Note 65 — Chapter II · BAPTISM AND TEMPTATION OF JESUS.

The impossibility of conceiving the sudden removals of Jesus to the temple and the mountain, led some even of the ancient commentators to the opinion, that at least the locality of the second and third temptations was not present to Jesus corporeally and externally, but merely in a vision;65 while some modern ones, to whom the personal appearance of the devil was especially offensive, have supposed that the whole transaction with him passed from beginning to end within the recesses of the soul of Jesus. Herewith they have regarded the forty days’ fast either as a mere internal representation66 (which, however, is a most inadmissible perversion of the plainly historic text: νηστεύσας ἡμέρας τεσσαράκοντα ὕστερον ἐπείνασε, Matt. iv. 2), or as a real fact, in which case the formidable difficulties mentioned in the preceding section remain valid. The internal representation of the temptations is by some made to accompany a state of ecstatic vision, for which they retain a supernatural cause, deriving it either from God, or from the kingdom of darkness:67 others ascribe to the vision more of the nature of a dream, and accordingly seek a natural cause for it, in the reflections with which Jesus was occupied during his waking moments.68 According to this theory, Jesus, in the solemn mood which the baptismal scene was calculated to produce, reviews his messianic plan, and together with the true means for its execution, he recalls their possible abuses; an excessive use of miracles and a love of domination, by which man, in the Jewish mode of thinking, became, instead of an instrument of God, a promoter of the plans of the devil. While surrendering himself to such meditations, his finely organized body is overcome by their exciting influence; he sinks for some time into deep exhaustion, and then into a dream-like state, in which his mind unconsciously embodies his previous thoughts in speaking and acting forms.