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.