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4 TRANSFORMATIVE STAGES IN THE JESUS STORY

The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

– ST. PAUL, 2 CORINTHIANS 3:6

WE BEGIN HERE with the profound summation of spiritual truth once made by Valentinus, who was the author of The Gospel of Truth, one of the many Gnostic writings found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. He was a Gnostic Christian, later labelled a heretic, who was Egyptian but lived in Rome from approximately 135 to 165 CE(he founded a school there about 140) and had a very large following. He wrote the powerful, life-changing formula: “What liberates us is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth.”¹ However far from this central theme the discussion may at times lead us, this insight underlies the whole of our exploration from beginning to conclusion.

First, then, there comes an obvious question: If you take the literal/historical route, how long did Jesus’ ministry last? In the schema according to Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, the ministry lasts approximately one year. This is because deeply underlying the entire message is the ancient myth of the solar god in his yearly round. John’s Gospel, however, which is, as we have seen, so unlike the other three in so many ways, seems to follow a three-year cycle. Scholars point out that in it there are at least three different Passover visits to Jerusalem. Since John’s Gospel is the most “spiritual” and the least concerned to give even the appearance of verbatim reportage of a fully human being (in spite of the final chapter, which is an obvious appendix by a later hand), this Gospel can opt for the potent number three and at the same time focus almost the entire story on Jerusalem itself. In any case, the ministry lasted at most three short years.

As the great New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann once put it, John’s Gospel is “all theology served up in the language of myth.” Mark, the earliest Gospel, has been described as a collection of loosely knit anecdotes intended not as history but for edification and general evangelizing. Its mystery or the “secret” it reveals on the surface, literal reading is that Jesus is the long-expected Messiah and that the Kingdom of God will soon be a reality in the here and now. At a deeper, esoteric level, however, its message, as we have said earlier, is an allegory of the evolution of the soul in matter, the soul of every one of us. The Gospel begins with Jesus’ baptism, which symbolizes the fact that to incarnate in the watery condition of the body is to be wholly immersed in the realm of matter. Just as Jesus descends into the waters of Jordan, so the soul of every one of us has descended into life in the body. The human body, as we know, is two-thirds water.

The Baptism

Few things, however, have been more distorted and misunderstood in the Christian religion because of a literal approach to the Bible than the ritual known as the Sacrament of Holy Baptism. In the past, indeed, many have died because of bitter differences over how, when and how often it should be administered, to whom and by whom. Today, even the fast-growing crowds of the unchurched—those whom the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, John Spong, usually refers to as “church alumni”—still want their infant children “done,” that is, christened or baptized. It is traditionally the key mark doctrinally of full membership in the Church; but, at the popular level, it is now commonly, for a growing number, little more than a social rite of passage and an occasion for a party.

Long ago, when I was a parish minister myself in the late fifties and early sixties, I baptized hundreds of babies and older children at my quickly growing suburban church, the majority of whom in all likelihood now belong to those swelling numbers who tell the census taker “no religion” when asked. I still vividly remember how weird it seemed at the time to be gazing down into the innocent faces of the tiny infant baptizands while reading from the prayer book service about their sinfulness and need for total regeneration. It seemed a poor way to welcome these young “souls” into Holy Mother Church, or into the world in general for that matter.

I am reminded here of Joseph Campbell’s anecdote in program 2 of The Power of Myth. There, in his commentary upon the way in which the Eden myth in Genesis shows nature as an enemy and God as opposed to nature, while man is seen as a disobedient sinner cast out of the Garden, Campbell told the story of the Zen Buddhist he once encountered in Japan. Remarking on this Genesis story, the monk said: “God against man—man against God; God against nature—nature against God. Funny religion!” Campbell noted that in the Japanese approach to religion there was no talk of depravity, a Fall from innocence, or original sin. They had a “mythology that includes all of life.” He found it all a strangely liberating environment in which to reflect upon religion and its impact on our daily lives.

In the Gospels, the very first mention of baptism comes at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark’s account. Without any of the preliminaries of the other Gospels, the drama commences with a quote from the Septuagint version (Greek translation) of the Old Testament: “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you . . . ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” Then John the Baptist appears in the wilderness “proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” It is clear that Mark deliberately took the Greek version of the quote, which is from Isaiah, chapter 40, rather than cite the actual Hebrew text, because it suited his purpose much better. He actually twists the original—which is about the return of the children of Israel from exile—and makes it into what it is not, a Messianic prophecy.

As one reads on, however, it is readily apparent that the personage Jesus presents at the Jordan does not proclaim himself as Messiah, or the Son of God; he announces instead the nearness of the Kingdom of God as being “the Good News [Euangelion] of God.”² It’s worth observing that “the Gospel” about which one hears so much in evangelical and other circles has nothing at this point to do with the kind of message that conservative preachers constantly proclaim. It’s not about “the blood of Jesus,” the Cross or even being “born again.” The Mark text explicitly says the Good News is the reality of the Kingdom, the reality of God’s presence in power in the world and intimately in one’s life.

Before going any further, we should notice that earlier, in Luke’s Gospel, he tells the mythical story of how Mary, upon learning that she is with child, goes to visit her relative Elizabeth. Though of advanced years and well beyond child-bearing age, Elizabeth has also conceived a son and is already in her sixth month.³ Thus, we learn that John and Jesus were six months apart in age. From the point of view of the astronomical allegory, this is of crucial importance:

1) Elizabeth is yet one more example of the many women throughout the whole of the Bible who conceive in a miraculous fashion in their senior years. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, the mother of Ishmael and Isaac, is one. You may remember she laughed at the angel’s message. “So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’” In Hebrew, the name Isaac means “he laughs.”⁴ The mother of Samson is another, as is Hannah, the mother of Samuel. The meaning is clear to those who understand the esoteric sense of it. We must return here to the belief of the ancients in several accounts that there were three evolutionary stages before the emergence on the scene of the human animal soul and finally the Christly or spiritual soul. First came the mineral, then the vegetative, then the animal, and finally, after “ages of ages,” the dawning of self-reflective consciousness and the flame of divine fire within. The aged women reflect or portray this fourth or “late in time behold him come” theme, as the familiar Christmas carol puts it so well. We will see later also how the story of Jesus coming across the water “in the fourth” watch of the night—just before the dawn—makes the same point.

2) The sixth-months-apart aspect is making the significant point that, in the earlier astronomical allegory, the natural man, who rises under the sign of Virgo on the eastern horizon, gives way six months later to the spiritual man or Christ, who is born on that same horizon in the sign of Pisces, the fish. Eventually, as the evolution of our soul continues, the natural man is surpassed by the spiritual. This is the meaning behind the Baptist’s words in John’s Gospel: “He must increase, but I must decrease.”⁵

Baptism Means Claiming Our Divinity, Not Removal of Sin

In Mark we read:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:9–12)

That such a baptism had nothing whatever to do with sin is transparent from both the text itself and from the fact that the sinlessness of the Jesus character in the drama is vigorously maintained in all of the New Testament.⁶ In John’s Gospel, the Evangelist is in fact obviously embarrassed by this whole event from that point of view and tries to explain it all away or at least to downplay it. Water, as we have seen, symbolizes a number of things, but principally it is the symbol of matter. Since our bodies are made up largely of water, the soul was thought of as held fast in a watery dungeon. It was a kind of death. When Jesus goes down into the water, representing the divinity in every one of us, his immersion symbolizes this central fact of Incarnation. The soul accepts the lot and the struggle of being human—a blending of spirit and matter—in order to expand through experience on this plane. Those who believe in reincarnation hold that it may take several or even many lifetimes to gain all the experience necessary for winning full spiritual maturity. My own view inclines towards the belief that we continue to unfold and grow on higher spiritual planes beyond the grave. What is certain is that nobody can say for sure what form our future development will take.

But while John, as the natural man, baptizes—symbolically buries or clothes the divine spark or soul in the “tomb” of matter—so in turn the Christ figure is proclaimed as the element or agent by which the natural man will now be baptized or endowed with the divine Holy Spirit. This is why John the Baptist is made to say: “I baptize you with water but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” Significantly, Luke says here: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” The fire symbols the divine flame of intelligence and of potential Christhood. That is why, incidentally, baptism in water is accompanied by anointing with oil in some major branches of the Christian church, for example in the Orthodox Church. Oil (“thou anointest my head with oil,” the Psalmist says) symbolizes this same reality. It is highly flammable and gives off a shine even when not ignited. It floats on water, that is, it rises to the top or the head, where reason and self-reflective consciousness were believed primarily to be embedded—and oil will even burn in the midst of the waters. In the watery “grave” of our material bodies, the “fire” burns on and nothing can ever put it out. This may be what the Gospel of Thomas’s Jesus (Yeshua) means when he reportedly says: “I have thrown fire upon the world, and look, I am watching ’till it blazes.”⁷ Or again: “Yeshua said, Whoever is near me is near the fire . . .”⁸

In any case, St. Paul, whose thoughts and arguments can be extremely complex and at times virtually incomprehensible to an average reader, goes on at considerable length in Romans using the imagery of death, burial and resurrection in relation to our oneness with the mystical Christ. For example, in chapter 6 of Romans, Paul says: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” None of this, by the way, implies that Paul took any of this literally. His Jesus Christ is supremely a spiritual ray from the Father, as was Horus before him. All the action he describes takes place on a spiritual rather than an earthly plane.

In adult baptism, where there is a total submersion of the person under the waters, this burial and resurrection symbolism is of course more vividly portrayed than in the sprinkling of infants, though the symbolism remains the same. Once, long ago when we were going through one of my family’s phases of attending a Gospel Hall form of worship (where the “whole Bible” was said to be preached and believed in), I took my place, at age twelve or thirteen, in the baptismal lineup at a tank at the very front of the church one Sunday evening. There, I had to endure the embarrassment of being nearly suffocated in front of some of my wide-eyed friends who had come along to observe the proceedings. The overzealous pastor got carried away and held me under unduly long as he simultaneously harangued the congregation. I emerged sputtering and half drowned. But as the proponents of infant baptism have always stoutly maintained, it’s not really the amount of water that counts. This is true, if only they truly understand what the fundamental symbolism actually represents.

Put as simply as possible, the Christian rite of baptism is not about forgiveness of sins, original or not; nor, obviously, is it about enrolment in a certain exclusive, ecclesiastical “club.” It’s at the same time much more universal, much grander and yet simpler than any of that. The sacrament is one of celebrating and ritually expressing the basic datum of all religion, that of Incarnation of spirit in flesh. As St. Paul triumphantly exults: our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. When a baby, for example, is baptized in the presence of all the congregation, what is really happening is that a fresh, incarnated soul is being symbolically welcomed into the whole human family. It’s an occasion for all present to share in the rejoicing at our common, God-given inheritance.

That is truly the theme of the account of Jesus’ baptism in the Gospels. As he comes up out of the water in the drama, he experiences a vision. The heavens are “torn apart” and the Spirit, in form like a dove, descends on him. Then the voice “came from heaven” saying that he was “my son, the beloved.” Instead of the negativity inherent in the mention of sin, the voice says, “with you I am well pleased.” The allegorical sense is crystal clear. The whole event is a claiming of our own divine descent. We are each declared to be the child of God, beloved by the very ground and source of all life. Instead of the pejorative, soul-killing labels the Church was to devise and pin on all its followers for centuries to come—of our “total depravity,” our unworthiness even “to pick up the crumbs” under God’s table—the pronouncement comes loud and clear of God’s infinite pleasure in us.

This contrasts radically with the view of our humanity once elucidated by Reverend John Wesley, the great Methodist reformer. In Sermon 45 in the 1872 edition of The Sermons of John Wesley, he thunders: “This then is the foundation of the new birth—the entire corruption of our nature . . . everyone born into the world now bears the image of the devil in pride and self-will.” That is really a classic statement of the dogma of original sin, the notion that, because of Adam’s alleged “fall,” humanity is forever tainted by that act of disobedience. Humanity, according to St. Augustine, was a “massa damnata,” and only the death of the sinless Son of God could ever set that right. This theology gave the Church enormous power and control over people’s lives, and it still looms large in too much Christian preaching today.

Nearly two thousand years of controlling people by constantly harping on their ungodliness and sin has produced predictably poor results. One can only speculate about how differently millions upon millions would have felt and behaved in countless generations had they been told from the very beginning: “You are my much-loved offspring with whom I am pleased indeed.” To create loving people, you need to have children who are told of their true nature and potential—and then are truly loved. The implications of this more spiritual understanding of baptism for the churches are potentially transformative on a grand scale. There really is some very Good News to proclaim! But new baptismal liturgies or services have to be created to replace the negative formulae of the past.

Nazareth

When Mark says that Jesus came from Nazareth and was baptized by John, it’s the only time he explicitly mentions the place that has come to be universally regarded as Jesus’ hometown. A few verses later, an unclean spirit is said to have addressed him as “Jesus, the Nazarene” (and Jesus is referred to as a Nazarene three more times in this Gospel), but there the meaning is quite different. It probably has nothing to do with a place name. As Professor G.A. Wells, in a lengthy and detailed discussion, points out, the term “Nazarene” is used in some extant documents as “the title of a sect.” It is thus the equivalent of saying “George the Methodist” or “Tom the Anglican.”⁹ Notice that Mark does not tell us that Jesus actually came from or grew up in Nazareth. According to Luke, Mary and Joseph lived there—they went to Bethlehem for the birth—but Matthew’s birth narrative differs sharply at this point. In Matthew’s version, their “house” was in Bethlehem. To keep the Nazareth connection, however, Matthew has the whole family go there after the highly symbolic return from Egypt following the death of Herod. In his usual formula, Matthew says this was to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy that “He will be called a Nazorean” (the King James Version again translates the Greek here as “Nazarene”). But there is no such prophecy in the entire Old Testament!

I will not weary the reader with the incredibly detailed and complex discussion and debate over the possible significance of the fact that Mark and Luke call Jesus “the Nazarene” while Matthew, John and Acts always call him “Jesus the Nazorean.”¹⁰ In any case, early Jewish followers of the Christian way were called by both terms. In none of the Gospels, however, does Jesus apply either term to himself. He is depicted rather as an itinerant prophet who called no town or village his home. He is Everyman.

Today in modern Nazareth, the Roman Catholics, with their huge Basilica of the Annunciation, allegedly built over the site of the grotto that was Mary’s home, are still engaged in a long-running dispute with the Greek Orthodox Church. The latter claim to have the true site of the Annunciation at their Mary’s Well Church, about half a kilometre away. But in such matters, of course, since it’s all mythical, absolutely nothing is certain. There are rival places for most of the “holy” sites in Israel that are touted today as genuine places where “events” in Jesus’ life are held to have occurred. Fighting over which religious group has control over what “sacred spot” is a major and ongoing scandal.

There is a good reason for discussing the alleged Nazareth connection, but as is becoming clear, the issues are far more complex than a surface examination suggests. Study of the records reveals that it is even quite possible there was no village or settlement at a place called Nazareth in the first century CE. For example, there is no mention of a village or town called Nazareth in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the works of Josephus (who wrote during the first century CE), nor in the Talmud. Yet both of the latter sources give lengthy lists of Galilean settlements. Josephus lived for some time in the region. According to The Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Nazareth “is not mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures (nor in any Hebrew literature prior to the seventh or eight century CE).”¹¹ Among recent books raising doubts over this whole issue is The Fabrication of the Christ Myth by the Jewish author Harold Leidner.¹²

My own examination and summary of the voluminous scholarly discussion over whether or not Nazareth was a hamlet at the putative time of Jesus’ childhood suggests that the general archaeological picture would appear to indicate the existence of a very tiny village wholly devoted to agriculture that originally came into being in the course of the third century BCE.¹³ So, I believe there most likely was a village called Nazareth in the first century CE. But its connection with any historical Jesus is at best obscure.

The reason St. Paul, who mentions the term “Jesus Christ” about two hundred times, never once writes of or calls him “Jesus of Nazareth” was undoubtedly because he himself had never heard of such a place. Its use by Mark and the other Evangelists appears ultimately to me to have its roots in theology, not geography or history.

The Temptation—

Testing in the Wilderness

Mark’s Gospel

Mark, as we have seen, has no real chronology. His work is not a biographical “life” of a historical person. Consequently, he covers this up and regularly connects scenes that were unconnected in his sources (or his creative imagination) with the Greek word euthus, which means simply “immediately.” That’s what happens right after his description of the experience attributed to Jesus at the River Jordan at the hands of John the Baptist. Aware now of his true, essential nature as God’s child or “son”—“the Beloved” with whom God is well pleased—we are told, “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” Mark then continues: “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”

When we look at the parallel descriptions of this episode in Matthew and Luke in a moment, we will see just how abbreviated and condensed this pericope (the technical, scholarly term) or passage really is here. But for now I suggest that you try to put aside all previous conceptions and misconceptions gained from whatever source—early Sunday school lessons, old sermons, or even recent readings of the text—and see the narrative through fresh eyes if you can.

Consider, first of all, that there were no witnesses to this “event.” You know at once you are in the presence of the mythical when there is no precision whatever regarding time or place and no possibility of eyewitnesses. The Evangelist is simply recounting or creating the story or mythos. The wilderness here, as it is time and time again throughout the Scriptures, is also simply an allegorical manner of speaking. It is a metaphor for the soul’s life in the body on this plane of existence. We are spiritual beings in the “wilderness” of bodily existence. Incidentally, the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites in the Old Testament uses the very same metaphor. The mention of his being with “the wild beasts” is a unique feature of Mark and again is a pointed reminder that we have an animal nature that cannot be hidden or ignored even though, notice carefully, the text clearly emphasizes our spiritual nature by saying that it was not chance but the Spirit that “drove” him out for the wilderness testing. This clash of Spirit and our animal nature is not just inevitable, however; it is absolutely essential for any possibility of growing and evolving into the complete beings of light we are destined one day to become. This can be costly and painful. But, it should be added, we are not, somehow, wholly on our own; there is the ideal model of the Christ figure in the Gospels to inspire us on our journey.

Everybody knows what is probably the most familiar passage in the entire Bible. Nearly every wedding one attends these days has it as a primary reading. It is Paul’s famous Hymn to Love in 1 Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13)

What must be realized is that, while Paul never met a historical Jesus, he had in his heart and teaching a vivid portrait of the Christ within—the goal of all human striving. In other words, this is not just a hymn to love, it’s an explicit, detailed picture of what God intends us to become. Anyone can talk about “beings of light,” but this sculpts out the steps we need to take to get there.

How long does this “wilderness” testing go on for? Well, the text of Mark says Jesus was there in the wilderness for forty days. But, as was described more fully in The Pagan Christ, in the Bible this is a fully symbolic number. Here it refers to the whole of life. Our entire life is a “test in the wilderness.” Forty always types, or represents, a period of incubation—as of seeds prior to blooming, or of a birthing process of some sort. A human fetus takes forty weeks to develop fully from conception. Jesus, acting out here the drama of the soul of every one of us, is then put to the test by Satan. It should be understood that Satan too is symbolic. He represents the necessary, opposing force in the yin and yang of life. Without the tension of opposites—Satan on one hand, “the fallen angel of light” or Lucifer, and the Spirit together with the “good angels” on the other—the soul would have nothing to push against, nothing to develop its spiritual muscle on.

It is worth pondering that much that we consider evil in our lives frequently has to be seen and understood in a far deeper and broader context. Without it, without the struggle with pain and suffering, we would be greatly weakened and impoverished.¹⁴ That’s why St. Paul could say that when he was “weak,” he found he was being made stronger by the enabling or “grace” of God.

Throughout the entire spectrum of evolving forms of life on this planet, you can witness this fundamental principle at work. All advancement and gain comes through the “pain” of the clash of opposites. Without this, everything would turn literally and figuratively to a kind of mush. Carl Jung said about this basic inevitability of human living: “The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil . . . Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end.”¹⁵ That’s why not only Jesus but Zoroaster, Horus, Hercules, the Buddha, and every hero ever known has had to pass through a series of tests or trials, from killing dragons to slaying giants. You can see the same process working in the saga of Frodo’s trials in Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, or in the story of Luke Skywalker’s adventures in the well-known Star Wars series of films. The adventures of Harry Potter echo the same theme. It is worth noting that Horus had three “fights” with his uncle and enemy Seth, just as there are three temptations from Satan in the Jesus story. The Buddha also had a threefold temptation to meet and overcome. His tempter, in the tradition, was the Kama Mara, the Sanskrit words meaning “lust” and “death.”

Two observations are important before we move on to the fuller and later accounts in the other two Synoptic Gospels. Firstly, there is an echo of a very familiar Old Testament narrative in the mention by Mark that angels ministered to Jesus. In chapter 19 of 1 Kings there is a story of the prophet Elijah going into the wilderness and, experiencing a deep depression in which he actually asked that he might die, we are told he was ministered to by an angel. Mark could well have expected those familiar with the Septuagint (Greek) version of the story to see the parallel.

Secondly, in reference to Satan or the Devil, Lord Raglan in The Hero makes a powerful argument that the general public is almost wholly unaware of the extent to which past figures of note, almost universally regarded as “real” or historical, are in actuality the product of ancient myth and drama. He writes: “The history of the Devil affords an interesting example of this process [whereby a dramatic figure in a ritual of some kind becomes historicized]. Originally, it would seem, he was a ritual character who wore the horns of a bull or goat . . . and so the Horned Man became the antagonist of the Hero. Eventually he stepped out of the ritual into real life, and became what to millions he still is, a figure far more real than any historical character has ever been to anyone.”¹⁶ Extreme literalists would do well to read Raglan’s book. For example, speaking of the Jewish traditions embodied in the Old Testament, he writes: “It is a necessary part of the thesis I am putting forward in this book that whoever regards the Old Testament as a historical work, in the sense in which we understand history, entirely misunderstands its character.”¹⁷ These words precisely describe the situation reflected in the New Testament as well.

Matthew’s and Luke’s Accounts

Matthew, like Luke, expands upon the scant two-verse version of the Temptation in Mark by giving us the nature of the wilderness testing in a highly stylized, three-act drama. Again there is no hint of any specific time or place other than an immediate connection with Jesus’ baptism by John and his new awareness of having an adult relationship as a beloved “Son” with the ultimate ground of all being we call God.

Both these authors mention that Jesus was led into the wilderness by the Spirit and that the actual testing came at the end of forty days of fasting. Both attempt to bring a little reality—not to say a ray of humour—by saying that after such a long time without food “he was famished.” Both agree on the first “temptation” about turning stones into bread, but they reverse the other two. Matthew places the pinnacle-of-the-temple ordeal first, followed by the offer of “all the kingdoms of the world,” while Luke does the opposite. Apart from this and the fact that Luke, whose theology lays a greater stress than the others’ upon the work of the Holy Spirit, says that Jesus returned from the Jordan “full of the Holy Spirit,” the two accounts are virtually identical.

Certainly anyone at all familiar with myth will recognize instantly that that’s precisely what we are encountering in these familiar stories. Again there is no hint of any witnesses or of “he told us” or “we were later told.” Besides, the vignettes themselves are wholly otherworldly, supernatural and visionary in feel and texture. There is no real suggestion of these being biographical details or historical facts. However, the mythical formation of the temptations as it has been developed in these two Gospels seems at a surface glance so obvious and, as it were, even heavy-handed that the inner meaning has been lost to millions of literalizers down the centuries. What, we can well ask, is the relevance of the temptations for the evolution of our own souls in today’s world?

I’d like to preface the answer to that question with a personal observation from my own life and from my observations of the lives of others. It is almost always just after my most exalted moments of highest spiritual experience or insight that sudden testing or temptations to doubt, to fear, to entertain negativities, can strike. The same can happen after a moment of high accomplishment. Life, it seems, wants to level us out or block us in some way. It’s a time to be watchful and mindful of past times when similar moments have come and have been overcome. Jesus is being tested precisely because he has just had a peak experience of ultimate reality at the baptism in Jordan. You will find this phenomenon on your spiritual journey too.

Temptation #1: Misuse of Spiritual Power for Selfish Ends

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” But he answered, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:1–4)