Commentators propose a number of explanations for the presence of the temptation scene in Luke 4. So François Bovon in his massive volumes, who sets it in the difficult, tense context of the pre-66 AD movements in Roman Palestine. As we know from Josephus, a well-informed and hostile witness, many of those movements were messianic and prophetic. It is difficult to distinguish between the two kinds of leadership. This is obvious when reading the gospels, which show evident unease, many years after the facts, when defining the respective roles of John the Baptist and Jesus. See Richard Horsley in numerous publications. The early followers of Jesus had to confront difficult political issues. We have echoes of them in texts from about 50 AD (Paul in his letter to the Galatians especially, as well as the hypothetical Q, and a proto-Mk?), from circa 80 AD (Mt and Lk), and 100 AD (John, Acts). Among these issues, a most fundamental one was display of fidelity, or faithfulness to a people, its institutions (the temple above all), its history (the Torah), its aspirations (to freedom, usually framed messianically). The early version of the story of the temptation was an answer to suspicions expressed regarding Jesus’ messiahship. The story in Q, with its three elements presumably arranged in the order we still have in Matthew, already dealt with the questions regarding the claims made by Jesus followers. It developed early on because it had become important and urgent to separate the understanding of Jesus’ messiahship from that which existed in Palestinian Jewish society.

One can give plausible explanations for why the Q story was kept by the Matthew and Luke gospels, whereas this tradition wouldn’t be interesting for the Mark community, supposing the author of the gospel of Mark had access to the tradition. One can also explain why the gospel of Luke transformed the story (re-arranging the order of the three temptations) in light of the concerns of a post-70 AD Judeo-Greco-Roman context in which political tensions had become even more exacerbated among the Jewish communities. The disaster of the 66–70 defeat was national, political, and religious. Messianic claims did not simply go underground, disguised in new apocalyptic colors, but they also became suspect. The intensity of the discussions is reflected in a passage among several from Josephus which describes the prophetic and messianic figures who arose in the period leading to the war. This well-connected priest had urgent survivalist’s reasons to please his imperial stoicizing, harmony-loving patrons after the Jewish revolt of 66–70. When he writes his account of the Jewish War, at about the time the gospels of Matthew and Luke were composed, he is quick to assume a take-no-prisoners approach:

Besides these there arose another body of villains, with purer hands but more impious intentions, who no less than the assassins ruined the peace of the city. Deceivers and impostors, under the pretence of divine inspiration fostering revolutionary changes, they persuaded the multitude to act like madmen, and led them out into the desert under the belief that God would there give them tokens of deliverance. [Jewish War 2.258–59]

The most suspect claim, from a Jewish community’s point of view in the post-70 period, one imagines, was that attached to Jesus. So, the defense of a messianic view of Jesus became even more concerned with the radical questioning Jewish communities couldn’t but direct at Jesus followers after the complete failure of all messianic movements.

All of this historical re-mapping, I admit, is fascinating but doesn’t get us one bit nearer the themes of the temptation story. It more or less satisfactorily explains its uses in the proximate context of later authors now called Matthew and Luke, or even its earlier context for its use in Q, but it remains a political, historicist analysis. It is story telling of a less inspired kind.

For a more appropriate literary view, better go to Amos Wilder or Gaston Bachelard, for instance the latter’s L’air et les songes. Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement (1943). Bachelard, in his third chapter on the imagined fall (“La chute imaginaire”), uses Edgar Poe to examine the knowledge of an ontological fall:

This sensibility, sharpened by the decrease of being, is entirely governed by material imagination. It needs a mutation that turns our being into a less earthly, more ethereal, more variable being, less close to drawn shapes.

= Cette sensibilité, affinée par la décroissance de l’être, est entièrement sous la dépendance de l’imagination matérielle. Elle a besoin d’une mutation qui fait de notre être un être moins terrestre, plus aérien, plus déformable, moins proche des formes dessinées. [Page 126]

Beginning with the spirit—like a dove a few verses before—, continuing with the movement in the desert, the in-a-blink lookover of all the kingdoms of the world, and ending at the top of the temple’s pinnacle and the proposed dream of an unending fall, everything flies in this story. The movement of the dreamy fall itself not only creates the abyss but reminds one of the verticality of things. Only saints know temptation and fall and verticality: isn’t that what defines them? As Caird says in his commentary on Luke, the person who goes to the gate of his garden when there is a bit of weather doesn’t know temptation as does the person who is travelling through the gale, and even more the person who climbs mountains. Speech itself in the story of temptation induces breath and the life-sustaining air to move in new ways.

So, for Edgar Poe who knew the state in which, in our dreams, we glide through the air and struggle with the spirit of the fall (ghost?) who wants us to sink, the power of speech is very near a material power, governed by material imagination.

= Aussi, pour Edgar Poe, qui a connu l’état où, dans nos rêves, nous planons dans l’air, où nous luttons contre l’esprit de chute qui veut nous faire sombrer, la puissance des paroles est bien près d’être une puissance matérielle, gouvernée par l’imagination matérielle. [L’air et les songes 126, his emphasis]