Reply #29: Robert Eisenman Thinks That the Form of the Last Temptation [View All]

[On the Road]

was written as a slur against Jesus' brother James, whose feud with Paul split the early church. (The Gospels were all written or edited by the Pauline side, and many passages can be read this way.)

Jesus, Matthew says, could have thrown himself down from the temple and angels would have caught him. James, however, was martyred by being forcibly thrown from a high point of the Temple and died. The reader can infer that James did not have God's support the way Jesus did.

The thought process behind the temptation is also interesting -- engaging in an act with fatal results in order to force God's intervention. I have suspected for awhile now that Jesus staged public events like the triumphal entry and confrontations like the cleansing of the Temple in order to make sure he was arrested and sentenced to death. His cry of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" shows that he was expecting an intervention that, tragically for him, never came.