Harry
Whittaker (d. 1992), a leading Christadelphian missionary and author, wrote the
following in his popular booklet, The
Very Devil, against the common
Christadelphian view that the tempter in the Wilderness narratives (Matt
4:1-11//Mark 1:12-13//Luke 4:1-13) was an external personification of an internal temptation of Jesus (he is
trying to support the view of John Thomas [1805-1871] that the external tempter was an angel from God’s
court):
a. The Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness
for the purpose of being tempted (Mt. 4:1).
b. “The tempter came to him” (v. 3). Does not this suggest a personal approach?
c. Is it altogether appropriate that the
inner thoughts of Jesus should be described as “Satan” and “the devil”?
d. The entire narrative in Mt. and Lk. reads
as a sequence of collocutions between two people.
e. The emphasis on angels (v. 6) would be
specially appropriate to the present hypothesis: “Cast yourself down. You will
come to no harm. I’ll see to that!”
f. “Sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world
and the glory of them” (v. 8). An angel could do this!
g. “All these things will I give thee, if
thou wilt fall down and worship me” (v. 9). These words, not without their
difficulty if spoken by Jesus to Jesus, present much more of a problem if
spoken by one of God’s angels of evil, for does not all human history declare
that the world’s pomp and circumstances are wedded to ways of evil.
h. “Get thee behind me, Satan” (v. 10) is a
rebuttal easier to grasp of spoken by Jesus to another, a Job’s Satan, rather
than to himself.
i. “And behold, angels came and ministered
unto him” (v. 11). Here again the curtain is drawn aside to reveal the activity
of angels of good as well as angels of evil operating in the same field of
human experience; cp. Rev. 12:7; Dan. 10:13. (Harry Whittaker, The Very Devil [Wigan, U.K.: Biblia,
1991], 42-43; note that, for Whittaker, “Job’s Satan” was also an angel from
God’s court [pp. 53-55] acting as an “satan” or “adversary”)
While one
disagrees with Whittaker’s view that the tempter in the narratives was an angel
of God, his comments do highlight just some of the many problems with the more
popular understanding within Christadelphian commentaries.
For more on
the problems with the Christadelphian rejection of a supernatural Satan vis-à-vis
the temptation in the wilderness narratives, see:
Thomas
Farrar (a former Unamended Christadelphian; now Catholic), The
Devil in the Wilderness
For a listing
of articles I have written on the Christadelphian movement, see: