[B-Greek] articles on PEIRASMOS

Jonathan Robie jwrobie at mindspring.com
Wed Aug 20 16:32:43 EDT 2003


Jeffrey Gibson wrote:

> At least with respect to the Matthean passage,  Danker assumes 
> what needs to be proven and simply repeats without examining 
> what older lexicons noted, working from a questionable 
> understanding of what the Matthean passage is all about, was the 
> meaning of the verb.

Possibly. I do not know what mental processes he went through to reach his conclusions. On a couple of occasions, I have been able to ask him about specific words, and I have been amazed at the detailed explanations he can come up with and the reasons behind them, all off the top of his head. At the end of the mental processes I'm currently going through, I will be able to say whether I agree with him on this word or not.

> But several things need to be noted. First, the experience of 
> PEIRASMOS that Jesus undergoes is divinely ordained. Second,
> the "adversary",  the one who carries out the PEIRASMOS, is
> here a divine instrument and does not carry out his work as an
> independent agent or one hostile to the purposes of God.
> Third, and most importantly, the PEIRASMOS that Jesus
> undergoes in Matt. 4:1-11 is intended by Matthew, as the
> welter of allusions to and quotations and images drawn from
> Deuteronomy 6-8 and the tradition it rehearses show, to be
> seen as a recapitulation of the PEIRASMOS experience to which
> God subjected Israel in the Wilderness.  And this was hardly
> a "temptation".

It is certainly plausible that the intended meaning here is "tested". It is not implausible that the intended meaning is "tempted", but a person who has that view would also have a different framework surrounding the interpretation of the Matthew passage. Your own interpretation seems to draw heavily on a particular understanding of Mark's intent and its relationship to Deuteronomy, and I do not think this is the only plausible interpretation of the passage.

In the passage itself, Jesus is both "tested" and "tempted".

Jonathan
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