Thomas Farrar, a former Christadelphian who recently converted to Roman Catholicism, has a new article on his Dianoigo blog which I found to be very insightful:
What "Yetzer in the Wilderness"? A response to Jonathan Burke on the Devil in the Synoptic Gospels
The article is a response to Jonathan Burke who argues that the tempter in the wilderness is an external personification of the inward sinful desires of Christ, based on the intertestamental concept of the yetzer hara, "the evil impulse/inclination." Farrar shows that this is a rather desperate attempt to protect Christadelphian theology which explicitly rejects the ontological existence of supernatural evil as a tenet of faith.
See also Farrar's paper, The Devil in the Wilderness: Evaluating Christadelphian exegesis of the temptation narratives
For those interested, on the topic of the yetzer hara, a very good scholarly discussion can be found in the following volume:
Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
What "Yetzer in the Wilderness"? A response to Jonathan Burke on the Devil in the Synoptic Gospels
The article is a response to Jonathan Burke who argues that the tempter in the wilderness is an external personification of the inward sinful desires of Christ, based on the intertestamental concept of the yetzer hara, "the evil impulse/inclination." Farrar shows that this is a rather desperate attempt to protect Christadelphian theology which explicitly rejects the ontological existence of supernatural evil as a tenet of faith.
See also Farrar's paper, The Devil in the Wilderness: Evaluating Christadelphian exegesis of the temptation narratives
For those interested, on the topic of the yetzer hara, a very good scholarly discussion can be found in the following volume:
Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Demonic Desires: Yetzer Hara and the Problem of Evil in Late Antiquity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
