What’s on Second?

I don’t mean to pick on the Hebrew Bible. It’s just that it’s so much bigger than the New Testament, with so many more voices narrating so many more events. It’s no surprise that we’ve found so many contradictions, and there are more to come.

You’d think that with four different accounts of Jesus’s life and death, the Gospels would be rife with contradictions. And you wouldn’t be far wrong—there are many tensions, many things that fit oddly together, but not so many outright contradictions, such as the one we identified about which day Jesus was crucified. But many of these tensions can be and have been massaged by saying that one Gospel merely leaves out details another Gospel includes, or is narrating a different but similar occasion. In this way the multiplication of the loaves and fishes itself multiplies into half a dozen events. But it’s not an outright contradiction. If you bought a miracle one time, why not six?

Today’s New Testament contradiction is a small one, really. Hardly worth mentioning. Except… when people are making sweeping claims that the Bible contains absolutely no contradictions, a small one looms very large indeed.

Matthew, Mark and Luke contain an account of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness by the Devil. (Not John—but you can say John just left it out.) Mark’s notice is very brief:

“He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.” (Mark 1:12-13, NRSV)

Matthew and Luke have much more detail (but still not a contradiction—perhaps Mark just left the additional material out). In Matthew’s version, after forty days, the Devil appears and suggests Jesus turn the stones into bread. Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3: “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

The Devil then flies Jesus to the top of the Temple in Jerusalem and says that if Jesus is the Son of God, he should throw himself down and trust the angels to catch him. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy again (6:16): “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” (This is a bloodless translation by the NRSV. The KJV catches the Greek (ekpeiraseis) better: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”)

Finally, the Devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and offers them to him if Jesus will bow down to the Devil. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy one more time (10:20): “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” The Devil vanishes and the story ends.

Luke has basically exactly the same story, in almost exactly the same words. So what’s the problem here? Luke’s story is in a different order. He reverses the temptation at the Temple and the temptation of the kingdoms, so they are third and second, respectively.

If the temptation in the desert was an historical event, it can only have occurred once, and it can only have occurred in one order. As Lincoln said of the Union’s and Confederacy’s claims to have God on their side, “Both may be, but one must be, wrong.”

And there’s no recourse to claim that the order in one or the other account is indeterminate, so that you can reconcile the versions. Both use clearly sequential language to coordinate their second and third temptations.

Matthew begins his second temptation with the word tote, “then.” Not “some time later,” but “right then,” right after the first temptation. And his third temptation is even clearer; it begins with palin, “again,” as in, “Again he transported him.” The only other transportation (paralambanei) is at the beginning of the second temptation. Matthew’s order is fixed.

Luke at first gives some hope to the literalists. He begins his second temptation (the kingdoms) with kai, which means “and.” Just “and.” So maybe he’s simply coordinating the first and second temptations. Maybe there’s still some room for a variant order?

But Luke takes away with his right hand what he gives with his left. The third temptation (the Temple) is connected with the particle de. It’s a Swiss Army knife of a particle, meaning “and,” “but,” “on the other hand,” and other things. But all its uses have one thing in common: de must always follow a previous contrasting thought or event. It can never begin an account. In this case, what Luke is contrasting is the Devil’s action in the second temptation (anagagōn, “having led [him] up”) with the action in the third (ēgagen, “he led [him]”). Therefore, the third temptation must follow the second. The contradiction stands.

Now, what does it mean that Matthew and Luke both have versions of this story, but Mark and John don’t? It turns out that there’s a lot of stuff Matthew and Luke have that the other two evangelists don’t. It appears that Matthew and Luke had access to a source, almost entirely consisting of sayings of Jesus, that Mark and John either didn’t know about or ignored.

Back in the nineties, this source, known as Q (after the German Quelle, or “Source”) was hot stuff. Big claims were made that it was a written source, and some scholars thought they could even sift it for layers in much the same way that we sifted out layers in some Hebrew Bible narratives. The point was to recover the actual historical words Jesus of Nazareth spoke. Nowadays, such grand claims are made more rarely, and Q appears to be a body of traditions, memorized and passed on until two slightly different versions were incorporated into Matthew and Luke. This would account for the variant order of the temptations, and the many small differences in the parables Matthew’s and Luke’s Jesus tells.

Who knows? Maybe Jesus said one thing one time, and something slightly different another time. Or maybe the differences come from the oral tradition. But oral tradition is not like the game of Telephone we all played as kids, where one child whispers something to another child, who must then try to whisper the same thing to the next child, and we all laugh at the end about how the message has been distorted. Oral tradition is a network, not a chain, of dozens of people all telling the same traditions, always aware of, and sometimes challenging each other on, their variant versions. And all the tellers, of course, are being judged by their audiences, who know the material themselves. Oral tradition is much more stable than Telephone, and we have no need to imagine someone taking down Jesus’s words as he spoke them. (“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven… you got that?”)

There’s no way to be objectively, scientifically sure about what Jesus actually said in the hills of Galilee. That was a dream of the nineties, and it’s hardly the only one to pass quietly from the scene. We know more now about what we didn’t know then, and, unlike the great sage Bob Seger, I don’t regret the knowledge.