“To a high place”: Jesus’s mid-air battles with the Devil
JESUS AND THE TEMPTATIONS, PART ONE
The levitationlike experiences of Jesus conform to a universal pattern
The greatest number of recorded levitators are those Christians who were inspired by Jesus’s life and legend. In the first instalment in a two-part feature BOB RICKARD analyses the ‘Temptations’ – a significant moment of paranatural transportation in Jesus’s life. Part two will discuss these in terms of traditions of magical battles in mid-air.
“Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.” – Impressions & Comments (1914)
This sarcastic quotation by the English physician and essayist Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) shows a level of cynicism that I do not share. Not only does it oversimplify a complicated scene to the verge of bigotry, it is plainly wrong in its lampooning of how ‘lunatics’ were treated in ancient Levant. Even a cursory survey of the literature discussing levitation – and its phenomenologically related instances of teleportation and bilocation – reveals a bewildering landscape, peopled with the supposedly ‘possessed’, shamans, saints, demons, magicians, mediums, demigods and even alien contactees, to name just a few of those actors or agents most often discussed. Had they an opinion, and someone to voice it, they might have challenged Ellis’s mocking statement. I humbly offer this alternative.
Ellis, unreasonably, asserts that Jesus’s contemporaries would have judged him by the standards of the modern world. However, it is evident that, like many archaic societies, the people of Jesus’s day had their own ways of accommodating eccentrics. Many became prophets; most of the rest were simply judged to be heretics, possessed, or both.1 I hope to show that the accounts of the levitation-like experiences of Jesus – as narrated in the scenes of his Temptation – seem to conform to a near-universal pattern of impromptu ‘shamanism’.2 By this I mean that an encounter with a numinous entity, including levitation-like phenomena, is sometimes associated with an ecstatic experience. These are precisely the elements that marked the character of Jesus as a prophet among his contemporaries. Wishing to avoid yet another fruitless debate about the nature of miracles, this study simply focuses upon discourse about ‘paranatural transportation’ in the life of Jesus.
Stories from our past can carry at least two main opposing vectors: heroes become immortalised and gods are made mortal (euhemerism). In the case of Jesus, both processes were, and still are, active. That said, it is not unreasonable to suppose that contemporary observers of an actual event – such as the sudden elevation of a person, floating some distance through the air, or disappearing only to reappear elsewhere – would find it difficult to explain what they thought they saw without resorting to some sort of ‘supernatural’ intervention. Modern witnesses of paranatural phenomena face a similar difficulty but in the other direction. Even if they had recording devices, many of today’s observers would find materialistic or rationalistic reasons for rejecting the evidence of their own eyes and ears – a reaction familiar to students of encounters with UFOs, ghosts or fairies.
What would an authentic account look like? For us today, it would make for undoubtedly strange reading, especially if we assume an honest and awed witness tried faithfully to describe what happened in the language and images available to him or her. The matter of language, as will become apparent, seems to be critically important.
JESUS AND THE TEMPTATIONS
The terrestrial ministry of Jesus begins with “that interview”, as Ellis put it. The bodily ‘Ascension’ with which Jesus departed this world may well remain a mystery. His earthly, public mission, however, was inaugurated by three important ‘set pieces’, two of which feature a teleportation-like mode of transportation as an essential part.
During his baptism by John the Baptist, the Gospel writers say, the “Holy Spirit” descended upon Jesus and he experienced direct communion with God. Almost immediately, Jesus is compelled to go into the Judaean Desert (a region north and east of Jerusalem towards the Dead Sea). The phrase used in the Catechism and elsewhere is significant: “At once... he is driven by the Spirit into the desert.” 4
Arriving there – quite possibly still in an ecstatic trance – Jesus is described as fasting and contemplating for 40 days and nights, much as did Moses and Elijah before him. Towards the end of this period of isolation, hunger and exposure, when presumably his physiological and psychological stresses are at their greatest – that is, in a state not unlike the effect of a shamanistic rite – Jesus is confronted by an entity frequently referred to as the ‘Tempter’.
The Tempter challenges Jesus three times, each time clearly acknowledging Jesus’s innate magical ability. 5 In the first instance, the exhausted Jesus is invited to relieve his hunger by turning stones into bread. As this has no immediate bearing upon our subject, I leave it there.
Next, this entity – apparently with great mystical or magical power at his own disposal – transports Jesus upwards, to one of the great peaks in the region. The impression of these movements given by the texts is one of teleportation: instantaneous transportation to a distant location.
While the exact location is unknown, Jabal al-Qarantal (as it is called in Arabic), located just northwest of Jericho, has historically been regarded as the mountain where Jesus was shown “all the kingdoms of the world”. Often referred to as Quarantania, itisa desolate ridge of mostly barren rocks overlooking “the sluggish, bituminous waters of the Sodomitic Sea”, where, as theologian and philologist Frederick Farrar (1831-1903) puts it, “in the language of the prophets, ‘the owls dwell and the satyrs dance’”.
From there, Jesus is again transported, this time to “the highest pinnacle of the Temple”,6 an estimated distance of 20km (12 miles) directly southwest from Quarantania to Jerusalem. At this remove, the identity of this ‘pinnacle’ can only be conjectured. Modern understanding of the word tends to be influenced by the familiar depictions in high art of Jesus and the Adversary standing
on the very highest tower or peak. Derived from the Latin for the tip of a wing, the word could equally apply to the extremity of any building.
Over time, the top of the walls of the Temple Mount have been destroyed and rebuilt. Farrar describes the locale thus: “Some well-known pinnacle of that wellknown mass must be intended; perhaps the roof of the Stoa Basilike, or the Royal Porch on the southern side of the Temple which looked down sheer into the valley of the Kidron below it, from a height so dizzy that, according to the description of Josephus, if any one ventured to look down, his head would swim at the immeasurable depth.” If the south-eastern corner is meant (see the Temple panel), the drop into the Kidron Valley (which runs below the Temple’s eastern wall, dividing Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives) has been estimated at around 450ft (137m).7
While the scriptural versions of Matthew 4:5 are largely in agreement that it was “a devil” who transported Jesus, this devil’s identity is never fully clarified. For example, the King James Bible has: “Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple”, where the more modern World English Bible has: “Then the devil took him into the holy city. He set him on the pinnacle of the temple”.
At this elevated, man-made, location, the Tempter challenges Jesus to have God make
A ridge of barren rocks where “the owls dwell and the satyrs dance”