Was Devil's temptation of Jesus real?

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Was it real or only allegorical? I mean Jesus following a devil to the pinnacle of the temple in the city to be tempted etc… appears a bit hard to believe.
 
Devil exists …ok… but the picture of a devil leading some body to a city temple in broad day light…
 
The devil doesn’t have to manifest physically for Jesus to know he was there. He might have simply been speaking to Jesus in locutions in Jesus’ mind. Even if the devil did manifest physically, he might have looked like an ordinary man. And it’s highly likely that wherever Jesus went in the temple was physically accessible by some stairs or a ladder to the roof or whatever.

I’m not seeing what’s hard to believe about it. You basically have one guy (Jesus communicating with the devil via his mind in locutions) or two guys (Jesus and the devil in some kind of human physical form) going up to a roof.
 
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Could be…Still this Devil’s temptation is one thing I find most unusual in the Gospel in a practical view point .Even more than any of Jesus miracles…
 
joseie said:
Was it real or only allegorical? I mean Jesus following a devil to the pinnacle of the temple in the city to be tempted etc… appears a bit hard to believe.
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Forty days without eating, and the mysterious event.

Catechism
538 The Gospels speak of a time of solitude for Jesus in the desert immediately after his baptism by John. Driven by the Spirit into the desert, Jesus remains there for forty days without eating; he lives among wild beasts, and angels minister to him.241 At the end of this time Satan tempts him three times, seeking to compromise his filial attitude toward God. Jesus rebuffs these attacks, which recapitulate the temptations of Adam in Paradise and of Israel in the desert, and the devil leaves him “until an opportune time”.242

539 The evangelists indicate the salvific meaning of this mysterious event: …

540 … By the solemn forty days of Lent the Church unites herself each year to the mystery of Jesus in the desert.
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Oh…no.Fully believe.Miracles are unusual things.What I meant is that this tempting incident is felt as more unusual.
 
For me, one of the most important points of Jesus rejecting all the temptations of the devil, in the desert, was Jesus’s reply to turning stones to bread, after such a long fast:
‘Man can not live on bread alone, but from every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’
Jesus only replied to the devil with Old Testament Scriptural passages.
 
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joseie said:
Was it real or only allegorical? I mean Jesus following a devil to the pinnacle of the temple in the city to be tempted etc… appears a bit hard to believe.
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It was real. The devil is a spirit and doesn’t go anywhere literally because he is nowhere. He is pure will and intellect.

His will was directed towards corrupting Jesus, which he failed at. He was smart enough to know better, but being an unclean spirit he is constantly consumed with pride.
 
But the problem in assuming that there was not any physical devil who did accompany Jesus to the top of the temple is that,a view could then emerge that even Jesus would not have gone physically to the top of the temple.The devil in spiritual form could have shown Jesus the view from the top of the temple even otherwise.That will lead to more complications.So better to believe the story as it is written.That is both physically went there.
 
Angels do not exist physically. They have no bodies or matter.

A spirit is not a kind of aerial body. It is intellect & will.
 
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Disputable.Just like a angles which are also spirits take physical body(eg.Thobit),Devil’s can also do so.
 
He would not have had to have been a physical person accompanying Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple.
 
Certainly a real event, and necessary for Jesus as the “new Adam” to contrast himself to the original Adam.

Adam in Genesis was created in the garden, in paradise, surrounded by everything he could ever want. But he and Eve fell to temptation of Satan, eating the one thing they were told not to amidst the bounty of everything else available to them.

Jesus, on the other hand, was driven into the barren desert, where nothing was available. And even though He had nothing, he did not fall for Satan’s lures and temptations.
 
I am a little troubled that many people on this site seem to run to “allegorical” interpretations of the Bible as opposed to reading the passage in its context. Clearly Matthew, Mark, and Luke who testify to the tempting of Christ were offering a historical narrative account of what Jesus did and said throughout his ministry. It seems a bit disingenuous that we would just throw that to the wind to be interpreted however we want because we have issues with finding a materialistic or naturalistic explanation.
 
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I have a difficult with this passage that is of different nature.

The devil isn’t stupid, is he? And he knew who Jesus was? Surely he must have known. Did the devil honestly believe that Jesus was going to accept his suggestions and do those stupid things? So the devil either seriously underestimated Jesus, and as a result wasted a lot of time and even created a story that doubtlessly acted as a warning to many others and thus harmed the devli and continues to harm him to this day. In other words, the devl shot himself in the foot. unless that is, there is something else to this story that I’m not seeing.
 
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And another thing.

The devil said, if Jesus were to throw himself down, God would sen angels to catch him and prevent him coming to harm.

Jesus didn’t contradict thta, but said something about not putting his father to the test.

So in other words, if Jesus ahd actually thrown himself down, God would indeed have sent angels.

This ia a bit starnge. Nowhere, not in the OT and not in the NT is there any precedent for such a thing happening.
 
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