In the KJV
of Matt 4:1, we read:
Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the
wilderness to be tempted of the devil.
The JST
makes an interesting change to this verse:
Then Jesus was led up of the Spirit, into the
wilderness, to be with God.
The
parallel texts does not speak of Jesus being led by the Spirit to be with God,
but to be tempted of Satan:
And immediately the Spirit took him into the
wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty days, Satan seeking to
tempt him; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.
(Mark 1:10-11 JST)
And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost,
returned from Jordan, and was let by the Spirit into the wilderness. And after
forty days, the devil came unto him, to tempt him. And in those days, he did
eat nothing; and when they were ended, he afterwards hungered. (Luke 4:1-2 JST)
Andrew
Skinner wrote the following about JST Matt 4:1:
The significant change of JST Matthew 4:1
regarding Jesus’s original reason for being in the wilderness (“to be with God”
versus the KJV, “to be tempted of the devil”) is exceptionally enlightening and
helps to answer the question raised by scholars about whether the “wilderness”
in this context is to be viewed negatively or positively: “Is it to be
understood negatively as a place of demons (compare 1QM 1) where creation has
been cursed (Isaiah 13:19-22; Ezekiel 34:25; Luke 11:24-28) or positively as a
place restored to a new creation by the coming of the messianic age (Isaiah 11:6-9;
32:14-20; 40:3; 65:25; Hosea 2:18; compare the pre-Fall paradise of Genesis
1:26-28)?”
The reading of the Joseph Smith Translation
shows that the Holy Ghost did not purposely lead Jesus to the devil to be
tempted. Rather, the Holy Ghost led Jesus to the Father, to a higher spiritual
environment, which is one of the purposes of the Holy Ghost. The wilderness experience
foreshadows the Millennium and harks back to the paradise of Eden. A hallmark of
the earth’s paradisiacal condition was the presence of God, and that was the
environment of Jesus’s forty-day wilderness sojourn. The whole earth will
return to that state at the second coming of Christ. (Andrew C. Skinner, “The
Life of Jesus of Nazareth: An Overview” in Lincoln H. Blumell, ed. New Testament History, Culture, and Society:
A Background to the Texts of the New Testament [Provo/Salt Lake City: BYU
Religious Studies Center/Deseret Book, 2019], 245-77, here, pp. 252-53)
Brandon D. Crow, The Last Adam: A Theology of the Obedient Life of Jesus in the Gospels and
Jeffrey Gibson, The Temptations of Jesus in Early Christianity
