As R.C. Zaehner puts it in one of his books, Judaism learned of the Devil from Iran, some 600 years B.C. Before that, anciently, it only had Satan, an angel in God’s service whose sole work was to muster evidence and argument on which to base his eternal case against man — thus his name: The Accuser.
When the Jews came back from the Babylonian Captivity, this dark figure had become a full-fledged antagonist of God Himself — no longer just man’s accuser but God’s enemy, the Satan of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament. Zaehner tells us that he originates from the Devil who tempted Zarathustra, namely God’s evil twin and adversary, Ahriman.
Whom Jesus encounters in the wilderness, a story found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and not in the fourth.
After he was baptized on the River Jordan, the Holy Spirit led Jesus to the desert where the Devil then tempted him.
The practice of withdrawing or retreating to the desert and meditating there must certainly be ancient and preceded Jesus by hundreds, nay, thousands of years.
Try imagining what it’s like — what it was like in the ancient days when the desert, the planet — was more pristine. The stars so big and close and bright, the wind, the sheer expanse of the sands, the size of your solitude. And this was the man who, taking it from our tradition, was closest to God than any other before him or after.
And don’t forget — he fasted for 40 days.
So. Suddenly. He encounters the Devil.
Do not be dismayed by the fact that, as we said, there is a version of the story in the Zoroastrian tradition, namely the temptation of the prophet Zarathustra by Ahriman. The claim that the Iranian parable is older and may therefore logically be the original seems reasonable enough. But so what? The story is obviously not history but parable.
If one treats it as history the same huge problem one has with the Gethsemane story in the fourth gospel surfaces: if all the disciples were asleep and Jesus agonized alone, who then was the source of the story?
If we treat the temptation in the wilderness as history, who then was the source? For in this case Jesus was even more alone than he was in the garden of Gethsemane where his disciples were at least present, only fast asleep.
Now if we read it as parable what does it bring us? Something that should cheer Christians: the New Testament version appears to be the more complete, the deeper, greater version.
It inspired Dostoevsky, arguably the greatest novelist of the nineteenth-century, to write the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, the Russian’s take on the Temptation in the Wilderness.
But even Dostoevsky’s was only one interpretation of the parable, profound as it is.
And even art or painting can only go so far in portraying the encounter. Recall how Martin Scorcese did the scene in his film rendition of Nikos Kazantsakis’ novel The Last Temptation of Christ. There the Devil appears as a snake and looks rather puny. Kazantsakis himself renders him as a beautiful boy with curly black hair and shining white teeth.
The Devil is spirit. Having horns and cloven feet and a tail was the work — of the Church (!) when it was conquering Europe, where one of the gods — Pan, the god of fertility — looked just so.
So tremendous was Jesus’ encounter with the Devil in the desert that angels came down to minister to him afterwards. After that, his own ministry began.
