Monday, August 19, 2019

Harry Whittaker (Christadelphian) on the "Tempter" in the Wilderness Being a Person External to Jesus


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:


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