Note 45 — Chapter II · BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

What was Mark’s object in introducing the wild beasts, it is difficult to say. The majority of expositors are of opinion that he intended to complete the terrible picture of the wilderness;45 but to this it is not without reason objected, that the clause would then have been in closer connexion with the words ἦν ἐν τῇ ἐρήμῳ, he was in the wilderness, instead of being placed after πειραζόμενος, tempted.46 Usteri has hazarded the conjecture that this particularity may be designed to mark Christ as the antitype of Adam, who, in Paradise, also stood in a peculiar relation to the animals,47 and Olshausen has eagerly laid hold on this mystical notion; but it is an interpretation which finds little support in the context. Schleiermacher, in pronouncing this feature of Mark’s narrative extravagant,48 doubtless means that this Evangelist here, as in other instances of exaggeration, borders on the style of the apocryphal gospels, for whose capricious fictions we are not seldom unable to suggest a cause or an object, and thus we must rest contented, for the present, to penetrate no farther into the sense of his statement.