Michael J. Kok, Four Evangelists and a Heresy Hunter: Investigating the Traditions about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (self published, 2025), 15.
The editorial choices behind the writing of the Gospel of Mark seem puzzling if its author aimed to produce a shortened, harmonized version of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. The latter Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s miraculous birth and appearances to his disciples after rising from the grave, and many aphorisms, parables, and ethical imperatives that they attribute to Jesus, are not reproduced in Mark’s Gospel. Mark’s Gospel concentrates on Jesus’s actions, as Jesus’s last days in Jerusalem are the focus of roughly one-third of its content. It gets straight to the point that Jesus’s mission was to die on the cross. Its outline corresponds to one of Peter’s sermons, which covered the key facts about Jesus from his initial association with John the Baptist to his resurrection (Acts 10:34-43).
It may be more likely that the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke depended on Mark’s Gospel.
The Amateur Exegete 
Hello Ben, I have two questions that I’d like you to answer before you go on vacation. First, I’d like to know: when you post about your new acquisitions, does that include all the academic biblical books you buy, or only some of them? I’d like to better understand what you usually choose to share on the blog.
The second question refers to that conversation we had about temptation in the Letter of James:
On the distinction between testing and moral temptation, what I am trying to clarify is not merely a matter of terminology, but the divine intention in each literary context. The definition of “temptation” is indeed quite broad, but it seems to me that James has in mind a very specific type of temptation — the kind activated by desire, that is, the inducement to sin through the person’s own internal inclination (Jas 1:14). In that sense, Job and Abraham operate in a completely different category from what James is dealing with.
Moreover, in the cases of Job and Abraham, the “evil” or trial comes from the outside — it is an external circumstance placed before the character in extraordinary narrative contexts. In James, however, the problem arises from within, from the internal desire that gives birth to sin. This difference between external evil and internal evil reinforces even more that we are dealing with distinct categories.
In the specific case of Abraham, it is also worth noting that there is no evidence (as far as I know) that in Second Temple Judaism his action was interpreted as sinful. On the contrary, Jewish tradition from that period consistently views Abraham as a model of obedience. This also shows that the ancients did not understand Genesis 22 as God inducing Abraham toward an internal moral evil, but as an exceptional narrative test.
In texts such as Job 1–2 or Genesis 22, the divine action functions as a narrative, localized, and exceptional test — not as moral inducement. These are singular episodes with specific theological purposes, not descriptions of the recurring way in which God deals with His people.
A possible objection, of course, is the case of David’s census in 2 Samuel 24, where Yahweh “incites” David, while the Chronicler replaces this with “Satan” (1 Chr 21). But even this episode operates according to a logic completely different from that of James. In 2 Samuel 24, the divine incitement occurs in the context of judgment, because there was already a prior sin on the part of the people (24:1). God, therefore, acts as a judge within a national framework of discipline, not as someone awakening an internal concupiscence in David to make him fall morally. In James, by contrast, the issue is precisely what leads to sin — the internal desire that generates and feeds transgression. Thus, in the case of the census, the mechanism is judicial and external; in James, it is moral and internal.
Therefore it seems reasonable to say that, “broadly speaking,” God can tempt, but not in the way James is excluding. The context of James is pastoral, focused on the ongoing and everyday experience of believers, whereas texts like Job and Abraham describe extraordinary and unrepeatable situations. Thus, when James states that God “tempts no one” (1:13), he is not denying every possible form of divine testing, but specifically rejecting the idea that God induces anyone to moral sin by stirring up internal desire — which is precisely the kind of temptation he is addressing.
Thank you again for the explanation and the list of texts — they give me exactly the starting point I needed to deepen the study.
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With regards to books, I try to post when I get new biblical studies books, usually in a Roundup. Not always. And lately I’ve been buying fewer books since I’m trying to clear out some of the books I’ve recently acquired but haven’t read.
With regards to James and temptation, I’m not really interested in clashing over the issue. Your reading of these texts is probably pretty standard among evangelicals. In fact, it is likely a reading I too would have taken up when I was an evangelical. My problems with it are multitude, but I think at the root of it all is that I don’t feel the need for the biblical authors to speak univocally on the subject. I think they can and do disagree, James being a particular instance.
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Could you tell me what the problems are so that I can improve?
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I also responded in another comment, but I wanted to tell you that you don’t need to improve. Your view may end up being the right view on this passage! There’s nothing wrong with you at all. You’re just like me – interested in getting at the heart of these texts.
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Ben, I intend for this to be my last comment on the matter. Do you agree that the “evil” in Job is not the same kind of “evil” that James refers to?
In Job — within the semantic and conceptual framework of the Ancient Near East — “evil” (raʿâ) refers primarily to external calamity or experiential suffering, not a moral category. James, however, is dealing with internal moral temptation. Wouldn’t mixing these categories be anachronistic and create a false contradiction?
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I don’t mean to speak for Ben, but, respectfully, the way you phrased your post sounds like you are trying to construe his lack of immediate response to your questions as tacit agreement or concession on his part. Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like the idea that James might contradict or try to challenge earlier Old Testament authorities on the topic of temptation is somehow out of the question.
It is possible for something to be both anachronistic and contradictory. A passage or idea in the New Testament might be changing or modifying a concept originally in the Old Testament or Apocrypha to better fit with later views.
Take for instance the concept that “Satan was originally an angel who rebelled against God, convinced other fallen angels to join him, and tempted the first humans in the Garden of Eden.” You won’t find any of these points in the Old Testament and these never even completely come together in the New Testament. The unified belief that Satan is the original “good guy turned evil” to become the arch-nemesis of God with demons obeying him is most familiar from Milton’s Paradise Lost. I don’t know think he was the first person to define Satan’s familiar backstory as we would recognize it but neither the Old or New Testament tells it like this.
The term “satan” in the Old Testament as an “accuser” or “adversary” is considered to be referring to a being under God’s control who is acting in full accordance with God’s wishes. In Job, for instance, the satan is generally believed to have been a member of God’s “court” or “retinue” who offers to “prosecute” Job with God’s full approval. His goal is to prove that Job is not actually “righteous.” (He is even allowed into God’s presence in heaven to speak in the story. The idea that Satan was expelled from heaven as an evil rebel doesn’t seem to apply. Also, God seems to not know how Job would react to calamity until the satan offers to “demonstrate” by putting him in a situation.)
In fact, he later recognizes Job’s righteousness in an odd verse where he says God “turned him” against Job, which fits with the idea that God was his still his ultimate “master.” He even seems more distraught over Job’s suffering that God ever does in the story.
In contrast, in the New Testament, in the aftermath of the rise of apocalyptic thought, the authors began to think temptation and evil-doing had to be caused by beings opposed to the righteous. Possibly Inspired by widespread ideas in the Ancient Near-East and Mediterranean of “evil spirits”, the idea of Satan as ruler of a demonic horde enabling evildoers emerged for the first time in Bible history. However, the idea that he rebelled against God along with other fallen angels at some point before or during the creation of the world never explicitly manifests itself in any book of the Bible.
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Thank you for your response.
Just to clarify: when I asked Ben whether he agreed or not, I didn’t mean to imply that his silence amounted to agreement. It was simply a genuine question, not a declaration of victory. If it came across otherwise, I apologize. And just to be clear, I’m not an inerrantist; my point is simply that I don’t see a formal contradiction between Job and James.
I agree with you that something can be both anachronistic and contradictory. What I’m asking for is a demonstration of how that applies to this specific case. Merely stating the possibility does not resolve the issue.
Regarding the example of the development of the figure of Satan: I don’t quite see how that illustrates a contradiction between Job and James. In fact, it seems to reinforce my point. If the figure of Satan evolves between the OT and the NT, that shows that the underlying categories also shift. Therefore, if the “satan” in Job functions differently from the Satan in the NT, it likewise makes sense that the “evil” in Job (external calamity) is different from the “evil” in James (internal moral temptation).
If the categories are distinct, then there is no formal contradiction, because a contradiction requires two texts to make opposing statements about the same thing in the same sense. And my point is precisely that Job and James are addressing different phenomena within different semantic frameworks.
If there is evidence that James intends to respond to, correct, or contradict Job’s conception explicitly, I would genuinely like to examine it. Otherwise, it still seems to me that mixing the categories generates a false contradiction.
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I read your comment and wanted to apologize on my part as well for misunderstanding your intention and some of your perspectives. Also, sorry about bringing up the whole example of Satan: it wasn’t the best analogy.
With regard to James and Old Testament, my current stance on whether they are contradictory might be somewhere between what you are arguing and what Ben was earlier. I see the contradiction as less explicit than in other cases, but more of a case where certain implications seen in the context of the passages seems to be at odds with one another.
I’m thinking of maybe going into a little further detail on this perspective but wanted to review the verses in James before posting. My current thoughts revolve around whether James is discussing temptation in the typical sense of offering a condition or object that “suggests”/”increases the odds” of wrong-doing as compared to its absence or the alternative: that he is somehow saying God doesn’t override someone’s “will” or “make someone do something automatically.” I’ll double-check but I think only the first is really considered temptation in the biblical sense, while the second possibility is really a form of “control” or “coercion.”
Thanks,
J.
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