12ᐯ At once the Holy Spirit sent Jesus out into the desert.

Mark 1:12
  • Author: Flavius Josephus
  • Created: Flavian Imperial Cult

This verse and the next are expanded into an entire chapter in Matthew, where Satan has a voice. Here, we are given the barest outline of an heroic journey, and it’s extremely tempting to look to Matthew’s dramatic details to fill in the story. Looking specifically at the words in these two verses, there are quite a few relevant notes. We see five “characters” besides Jesus in these two verses, each worth a few words: Spirit, wilderness, Satan, wild beasts, and angels.

Here, the word Spirit appears without descriptives like ‘sacred’ or ‘holy’, so we can assume that this says the Spirit of Jesus led him into the wilderness, or that he willfully went into the wilderness. At the very least, the Romans do seem to say that this fellow was sincere in his actions, that he felt this was the best thing to do, and that he wasn’t just being irrationally vengeful or intentionally perfidious.