It's a guessing game, at this point in history.

The point to drive, here, is that the four Gospels represent four separate and different accounts of the life of Christ.  Some of the Gospels agree with one another some of the time, but it is, in fact, very rarely that they all agree about a particular thing.  With that said, we will close today with a big, important rhetorical question: "If The Gospels do not tell the same story, which story of Jesus is the true story?"

Gnaw on that until next time, and, please, share this writing.

Love

-------------------------

To read what's next, click here.

To read what came prior to this, click here.

On Matthew 3:13 through Matthew 3:15

Welcome to The Moral Vision of Jesus Christ, your guidebook to The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Here, we're studying the moral code of Christ, verse by verse.  Our reasons are manifold.

We are going at a deliberately slow rate, to ensure that the work will be as exacting as possible.  Today, we will take three verses.  Sometimes we might take two.  Sometimes only one.  We'll do no more than three, though, under normal circumstances.  The totality of this study will take us years.  We work this slowly because we want to be as certain as possible in any conclusions we draw from our study.  We work this slow because to work any faster would guarantee our constantly going off half-cocked and unprepared.*

Today is special because today is the first day we will be reading words attributed to Jesus in our study.  Those of you who read the Introduction may recall that we quoted Jesus in passing there, but that does not count.

Soon we will number the sayings of Christ and break them apart into single ideas.  There will be a separate page here at The Moral Vision which you will have access to by a link at the bottom of the text.  The page will contain a running list of the sayings of Jesus by number, along with a few data points i.e. "Does the saying endorse violence?" "Does the saying endorse human authority?" "Does the saying have Jesus claiming he is God?" "Does the saying endorse materialism?"  The list will also cross-reference the saying with its analogues in the opposing three Gospels.  We will attempt to keep that page up-to-date as much as possible, but updating may occur in fits and starts.

Some of you may have noticed that we've mentioned "red letters" a couple of times without taking the time to explain what "red letter" means exactly.  Some of you may know what we mean off-hand, and some may have no idea, but you can purchase Bibles that have the words of Jesus printed in red text, so that it stands out from the rest of the text.  They call them "Red Letter Bibles."  They are helpful.  This study itself will be in red letter.

Ok.  I think we're ready.  Ladies and gentlemen, it's my excited pleasure to introduce to you the subject of our study, Jesus Christ.

------------------------------

Matthew 3:13 through Matthew 3:15

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. 

14 John tried to prevent him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” 

15 Jesus said to him in reply, “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he allowed him.

------------------------------

Yay!  We're here, finally!

We don't want to get all over-spun, so we'll take this a verse at a time.

Recall that we last left Jesus still a baby in Matthew 2:21.  The narrative jumps from Jesus being a baby, freshly returned from his exile to Egypt (which likely never actually occurred), to Jesus being one of the many adult Jews who are going out to receive John the Baptist's baptism.  The time span between these two points, or Jesus' formative years, we know next to nothing about.  Matthew certainly gives us little clue.  In Matt 3:13, Jesus simply leaves Galilee to get to where John the Baptist is, on the river.

We should take the time to avail ourselves of a map of Palestine the way it was in the first century, which is easily available online.  On a map, we see that Galilee was bordered, for a very short distance along its south-eastern limit, by the Jordan.  This is right where the river flows out of the Sea of Galilee.  The river flows due south where it eventually becomes a tributary of the Dead Sea.  

The wording in Matt 3:13 gives us an indication that Jesus had traveled south far enough that he was no longer in Galilee.  John could have been baptizing, then, anywhere between thirty and seventy miles from Nazareth.  Remember, Nazareth is where we last left Jesus and thereby assume he journeys from.  If Jesus walked, it could have been a two to four day trek out to John.  If Jesus took a camel, the journey would likely have been a day or two at the maximum.  We aren't told how Jesus travelled, but it can be assumed that we meet him at the end of a lengthy journey.

Matt 3:13 explicitly calls out the purpose of Jesus' journey to John the Baptist.  It is the same as that of most of the people crowded around John by the Jordan: he makes the journey to be baptized.

What is John's baptism, again?  A washing away of impurity.  A washing away of sin.  John's baptism is of repentance.  Jesus, who people normally think of as "without sin," nevertheless travels this distance - probably a multiple day ordeal through unforgiving desert heat - explicitly "to be baptized by [John]."

Why would someone who is above sin need a baptism of repentance from it?

Some might say that Jesus is identifying himself with humanity for humanity's sake.  "He is sinless, of course, but has come to humans in the form of a human to have a human experience before their eyes, so he starts it off in this human way: asking for a baptism of remission from sin."  This reads a lot into the text that isn't explicitly there.

Matt 3:14 has John the Baptist experiencing parallel confusion.  He doesn't feel capable of baptizing Jesus, for some reason.  He says "you should wash away my sins, not the other way around."

One interesting thing about Matt 3:14 is that it seems to pre-suppose a relationship between Jesus and John.  John sees Jesus and immediately says "no, you're too good to be baptized by me," as if he is already familiar with the character and nature of Jesus.  This could certainly be seen as evidence that Jesus had spent some of his "formative years" with John the Baptist.  This is interesting because it contradicts the The Gospel According to John, which has John the Baptist claiming that he "did not know [Jesus]."  It also begs one-thousand difficult or unanswerable questions: "where did John and Jesus meet up, prior to the Gospel accounts?"  "What did they do together when they met?"  "Were they students in a common school of thought together, or co-creators of a school?"  Etc...  And, again, these questions are all contingent on the supposition that the two did, indeed, know one another prior to their meeting in Matthew chapter 3.**

We should also recall that this "baptism in the desert" situation was atypical for the Jews.  Their traditions didn't call for an immersion for the cleansing of sins, and, if they had, they would have likely performed such rituals in Jerusalem where all the other traditional rites were performed, not out in the middle of the desert away from civilization and security.  It was not as if you might, as a person from that region, assume that everyone around at the time had gone out, or would go out, to receive John's baptism.  It's likely that many wouldn't have even known John's name.

Since the baptism John offered was a new one that existed outside of existing Jewish law and tradition, we can assume that John's group of followers would have been comprised of people who had been left somehow wanting by the existing law and tradition.  It's safe to assume that most of the people that went out to John sought drastic change in their lives.  More often than not, those seeking drastic change are the poor, the marginalized, and the disaffected.***  It was these that John primarily baptized, with the occasional upper-class elite venturing out "just to see," like we saw The Sadducees and the Pharisaic elites do.

Finally, in Matthew 3:15, we get Christ's response, and his first words, so-to-speak.  When John the Baptist has resisted baptizing Christ, Christ responds “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.”  John the Baptist responds with reflexive obedience and baptizes Jesus.

Notation in The New American Bible says "Here... righteousness seems to mean the saving activity of God.  To fulfill all righteousness is to submit to the plan of God for the salvation of the human race."  It would seem as likely that Jesus merely meant "everyone else is out here getting baptized, and it's the normal thing to do among your audience, so just baptize me."

It would seem just as likely, too, that these words didn't actually even get spoken.  You'll notice that they do not occur in any of the other Gospels.  In our effort to find the truest knowable Jesus, we will constantly be checking to see in how many Gospels his sayings are repeated, and if there is any wild variation between the iterations.  Generally, albeit not always, the more times the saying was recorded, the more likely it was to have been historical.  The fact that the dialogue at hand today is unique to The Gospel According to Matthew gives us some cause to be wary as to its historicity.****

These verses are denser than what we were used to, early on.  When Jesus speaks, which is a good percentage of the upcoming text, we will always find this kind of scholastic density, so it works to our advantage that the story is told four times over.  We have plenty of time to unpack everything.

We'll take our leave of it here, today.  Join us next time when a full-on miracle including a "voice from the heavens" will unfold.  

Thank you for reading.

Please share this writing.

Love

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* We will still go off half-cocked, mind you.  Just not as frequently as all that.

** We will learn more about this when we read Luke's portrayal of the life of John the Baptist, which is the most detailed.

*** Why would one want a change if one had no want? 

**** Historicity means "historical authenticity."

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