Matthew 4

Matthew 4
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Matthew 4:11-12 on Papyrus 102 (3rd century).
Book	Gospel of Matthew
Bible part	New Testament
Order in the Bible part	1
Category	Gospel

Matthew 4 is the fourth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament. It contains two quite distinct sections: the first half, to verse eleven, is Matthew's account of the Temptation of Jesus by the devil and the second section deals with Jesus' first public preaching and the gathering of his first disciples.

The New King James Version organises this chapter as follows:

The section of this chapter dealing with the temptation of Christ by Satan is unquestionably the best known and most studied portion. Satan tempts him three times: in 4:3 with food to relieve Jesus' fast, in 4:6 with testing God, and in 4:9 with control of all the kingdoms of the earth.

There are a number of theories regarding the temptations. One suggests that the three temptations show Jesus rejecting various visions of the Messiah. In the first temptation he shows that he will not be an economic messiah who will use his powers to feed the world's hungry. In the second that he will not be a miracle worker who puts on great spectacles, and the third that he will not be a political saviour but rather a spiritual one. Many scholars today reject this view. A popular theory today is that Jesus is demonstrating that he will not fail where the people of Israel did. There are several references to the period after the Exodus and this is the section of the scripture Jesus' draws his quotes from. In that section the Israelites anger God by testing him and they soon compromise their principles for political power, mistakes that Jesus does not make.

In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 1, the temptation narrative takes only two verses. Luke is quite similar to Matthew with only somewhat different wording and with the order of the second and third temptations reversed. It is thus widely believed that much of this section in Matthew came from the hypothetical document Q. Schweizer notes that Q likely contained little except the actual dialogue, as the extra information is quite different in the two gospels. Hill feels that Mark is written in a manner that assumes his audience is already familiar with the temptation narrative, so this dialogue may have been widely known by the early Christians and thus not necessarily in Q.