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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
History depends entirely on reliable information. The more the historian has the better her history will be. Does the same rule apply to gospel writers? More specifically, how did the author of Mark obtain the data reported in this passage? What source did he use to learn that Jesus saw a vision and heard a heavenly voice? How did he know that the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert or that Jesus was tempted there by Satan? Jesus could have been the only source for this information. Even so, we still don't know how the information reached the gospel writer. How was the data "massaged" in the process of transmission, if in fact it originated with Jesus? I think we can be confident that the author himself believed these events took place as he reports them, but we shouldn't suppose that means they were historical events in a modern sense. Indeed, the contents of visions and experiences with Satan aren't historical by definition. They aren't things that a historian can verify. The most the historian can say is that Person X believed she saw a vision and Person Y felt himself under attack by Satan. So, the question is whether or not Jesus believed he had a vision and was tempted by Satan. And how did Mark come to possess this information?
Mark isn't a fabrication. It isn't the product of an over-exercised religious imagination. Whatever it is, it isn't myth in any recognizable sense. The author firmly believed he was writing the truth about the past. It was, for him, an "empirical" past, though one determined by gospel rather than historiography. This means there was some connection with Jesus and the disciples as the ultimate source for much of what he wrote. If that's the case, then we're dealing here with a first century Jewish mystic who saw visions, wrestled with the devil, and believed that he had a special relationship with God--if we can trust Mark's sources. I think we can, at least at this point. It's highly likely that the early church thought Jesus saw dovish visions and the rest of it because Jesus shared this information with others and that information, in one form or another, reached the author of Mark.
