On the Temptation of Christ

Detail of an image showing the Devil bearing Jesus 

found in an old French liturgical book (c. 1470-75) 

Collection: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library 

(MS 425, fol. 48r) [1]

 

 

... the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, 

and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them ... 

                                                       - Matthew 4:8 (KJV)

 

 

I.

 

The biblical verses pertaining to the Temptation of Christ are among the most critically (and theologically) fascinating verses in the New Testament.

 

For these verses tell us something crucial about Jesus that any thoughtful and naturally questioning person who thinks the story of Christ through to the bitter end will ultimately have to acknowledge; namely, that Jesus was a kind of idiot [2] whose teachings were inadequate and displayed a fatal misunderstanding of the nature (and limits) of man.

 

For those who are unfamiliar with the verses and don't have the Good Book to hand, here's how they appear in Matthew 4:1-11 (KJV): 

 

 

1 Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil. 

 

2 And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was afterward an hungred. 

 

3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread. 

 

4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. 

 

5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, 

 

6 And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. 

 

7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. 

 

8 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; 

 

9 And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. 

 

10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. 

 

11 Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.

 

 

II. 

 

It's this version of the narrative that we shall base our reading upon here, essentially arguing - in agreement with Dostoevsky and D. H. Lawrence - that man doesn't want freedom (or even salvation), but demands rather miracle, mystery, and a powerful authority to whom he can willingly submit.

 

Only a very rare few can find fulfilment without these things and establish lives of sovereign individuality. Jesus either couldn't or wouldn't see this and via his ideal teaching he makes "demands greater than the nature of man can bear" [3]. 

 

Thus, if you want to establish a Christian Church and State, you're going to have to turn to "that other great Spirit" [4] who loves man for what he is and not for what he ought to be: the Father of Lies and Prince of Darkness, Satan.      

 

 

III. 

 

The first temptation takes place in the Judean desert, where Jesus has been fasting for forty days and forty nights; a symbolic period of trial and spiritual endurance within biblical mythology, during which Christ demonstrated his total reliance on God. 

 

The devil encouraged Jesus to surrender to his hunger and prove his divinity by turning desert rocks into bread, but, being the religious fanatic that he was, Jesus simply mumbled something about man not living by bread alone. 

      

One can't help wishing he'd replied rather: I can resist everything except temptation [5] and conjured up a fabulous feast, inviting the Devil to join him - that would have been the wittier thing to say and also would have thrown the Devil on the back foot; Jesus would have turned the tables and upped the stakes via an act of what anthropologists term potlatch. 

 

But, of course, Jesus is completely humourless - he is not recorded laughing even once throughout the New Testament, let alone cracking a good joke or making a genuinely witty remark of the kind Wilde was famous for. 

 

So we get the now proverbial line about bread which Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor says was his first mistake: Feed men, and then ask of them virtue [6] - that's the formula if one wishes to produce loyal followers. And if that bread happens to be produced miraculously from stone, all the better; men who are both well-fed and given a magical display of power will be doubly loyal [7]. 

 

D. H. Lawrence develops this criticism of Jesus. Like the Inquisitor, he insists that man "demands bread: and not merely as foodstuff, but as a miracle, given from the hand of God [...] The earthly bread must in itself be the miracle, and be bound up with the miracle [...] The earthly bread is leavened with the heavenly bread" [8].  

 

IV.  

 

The second temptation of Christ unfolds when the devil takes Jesus to the highest point of the temple in Jerusalem and urges him to throw himself over the edge, quoting scripture (Psalm 91:11-12) in support of the idea that the angels of Heaven would catch him, were he truly the Son of God and not just some delusional carpenter. 

 

This was an attempt not only to force Jesus into making a dramatic display of his divine status, but to manipulate God also into taking action. Predictably, Jesus declined to jump and refused to put his Father to the test.

 

Again, for me at least, it would have been more interesting had he succumbed to temptation and accepted the challenge. Or indeed if he had said something along the lines of 'Let's find out if the demons of Hell are as prepared to catch you as the angels me', and thrown the Devil off the top of the temple.

 

Casting himself down from the temple to be caught by angels - or turning the tables on the devil by pushing him from the temple - would, much like the stone-into-bread trick, demonstrate his godhood in the minds of the people and they would abandon their old ways and follow him to heaven and back.

 

But then I'm not a Christian and I suppose what I'm suggesting is, much like the Grand Inquisitor's philosophy, Satanic in character. 

 

 

V. 

 

Finally, the devil offers Jesus authority and political power over all the magnificent kingdoms of the Earth - providing that Jesus abandons his mission, derails God's plan, and agrees to kneel before him. 

 

Taking charge in this manner would ensure universal salvation, the Grand Inquisitor claims. But Jesus isn't tempted and firmly commands the devil to fuck off - Get thee hence! - making it clear that he submits to and serves no one other than his Father.

 

Lawrence is convinced that Jesus should have accepted earthly power and the responsibility of such; that he was profoundly and disastrously mistaken in his one-sided insistence on the Love ideal and his perverse self-absorption. 

 

For while he succeeds in providing a model of practice for the ascetic individual, by refusing to think of men as social beings and showing no understanding of how power and politics operate, Jesus surrenders us all to the State and opens the way for those who have no qualms about exercising power in the most brutal manner: 

 

"Jesus made it inevitable, when he said that the money belonged to Caesar. It was a mistake. Money means bread, and the bread of men belongs to no man. Money also means power, and it is monstrous to give power to the virtual enemy." [9] 

      

In his late essay 'The Risen Lord' (1929), Lawrence famously dreams of a very different Jesus: no longer a man of sorrows, but a power-lord who agrees to come down off his mountain top so that he might rule. Here is a Jesus with tongues of fire round his brows, not a crown of thorns, willing and able to take the devil on at his own game and resist those mechanical forces belonging to Mammon [10].   

 

It's a Jesus that the Grand Inquisitor would absolutely approve of. 

 

I suspect that the early founders of what became known as Christianity [11] quickly understood that it's the principles put forward by Satan - a kind of politics of evil - that allows for the long-term survival and success of an institution. Nietzsche writes of how, "with every extension of Christianity", it became more and more necessary to vulgarise the teachings of Jesus and incorporate "the doctrines and rites of every subterranean cult" [12]. 

 

 

VI.       

 

In conclusion: the Grand Inquisitor is quite right to say that the Catholic Church does not need Jesus - and that if he were to return, as promised, it would only throw a spanner in the works and interfere with their mission which is to rule mankind in the name of God, but using the Devil's tricks and techniques (even those which bring death and destruction).   

 

And even if Jesus himself were to kiss me on the lips, I would not say otherwise. For Dostoevsky's tale is, as Lawrence says, depressingly true whether we like it or not, presenting the "final and unanswerable criticism of Christ [...] borne out by the long experience of humanity" [13].   

 

Notes

 

[1] Artists have produced many visual representations of the Temptation of Christ, but this is by far my favourite, showing as it does Jesus being quite literally carried up the mountain. The image makes me smile, because Jesus appears to be no more than a large doll or dummy via whom the devil might ventriloquise his own Satanic philosophy.    

  

[2] The term idiot is used here in a philosophical sense that draws upon Nietzsche's characterisation of Jesus in The Anti-Christ (§ 29) as an idealist detached from material reality and living in his own inner world. It is highly likely that Nietzsche borrowed the term from Dostoevsky who used it in his 1869 novel of the same name to describe someone (Prince Lev Myshkin) who is equally pure in spirit, but seen as naive and foolish by others.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Grand Inquisitor, by F. M. Dostoevsky', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 128.

 

[4] Ibid., p.129. 

 

[5] This profoundly anti-Christian line was written by Oscar Wilde in his play Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and is spoken by Lord Darlington in Act 1. 

 

[6] 'The Grand Inquisitor' is a story contained within Fyodor Dostoevsky's philosophical novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880). The line quoted is found in Book V, Chapter 5.   

 

[7] The Roman poet Juvenal would famously sum this up with the phrase panem et circenses - a practice of appeasing the people that he condemns. See Satire X in Book 4 of his Satires (a collection of satirical verses written between 100 and 127 AD). Today, we might say cibus rapidus et TikTok.   

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Grand Inquisitor, by F. M. Dostoevsky', Introductions and Reviews, pp. 128 and 132.  

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 146. 

 

[10] This essay can be found in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 265-273.  

 

[11] As Nietzsche points out, the term Christianity is already a misunderstanding (and a corruption) of the glad tidings taught by Christ. See The Anti-Christ (§ 39), where he claims there has only ever been one Christian - and he died on the cross. What followed in his name was a reversal and negation of the values he had lived his life by.     

 

[12] Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ (§ 37), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1968), p. 149. Nietzsche refers to this as Christianity's fall into morbid-barbarism, but we could just as easily use the phrase cynical-satanism.     

 

[13] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Grand Inquisitor, by F. M. Dostoevsky', Introductions and Reviews, p. 127. 

 

 

This is a sister post to (or variant of) an earlier (unexpected) text published on TTA discussing the Spanish Inquisition in relation to Dostoevsky's 'The Grand Inquisitor' (5 Aug 2026): click here.