Hardly the Last Word

It’s been a week and a few days now since I taught this story (from early chapters of Matthew, Mark, and Luke) to our Sunday school class at Athens Christian Church, but I’m still thinking about the enormous interpretive challenge it represents. ?I’ve tried to draft this post a few times, and having completely rewritten it twice in vain attempts to get at an adequate reading of the text itself, I’ve decided to make the difficulty itself the focus of the essay.

Stories like this make think that Eric Auerbach was onto something in Mimesis when he wrote about the spareness of Hebrew narrative. ?Before I taught this story recently, I thought there was more story there than the New Testament text actually offers, and that’s no great surprise: two of my favorite Jesus-texts are Milton’s Paradise Regained and Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and as is only natural (those who know Milton know just how much of Paradise Lost is involved with most English-speakers’ ideas of what the Devil is like), I had been supplementing the gospel text as I remembered it with the best bits of those modern texts.

But when I had to face the texts in their nakedness, facing a classroom of educated adults, I found myself grasping for meaning in an alien exchange between two literary characters who almost seem primal forces rather than human beings. ?The only thing the reader gets from Jesus’ side is that he had journeyed and fasted for forty days (no doubt an echo of the Hebrews’ wandering in the wilderness for forty years), and from Satan’s side the text is even less talkative. ?The rapid-fire presentation of setting, test, and rejoinder leaves a reader almost nothing to grab onto, and that indeterminacy is, as best as I can tell, the best road into a decent reading of the text.

To take Matthew’s order of temptations (which differs from Luke’s–Mark does not enumerate the temptations) for now, each temptation lacks vital clues that a more confident Rabbi would fill with Midrashim but which confound my efforts to read on the surface of the texts themselves. ?My readings of Milton and of Kazantzakis and of Biblical studies scholarship make me think that the bread that Jesus might produce from the stones might be the fuel of luxury or the comfort of eternal abundance or a simple act of self-satisfaction after a forty-day fast or even a popular revolutionary’s promise to feed the peasants starved by the empire’s wars, but all that the text offers is stones, and all the devil suggests is that Jesus turn them to bread. ?When Jesus is atop the temple, the devil might be threatening him with physical harm to see if he’ll save himself or offering a moment of religious spectacle for the people in the Temple or playing to a human being’s curiosity about whether his own place in the world is as tenuous as his fellow human beings’ or something else entirely, but again, all the text says is where they are, what the devil says, and the bit of Deuteronomy Jesus quotes. ?The Greek text isn’t even so courteous to let a reader know whether “the Lord” that Jesus commands against testing is the Father on high or Christ Himself, perhaps an allusion to His future status in Christian worship. ?And when the devil asks him to bow down, I know that it happens on a high mountain, but I don’t know whether it’s the same mountain from which Moses viewed the promised land in Deuteronomy or a mountain as tall as the Tower of Babel or anything else about it, and I don’t know whether the test is a check of cultic loyalty (though scholars note well that Satanic cults had not yet arisen, historically) or an invitation to confer legitimacy on the devil’s rule or even a bit of trivia (will Jesus note that the kingdoms aren’t the devil’s to give?).

In other words, at every turn in this strange, sparse text, all of the readings I’ve ever heard and read compete with one another to fill in the text’s gaps, but only those gaps remain when I look at the page. ?When angels come to minister to Jesus (common to Matthew and Mark but not to Luke), the text does not say what service they render (do they give him a sandwich? ?do they give him a ride down from the top of the mountain?) but leave that little bit unwritten.

In the Sunday school, alas, I fell to the temptation of my own, namely to pretend that all of my own Midrashim were in fact themselves inherent in the text, that a basically apocalyptic-political reading was the best. ?I probably could defend that move if I were to note openly that I’m playing the historian, but at the same time I should not have pretended that such a profound array of absences in reality held such certain presences. ?I suppose, at the end of the day, I’m still very much learning how to teach the Bible.

by ngilmour