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?