The Devil is a Bible Scholar

Gospel Reflection for March 9, 2025, the first Sunday of Lent - Luke 4:1-14

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the desert,

For the space of forty days; and was tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days; and when they were ended, he was hungry.

And the devil said to him: If thou be the Son of God, say to this stone that it be made bread.

And Jesus answered him: It is written, that Man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word of God.

And the devil led him into a high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time;

And he said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them.

If thou therefore wilt adore before me, all shall be thine.

And Jesus answering said to him: It is written: Thou shalt adore the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and he said to him: If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself from hence.

For it is written, that He hath given his angels charge over thee, that they keep thee.

And that in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone.

And Jesus answering, said to him: It is said: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

And all the temptation being ended, the devil departed from him for a time.

And Jesus returned in the power of the spirit, into Galilee, and the fame of him went out through the whole country. (Luke 4:1-14 DRA)

St. Luke’s account of Our Lord’s temptations by Satan in the wilderness is a suitable introduction to the holy season of Lent on this first Sunday. It teaches us an important lesson, one that may be overlooked in more analytical interpretations of this passage, like those I have written before and which are very beneficial in themselves. However, for this reflection I would like to look at this overlooked element, that which is revealed by the title of this post.

In the first volume of his three-part series of studies on the Person of Jesus in the Gospels, entitled Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI highlights this rarely-noticed aspect of Christ’s temptations, one that is perhaps too obvious to be seen. Almost the entire dialogue between Christ and the devil involves an exchange, what St. John Chrysostom described as a spiritual wrestling match, of quotes from Scripture. Though we usually take it for granted, one could rightly ask: how can Satan, the great rebel, the prince of demons, the first murderer and liar, use God’s own words against Him? As the Church teaches, Scripture has one author, the Holy Ghost, who breathed through His many sacred writers to communicate the truth of Christ. So, when Satan quotes the Bible, he is using God’s own inspired words in an attempt to disprove the divine identity and messianic mission of Christ.

Pope Benedict observes:

The devil proves to be a Bible expert who can quote the Psalm exactly. The whole conversation of the second temptation takes the form of a dispute between two Bible scholars. Remarking on this passage, Joachim Gnilka says that the devil presents himself here as a theologian. The Russian writer Vladimir Soloviev took up this motif in his short story “The Antichrist.” The Antichrist receives an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Tübingen and is a great Scripture scholar.

One of the great “advances” of the so-called Enlightenment, extending from humanistic studies in the Renaissance, is modern biblical scholarship, most prominently the historical-critical method. While it has given some contributions of genuine use, particularly for historical context and corroboration, it has also been one of the most powerful instruments of Satan for destroying faith in the divine inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. As Soloviev knew, this is truly the work of the Antichrist, to teach the world that the only rational way to approach the Bible is to deny its whole purpose, that of communicating God’s revelation and teaching us to live in accordance with His Wisdom. How many Christians today truly believe that the Bible is inerrant, after every part of it has been dissected by biblical scholars and judged to be contrary to science, history and modern moral standards? Pope Benedict thus writes,

The fact is that scriptural exegesis can become a tool of the Antichrist. Soloviev is not the first person to tell us that; it is the deeper point of the temptation story itself. The alleged findings of scholarly exegesis have been used to put together the most dreadful books that destroy the figure of Jesus and dismantle the faith. The common practice today is to measure the Bible against the so-called modern worldview, whose fundamental dogma is that God cannot act in history—that everything to do with God is to be relegated to the domain of subjectivity. And so the Bible no longer speaks of God, the living God; no, now we alone speak and decide what God can do and what we will and should do. And the Antichrist, with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly purely scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times.

The guiding principle of modern biblical scholarship and the historical-critical method is that God is wholly removed from human life and from the processes of nature. If He exists at all, He is only a deistic “divine watchmaker” who designed the essential laws of science and then left the world to its own devices. Therefore, from this perspective, if none of the supernatural claims in Scripture are literally true, then most of its material is just made-up, like the pagan myths of antiquity, perhaps containing interesting philosophical insights into how one should live but nothing more.

In obedience to this principle, traditional authorship is routinely denied, the recorded events are attributed to the propagandist fiction-writing of authors living many centuries later, and accounts of miracles are chalked up to ancient peoples’ ignorance of science. Modern biblical scholars, such as Bultmann, Ehrman and the Jesus Seminar, thus see it as their mission to scrape away all that is presumably superstitious and false in Scripture in order to the reveal its true meaning – which just happens to match up with the personal beliefs of the individual interpreter, which may be Protestant, Heideggerian (for Bultmann), Marxist, LGBTQ, feminist, etc., and if this “true meaning” seems to contradict Scripture, Scripture must be wrong.

Pope Benedict concludes:

The theological debate between Jesus and the devil is a dispute over the correct interpretation of Scripture, and it is relevant to every period of history. The hermeneutical question lying at the basis of proper scriptural exegesis is this: What picture of God are we working with? The dispute about interpretation is ultimately a dispute about who God is. Yet in practice, the struggle over the image of God, which underlies the debate about valid biblical interpretation, is decided by the picture we form of Christ: Is he, who remained without worldly power, really the Son of the living God?

Unfortunately, this problem of modern biblical interpretation is not limited to non-Catholics. One of the most glaring examples of it for Catholics is the New American Bible, whose notes contain blatant heresy, yet it is handed out as the standard Bible in most American parishes. While the Church has given some helpful advice regarding Scripture in recent decades, to help Catholics interpret it in accordance with infallible Catholic doctrine, in the early 20^th century the Pontifical Biblical Commission gave answers to many questions posed by modern scholarship, and at this time it possessed infallible magisterial authority, so that its teaching is just as binding and reliable today.

Many of us this Lent, myself included, will take up as a “positive” sacrifice the daily reading of Scripture. But as we reflect on God’s Word communicated through the words of His sacred writers, may we remember the principles given to us by the Church for interpreting it correctly and guard ourselves against the seductions of the Antichrist, who even now seeks to destroy our faith in God and His saving actions in history. May the Holy Ghost free us from the false popular conceptions of God which have deformed our faith.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

An evil soul producing holy witness

Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,

A goodly apple rotten at the heart.

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

(William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)