The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke each reference the venturing of Jesus into the desert for forty days where he encounters the devil and perseveres. Matthew's account of Christ fasting during this time compares interestingly with rituals from other cultures and religions. Viewing through an anthropological lens, readers can understand The Temptation of Christ with a new perspective.
John Milton's Paradise Regained
John Milton during the Renaissance with Paradise Regained was one of the first to re-envision Christ's temptation. Milton recreates Jesus entering the "wilderness," fasting, and meeting Satan. Though tempted and challenged, Christ overcomes.
Milton, however, puts more emphasis on Christ defeating faulty rhetoric. Christ transcends Satan's logic through introspection and sound reason. He sets a new example, a hero of the mind rather than might. Through inwardness, discovery, and actualization, Christ travels the arch to enlightenment and utters to Satan, "Get thee behind me."
Self-Induced Trauma Rituals
Another way to view the story of Christ's temptation instead of as Biblical truth or literary vehicle is as historical artifact. The accounts of Christ's ritualistic meditation, isolation, and fasting indeed resemble many other practices from many other cultures. Nearly all non-Western cultures use trauma rituals for the sake of enlightenment or spiritual evolution.
Trauma rituals even exist within Western culture. Some members of the North American Mandan tribe participate in the Sundance ritual, a grisly spectacle where skin from the pectoral is pierced and pulled for hours on end until the participant experiences wild, psyche-altering hallucinations and visions. Piercing enthusiasts in Western culture perform similar suspension rituals for similar desired effects.
Subcultures, or counter-cultures, in the West perform trauma rituals through the use of chemicals. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and Timothy Leary and his followers with their motto, "tune in, turn on, drop out," all intrepidly set out on quests for psychic evolution or enlightenment. They used LSD as their trauma stimulant.
Other cultures use fasting to induce trauma. Fasting, like pain or hallucinogenic drugs, leads to strange, powerful, and at times profound, psycho-visual distortions. Remnants of fasting rituals exist in Islam and Christianity. Muslims fast during Ramadan, and Catholics fast during Lent, in commemoration of Jesus.
Revisiting Jesus and the Dessert
With the nature of trauma rituals in mind, viewing The Temptation of Christ as a historical artifact of an actual instance of meditation, individuals can apprehend a story devoid of divinity, though awe-inspiring all the same.
Jesus wandered into to the desert, isolated himself with his thoughts, and deprived himself of nutrition. Eventually, the hallucinations took hold, he became traumatized, battled the the trauma in all its complexity, and achieved enlightenment. Jesus was not in the desert, carrying on a godly conversation with the devil. He was talking to himself, to his own mentally-produced hallucinations, realizing a personal and universal understanding through self-discovery that in time would develop into an earth-sweeping philosophy.
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