Pastor Pastorum; Or, The Schooling of the Apostles by Our Lord

by Henry Latham

Chapter V. The Laws Of The Working Of Signs.

I have already, in the introductory Chapter, given my view of the principles which guided our Lord in the exercise of His superhuman powers. He is tempted to employ them when He saw they should not be employed, and the Laws are drawn from His refusals. Consequently they all take the form that, for such and such a purpose, or under such and such circumstances these superhuman powers are not to be brought into action.

I will recapitulate the Laws before stated—

(1) Our Lord will not provide by miracle what could be provided by human endeavour or human foresight. He Himself, as far as we can see, never employs superhuman power or illumination to effect what could be arrived at by human effort.

(2) Our Lord will not use His special powers to provide for His personal wants or for those of His immediate followers.

(3) No miracle is to be worked merely for miracles' sake, apart from an end of benevolence or instruction.

(4) No miracle is to be worked to supplement human policy or force—as (for instance) those of Joshua were.

(5) No miracle is to be worked which should be overwhelming in point of awfulness so as to terrify men into acceptance, or which should be unanswerably certain, leaving no loophole for unbelief.

Before going into particulars about these Laws there is something to be said about the narrative of the Temptation itself, and the form in which it has come down to us.

The incident of the Temptation is recorded in all the Gospels except that of St John; but the account in St Mark's Gospel relates only that our Lord withdrew into the wilderness, and that He was there “forty days tempted of Satan.” In the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke we find, with some small variations to be noted presently, what is commonly known as the History of the Temptations of our Lord.

The narratives, taken from the Revised Version, are as follows:

“Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he afterward hungered. And the tempter came and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: And on their hands they shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh him unto an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he said unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him; and behold, angels came and ministered unto him.”[55]

“And straightway the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.”[56]

“And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days, being tempted of the devil. And he did eat nothing in those days: and when they were completed, he hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, command this stone that it become bread. And Jesus answered unto him, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone. And he led him up; and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, To thee will I give all this authority, and the glory of them: for it hath been delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship before me, it shall all be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him, It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. And he led him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, to guard thee: and, On their hands they shall bear thee up, Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from him for a season.”[57]

What we find in St Mark may have been generally known to our Lord's disciples from the earliest period of the ministry. But the account of the Temptations themselves, which we find in St Matthew and St Luke, can only have come from our Lord Himself. Assuming this to be the case, the passage before us is singular in two respects.

First, Because the Evangelists have here, and here only, altered the form of what our Lord delivered, and changed into a narration in the third person what must, in the first instance, have been expressed in the first.

Secondly, Because this is the only instance in which our Lord breaks through His reticence as to His own personal history on earth. Here and here only does He give us a glimpse of what had befallen Him or of what had passed within His breast.

St Matthew and St Luke differ as to the order of the second and third Temptations. I have adopted that given by St Luke. According to my view, our Lord in the one rejects the use of physical violence and in the other that of moral compulsion. It is more after our Lord's way to proceed from what is concrete to what is abstract, than in the reverse order.

I feel strengthened in this view by some of the characteristics of the Gospel of St Matthew, in the form in which it has come down to us. This Evangelist has always the Kingdom before his eyes. He would therefore be inclined to account the [pg 117] rejection of “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them” as the highest possible instance of the renunciation of self; and as he accounted it the most severe of the temptations he would naturally place it last. St Matthew moreover throughout his Gospel often puts together the discourses of our Lord according to their subject-matter, and not in the order in which they were spoken. He would therefore have no scruple about changing the order of the account of the Temptations which may have come before him as a detached document. On the other hand we do not know of any bias of St Luke which should lead him to prefer one order of events to another.

Another slight variation may be noticed. St Matthew tells us that He was “led up of the Spirit to be tempted of the devil.”[58] The words imply that He was led up with a view to undergoing temptation. But in St Mark and St Luke we have “being tempted” without any intimation of purpose. Grave difficulties attach to the view that our Lord went into the desert with the set purpose of seeking and confronting temptation. Moreover it is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares. If we know that endeavours are about to be made to persuade us to a particular course, we close our ears to all that pleads for it—being forewarned, we are forearmed; so that, as [pg 118] regards these words, and indeed throughout the passage, I place more confidence in the version of St Luke than in that of St Matthew, or, to speak more accurately, that of his translator from Hebrew.

The words “Get thee hence,” at the close of St Matthew's relation of the temptation on the mount, have been supposed to indicate the final banishment of the Tempter, and therefore to shew that this temptation came last. The force of the argument rests on our supposing, as no doubt the author of St Matthew's Gospel did, that the events here related formed three distinct visible scenes, occurring in close succession, towards the end of the forty days. Whereas I hold that we have here a representation of our Lord's inward conflicts, clothed by Him in a garb of outward imagery, that they might be the better understood. If this view be taken, the trials may have gone on simultaneously throughout the forty days, and may have been so far like our own inward troubles that one harassing perplexity may well have been most pressing at one moment and another at the next. But if these struggles are represented by visible occurrences, these occurrences must necessarily be related one after the other. The words “Get thee hence” might refer not necessarily to a final banishment, but only to the end of one assault. St Luke's version is reconcileable with the view that he understood our Lord to be speaking [pg 119] figuratively and personifying the voices that tempted him.

It may be asked, “At what period of His ministry did our Lord give the disciples the account of what passed in the desert?” We can only guess, but the guess is worth making. We do not know whether the account which we possess was contained in what critics call “the original document,” on which the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark are supposed to be based. Its omission by St Mark rather favours the supposition that it was not. It may have been, in the first instance, put down in writing by one who heard the recital from our Lord's lips, and may have come into the hands of the evangelists as a separate “parchment.”[59] This document might contain no note of the time and place at which our Lord delivered the account—and, in the absence of information on this point, the compiler of the gospel might have made the alteration from the first person to the third, if it had not been made before, and have inserted the account in the place belonging to it in the order of events. I conjecture that the communication was made near the end of the ministry, possibly after the feast of the dedication,[60] at the time when

“He went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John was at the first baptizing; and there he abode.”[61]

The place would recall what had happened after He had been “driven” from that spot by the Spirit into the wilderness about two years before.

Other considerations also lead me to this conjecture.

It is strange that no allusion is ever made to so important a record: and this would be far more strange if the knowledge had lain in the minds of the Apostles all through the period of our Lord's ministry, than if they had only obtained it when the close was at hand. Moreover, the absence of any account of the circumstances under which the relation was made inclines me to think that this must have taken place at a time of which our records are scanty; and there is no time in the sacred history of which the narrative is less full than the period at which I place the communication, viz., the early spring preceding the Passion of our Lord.

There is also this consideration of a different kind. In all education there are two elements, that which is communicated by the teacher ready made, and which the pupil has only to register, and that which the learner elicits by turning over in his mind the matter which gives food for thought. In our Lord's teaching of the disciples the proportion of the latter element to the former steadily increases from first to last. At first, sayings are given them to remember; latterly, they receive mysteries on which to meditate. In the Sermon on the Mount men are told plainly what it was [pg 121] desirable for them to know; afterwards, the teaching passes through parables and hard sayings up to the mysteries conveyed by the Last Supper. The lessons of the Temptation have the form of the later teaching of our Lord: they contain hard matters and only yield their fruit by being long laid to heart.

Not only would the lessons of the Temptation have been more intelligible to the Apostles towards the end of the ministry than at the beginning; but, turning as they do on the use of superhuman powers, they would suit the time when the Apostles were about to exercise similar powers themselves.

Now comes the great question of all: In what sense is the narrative to be taken?

Many writers accept it as literal history and suppose the Tempter to have appeared in bodily form and to have conveyed our Lord, also in the body, both to the mountain top and the pinnacle of the Temple. Others have regarded it as a vision; and intermediate views have been adopted by many.

On one point fortunately we may be pretty confident. The substance of the history came from our Lord. The most unfavourable critics allow this, from the extreme difficulty of referring it to any other source. It cannot have been introduced in order to make the Gospel fall in with Jewish notions of the Messiah, for there are no traditions that the Messiah should be tempted: [pg 122] and if the passage had been devised by men, the drift of it would have been plainer, and the temptations would have been such as men would feel might have come upon themselves. We have many accounts, in the legends of the saints, of the sort of trials which present themselves to the imagination of human writers; and they differ totally from these.

I have let fall already a few words shewing in what way I regard the passage. I must now speak more fully on the subject.

It may be assumed that, in all our Lord's dealings with His disciples, His primary purpose was to do them good. He did not leave behind Him this reference to His sojourn in the wilderness and its momentous results, merely as materials for biographers. The trials which had beset Him would soon beset them also in doing the work He destined for them; before He left them He would therefore relate in what disguises the temptations had appeared and how they had been repelled. Behind the Apostles, who formed as it were the front rank of His audience, there stretched long files of hearers,—all those to whom His words have since come. At the end of this file we ourselves stand; and those among us who have special gifts, and are tempted to use them for selfish ends, or for putting a yoke, physical or mental, upon other men, may well take them to heart. My business however now is with the Apostles. It [pg 123] was likely that our Lord would give them some hint as to the principles on which superhuman power can be safely employed: and it was certain that this lesson would be put by Him in the form which would best convey it, and which would make the most lasting impression. The form then, as well as the matter of the lesson, must be worth studying closely.

One reason why this passage has such a powerful interest for men is that the history is a personal one. Our Lord riveted the most earnest attention of His hearers by speaking to them of Himself; and something of the same effect is felt by readers of the story now. We know how a teacher at once enchains the interest of his class when, leaving things abstract, or what he finds in books, he says, “Now I will tell you something that happened to me;” and we can understand the eagerness with which the Apostles would gather round our Lord, and can imagine how intently they would gaze upon Him, when He told them that He, like them, had been tempted, that He too had fought hard battles and that He would tell them what they were.

Another source of interest is that the story deals with inner struggles in a figurative way—the voices are personified and the action is localised.

That Satan should have appeared in a bodily form is, to my mind, opposed to the spirituality of all our Lord's teaching. Such an appearance presents endless difficulties, not only physical but [pg 124] moral. If our Lord knew the tempter to be Satan, He was as I have said forearmed; if He did not know him, this introduces other difficulties. He must at any rate have been surprised at meeting a specious sophist in the wilderness. Milton deals with the subject with great skill, from his point of view, in Paradise Regained. Certain points he leaves unexplained, and those I believe to be inexplicable. They are these. I cannot understand that our Lord should suffer Satan to transport Him to the mountain top, or to the pinnacle of the Temple, or that the Evil One should propose to Jesus to fall down and worship him.

I can however readily comprehend that our Lord should represent under this imagery and under these personifications what had passed within Himself. He could not indeed bring the lesson home to His hearers in any other way. To have represented mental emotions, to have spoken of the thoughts that had passed through His mind, would have been wholly unsuited to His hearers. We know how difficult it is to keep up an interest in a record of inward struggles and experiences. Men want something to present to their mind's eye, and they soon weary of following an account of what has been going on within a man's heart, void of outward incident. A recital of what had passed in our Lord's mind would have taken no hold of men's fancy and would soon have faded from their thoughts. But the figure of Satan [pg 125] would catch their eye, the appearance of contest would animate the hearers' interest; while the survey of the realms of the earth, and the dizzy station on the pinnacle of the Temple, would take possession of men's memories and minds.

The Apologue was to Orientals a favourite vehicle for conveying moral lessons; and we have a familiar instance in English Literature of the attraction of allegory. Would Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress have possessed itself, as it has done, of the hearts of whole sections of the British race, if, shorn of its human characters and its scenery, it had only analysed and depicted the inward conflicts, the mental vicissitudes and religious difficulties of a sorely-tried Christian youth?

The use of the name Satan must be considered. This name, which means the enemy, occurs in the Old Testament, in the book of Job and elsewhere but not in the Pentateuch. The Jews we know had a dæmonology of their own. The gods of the heathen they regarded as devils, of whom the Sidonian deity Beelzebub was Prince. Our Lord never countenances these views. I believe that He uses the word Satan in a generic sense to personify evil spiritual influences exercised upon earth.

When the Apostles returned safe after being sent through the cities, our Lord regards this as an augury of their success in the great conflict and says that He “beheld Satan fallen as lightning [pg 126] from Heaven.”[62] We have clearly impersonation here. He says also “If Satan hath risen up against himself and is divided,”[63] a supposition which excludes the idea of an individual being, and agrees with the collective meaning I attribute to the term. When St Peter rebukes our Lord for declaring before His followers that He would be “rejected and killed and after three days rise again,” our Lord says “Get thee behind me, Satan.” St Peter, by saying of the suffering of which our Lord spake “this shall never be unto thee,”[64] unwittingly had acted as the ally of those who would tempt our Lord from yielding implicitly to His Father's will, and our Lord therefore calls him Satan. On the whole then I lean to the view that the communication, or discourse of our Lord, which has been preserved in the form of the narrative of the Temptation, was delivered by Him in the form of an apologue or species of parable, in which our Lord, after Eastern fashion, introduced Satan as an embodiment of the powers of evil.

It must not be supposed that by giving up here the personality of the tempter we are making an abatement of what is superhuman in the Gospel, in order that, in virtue of having so done, we may hope to win this or that section of doubters over to our side—the whole question of evil remains a mystery, and in mystery there can be no degrees. It is of no use endeavouring to make infinity a trifle less infinite.

Whether the word Satan be here used collectively or personally is altogether a different question from the existence of intermediate intelligences, and is quite an open one even for the most orthodox.