The Son of God
The Son of God
Mark, of course, only mentions the visionary experience in passing, but Matthew and Luke give us a detailed account. The Matthean account seems to be closer to the original form of the story, and we will follow it. Notice immediately that Jesus is tested in regard to the same title that had been revealed to Him at the baptism: “Son of God” (in the form “if you are the Son of God, then …”). Of course, some scholars have scoffed at treating this story as historical, completely forgetting it is possible to take this as the relating of a visionary experience Jesus had while full of the Spirit, and we might add in a limenal state (i.e., when consciousness hovers between the visionary and the nonvisionary). Matthew is explicit that Jesus had these visions from the nefarious one after having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, which makes the first temptation, to turn stones into bread, a natural one. Now one of the most remarkable features about this visionary encounter with the adversary, Satan, is that Satan is tempting Jesus to do things mere mortals cannot do. I have known some people who can turn bread into stones but not any that have been tempted to do the opposite. The point here is that Jesus is being tempted to act in a fashion that only a divine Son of God was capable of doing. This story then undergirds the theology that Jesus was no ordinary or mundane messianic figure, and as with the title “Son of Man,” the story suggests a more than mundane character for Jesus.
Now a temptation is hardly a temptation if you know perfectly well you can't carry it off. The point here is that Jesus is being tempted to act in ways that would obliterate His true humanity and His identification with us. The essence of Jesus' being truly human and acting in accord with that is being put to the test. To be human means to have certain limitations of time, space, knowledge, and power. Yet Jesus believed He could transcend these limitations in some fashion, and here He was being tempted to go ahead and do so. What kind of person believes such things about himself? Notice then that Jesus responds to Satan by quoting Scripture, a resource any human being could use to combat evil. Jesus throughout these Gospels acts by the power of the Spirit and by using the Word of God, the same two resources these Gospels say Jesus bequeathed to His followers. This is interesting.
Returning to the vision itself, we see the second temptation is to cast Himself off the pinnacle of the temple. Here Satan becomes the exegete and cites Ps 91:11–12 to encourage Jesus to do it. The text refers to ministering angels who would bear Him up if He leaped off the pinnacle and not allow Him to harm Himself. This is interesting since Mark had mentioned that Jesus was ministered to by angels in the wilderness. But again, Jesus resists the temptation. Notice that here Jesus responds, in a battle of Bible quotes, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matt 4:7). Scholars have resisted seeing this as evidence that Jesus placed Himself in the category of the Lord God, but surely that is the most natural implication here, and it is interesting that Jesus' brother James is later to say emphatically that God cannot be tempted and He tempts no one (Jas 1:13). Perhaps he knew of the story of Jesus' vision quest and battles with the powers of darkness.
The third and final test is indeed the climactic one where Jesus is offered the kingdoms of the world if He will just bow down and worship Satan. Jesus refuses to do so and like a good monotheist says only the one God should be worshiped. Notice and compare the reply to test 2 and the reply to test 3. In test 2 Jesus identifies Himself with the Lord God; in test 3 His reply distinguishes Himself from Yahweh. What sort of person sees both identity with and distinction from God as categories he could freely use to describe himself?
Lest we think that we have exhausted the evidence for Jesus as a Seer, it is not so. There are interesting logia, like Luke 10:18 where Jesus, upon the report of His disciples performing exorcisms successfully like their Master, says, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” This should be compared to a text like Mark 3 where Jesus' exorcisms are recognized by His antagonists, but they attribute them to His being in league with the Devil. Jesus counters by saying that to the contrary He had first to bind that strong man Satan before He could loose his captives. Far from being in league with Satan, the work of Jesus has been to destroy his strongholds and liberate his captives. This is what Luke 10:18 suggests as well. The most frequent sort of miracle predicated of Jesus in Mark is exorcism. Furthermore, it is the sort of activity which led to later rabbinic charges that Jesus was a magician, dabbling in the dark arts. There must indeed be a historical foundation for this aspect of Jesus' ministry, whatever one may personally believe about demons.
Whether one personally believes in the powers of darkness is irrelevant to the historical quest for understanding Jesus, as many early Jews, probably most of them, did believe in such beings, and there is no good reason to doubt Jesus did as well. We cannot eliminate evidence from our quest for the historical Jesus just because we don't share such a belief system or particular belief. Jesus was without doubt different from many moderns in what He believed, and if the goal is to understand Him and understand His self-understanding and presentation, then it is a mistake to evaluate the evidence with certain antisupernatural prejudices or biases in place. This may tell us much about ourselves, but such biases skew a fair and accurate assessment of Jesus' self-understanding and self-presentation.
Our next port of call is Matt 11:27, the so-called Johannine thunderbolt. This text presents Jesus as claiming that no one knows the Father but Jesus and those to whom Jesus reveals Him. It speaks to Jesus' apocalyptic mentality and frame of reference. The basic assumption of apocalyptic is that heavenly and spiritual things are now hidden from fallen mortal gaze and can only be known if they are revealed through a revelator, one who sees into the other realm. Jesus is presented as one such person who does so. Indeed, Jesus presents Himself as one who plays out the apocalyptic script of Daniel and Zechariah not only by proclaiming the kingdom and calling Himself Son of Man but even by performing prophetic sign acts like riding into Jerusalem on a donkey, as Zechariah spoke of, or cleansing the temple. The closer we look at the drama of Jesus' life, the more He seems to be dancing to an apocalyptic tune not entirely of His own making.
And this brings us to the trial narrative in Mark 14. After offering a whole chapter of prophetic pronouncements about the near and more distant future, in Mark 13 (notice that the cosmic signs are only associated with the Second Coming account, whereas the signs upon the earth are associated with preliminary mundane events which lead to the destruction of the temple), we have the trial narratives seriatim. While Jesus predicted the demise of the Herodian temple within a biblical generation (40 years)—a prediction which was “spot on,” as the British would say, since the temple fell in AD 70 and Jesus made the prediction in AD 30 not long before His own demise—what is more important for our purposes is that the predictions about the return of the Son of Man in Mark 13:32 prepare for the prediction at the trial narrative in Mark 14:62 where Jesus partially quotes Dan 7:13. Here to the high priest who assumed he was judging Jesus and would have the last word about Him, Jesus in effect turns the tables and says to the high priest, “Yes, I am Messiah, Son of God, but what you really need to know is that you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds to a theater near you, judging you.” What kind of person thinks his own life will have an earthly sequel?
I have stuck carefully to our earliest witness Mark and the Synoptics in this essay without bringing the later fourth Gospel into the discussion. This was intentional, but the Christological portrait of Jesus in Mark is hardly any less exalted than the one in John; it's just differently focused. John famously does not give us exorcism stories, nor does he mention Jesus' being an exorcist. But just as the first canonical Gospel raises the question, “What sort of person can get in a championship cage match with Satan and live to tell the tale?” so the last Gospel raises the question, “What sort of person thinks he came from God, and is ‘of God’?” The claims are presented differently, but the end result is much the same. The canonical Gospels present this in a clearly heavenly light, all the while emphasizing His true humanity as well. In other words, there is no nonmessianic Jesus to be found at the bottom of the well of historical inquiry. Jesus made some remarkable claims for Himself and His ministry; the historian's job is not to explain the claims away but rather to explain them.