‘You know some of the gospel accounts cannot be eye-witness.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there is only ‘the Christ’ and one other and the other is not an evangelist.’
‘You’re thinking of the temptation.’
‘I am thinking of the temptation.’
‘Well, Mark gets it about right, he has, ‘…and immediately the Spirit driveth him into the Wilderness… and he was there in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan and was with wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.’ And that’s probably as much as one can say… if the tale has been reported, yet both Luke and Matthew go into massive amounts of detail.’
‘They do but that detail may be a part of the rite.’
‘A part of which rite?’
‘The rite of Baptism which it immediately follows but which if we read from right to left instead of from left to right it actually precedes.’
‘And the Satan is…?
‘The Satan is… the initiating Priest.’
‘And you accuse me of trying to get us hanged!’
‘The ‘Satan’, as in the Book of Job, the prosecutor of God: the opposition. It makes more sense to be tested before the descent of the Spirit than after it.’
‘You know you might be right.’
***
Heart of Albion – Stuart France & Sue Vincent
