Luke 4:2

4:2 where for forty days he endured temptations 1  from the devil. He 2  ate nothing 3  during those days, and when they were completed, 4  he was famished.

Luke 4:5

4:5 Then 5  the devil 6  led him up 7  to a high place 8  and showed him in a flash all the kingdoms of the world.

1 tn Grk “in the desert, for forty days being tempted.” The participle πειραζόμενος (peirazomeno") has been translated as an adverbial clause in English to avoid a run-on sentence with a second “and.” Here the present participle suggests a period of forty days of testing. Three samples of the end of the testing are given in the following verses.

2 tn Grk “And he.” Here καί (kai) has not been translated because of differences between Greek and English style.

3 sn The reference to Jesus eating nothing could well be an idiom meaning that he ate only what the desert provided; see Exod 34:28. A desert fast simply meant eating only what one could obtain in the desert. The parallel in Matt 4:2 speaks only of Jesus fasting.

4 tn The Greek word here is συντελεσθείσων (suntelesqeiswn) from the verb συντελέω (suntelew).

sn This verb and its cognate noun, sunteleia, usually implies not just the end of an event, but its completion or fulfillment. The noun is always used in the NT in eschatological contexts; the verb is often so used (cf. Matt 13:39, 40; 24:3; 28:20; Mark 13:4; Rom 9:28; Heb 8:8; 9:26). The idea here may be that the forty-day period of temptation was designed for a particular purpose in the life of Christ (the same verb is used in v. 13). The cognate verb teleiow is a key NT term for the completion of God’s plan: See Luke 12:50; 22:37; John 19:30; and (where it has the additional component of meaning “to perfect”) Heb 2:10; 5:8-9; 7:28.

5 tn Here καί (kai) has been translated as “then” to indicate the implied sequence of events within the narrative.

sn The order of Luke’s temptations differs from Matthew’s at this point as numbers two and three are reversed. It is slightly more likely that Luke has made the change to put the Jerusalem temptation last, as Jerusalem is so important to Luke’s later account. The temporal markers in Matthew’s account are also slightly more specific.

6 tn Grk “he.”

7 tc Most mss (א1 A [D W] Θ Ψ 0102 Ë1,[13] 33 700 2542 Ï it) refer to Jesus being taken up “to a high mountain” (with many of these also explicitly adding “the devil”) here in parallel with Matt 4:8, but both scribal harmonization to that text and the pedigree of the witnesses for the shorter reading (א* B L 1241 pc) is the reason it should be omitted from Luke.

8 tn “A high place” is not in the Greek text but has been supplied for clarity.