After Jesus had entered the water, God’s Sacred Breath entered Jesus to fill and indwell him, so he followed his voice into an area where all noise was cut off. He went without food to worship for as many days and nights as two people have digits, and his hunger ate him. There his soul was tested by the head of the worldlings.
Does this sound vaguely familiar? You may recognize the passage as the first two verses of the fourth chapter of Luke — the beginning of one account of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, but it’s been translated with an amalgamation of terminology from eleven different languages that renders a recognizable story strange and somewhat startling.
Some terminology might seem curious to English speakers, but these phrases are all drawn from real Bibles read by and for real people with real Christian faith.
This familiar story of Jesus’s temptation is told in all three of the synoptic gospels and holds a special place in how we view and think of Jesus, especially at this time of year during the 40-day season of Lent when many of us also fast or undertake other spiritual practices.
A New Lens for Lent
During Lent, as we take a step back from business as usual to reflect and remove distractions from our lives, it may be especially valuable to also take a step back and “unfamiliarize” ourselves with this pivotal passage of Scripture in order to understand and embrace it even more deeply — not just seeing it with fresh eyes, but bringing us closer to fellow believers the world over.
Let’s look at this passage in the hybrid translation above a little more closely. If you want, you can follow along with all this information and more in the Translation Insights & Perspectives (TIPs) tool on the pages for Luke 4:1 and Luke 4:2.
After Jesus had entered the water…
In the original Greek text and English translations of Luke 4:1, there is no mention that the temptation happens immediately after Jesus’ baptism. In fact, unlike the other gospels, Luke inserts Jesus’s genealogy at the end of chapter 3.
But in a recent Italian translation, the translator felt there was a need for a clear connection between these two events, especially because the episode about the temptations is placed at the beginning of a new chapter. When tempted by the devil, Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit because the Spirit had just descended upon him at baptism.
English uses “baptism” for “entering the water” — a transliteration of the Greek baptizo, which also means “immerse.” As a result, most languages use an actual translation of baptize, often as a form of “dip,” or, like the Indonesian Uab Meto, “to enter into the water.”
…God’s Sacred Breath entered Jesus to fill and indwell him…
Baptism as “entering into the water” seems particularly fitting since it corresponds so seamlessly with his then being “filled with (the Holy Spirit)” expressed right afterward as “fill and indwell.” This translation from Tagbanwa, a language in the Philippines, beautifully encapsulates how the Holy Spirit not only fills us at first but stays and “indwells” us.
Interestingly, the name used here for “Holy Spirit” is “Sacred Breath,” which follows the example of famed French translator A. Chouraqui, who drew his inspiration for that translation from one of the other meanings of the Greek Pneûma or the Hebrew Ruach. The translation for the Spirit as “Sacred Breath” connects the Spirit’s indwelling nature with God’s lifegiving breath in Genesis 2:7 and Jesus’s Spirit-giving breath in John 20:22.
…he followed his voice into an area where all noise was cut off.
After entering the water and being “indwelled” with the Spirit, Jesus “followed” the Sacred Breath’s “voice” (according to Bariai speakers and readers in Papua New Guinea) to a place where “all the noise was cut off.”
This spatial translation for desert comes from Australian Noongar speakers, and though it misses the important parallel to the desert where Moses and the people of Israel spent their 40 years, our own Lenten practices might also benefit from finding quiet places where “all the noise is cut off” — even if we don’t necessarily travel to a desert or wilderness.
He went without food to worship for as many days and nights as two people have digits, and his hunger ate him.
The Mexican language of Isthmus Mixe adds clear purpose to Jesus’s long fast, specifying that his intent in going “without food” was “to worship God.”
Using “as many as two people have digits” like the Mairasi of Indonesia to designate the number forty may seem unusually anatomical for English speakers, but many languages around the world use similar body part tally systems.
And the Ugandan Kupsabiny expression for Jesus’s intense hunger during his fast, “the hunger ate him,” gives a new physical intensity to his experience in the wilderness. You might reflect on this language if you do your own fasting practice this Lent.
There his soul was tested by the head of the worldlings.
We are familiar with the English account of Jesus’s temptation, but the “soul test” of the Tibetan Bible adds another layer that brings out the experience of spiritual warfare. It’s one thing to withstand a temptation (only to know that there’s another temptation right around the corner), but “soul test” reminds us that our soul grows during these tests — and becomes more equipped to handle them in the future (Rom. 5:3-5).
“Devil” is often translated with a term that describes the commander or leader of an army of evil spirits, but “head of the worldlings,” a translation from the 40,000 Ojitlán Chinantec speakers in Oaxaca, Mexico, seems to work very well for this passage in particular. After all, later in verses 5 and 6 the devil claims the power to offer Jesus authority over all the “kingdoms of the world.” And it calls to mind Paul’s designation of Satan as “god of this world” in 2 Corinthians 4:4.
Make More Room for God This Lent
There are many ways and reasons to observe Lent. Some believers choose to fast to prepare themselves for the glorious news of the Easter resurrection. Others fast as a form of sacrifice to ever-so-faintly shadow the sacrifice of Jesus. Some see it as a form of service or obedience.
In contrast to many of the other liturgical seasons throughout the year, Lent happens mostly quietly and privately, so the motivations and practices tend to vary greatly. Even so, most if not all practitioners of Lent share a common desire to make more room for God, to have a greater focus on him.
And one primary way to sharpen this focus on God so he gains more room in our lives and hearts is to study Scripture.
During this Lenten season, consider immersing yourself in a different kind of Scripture reading through the lenses of languages from around the world in the TIPs tool. If you’d like to immerse yourself more fully in the story of the temptation (or “soul test,” as our Tibetan brothers and sisters would say), you can start in Matthew, in Mark, or in Luke.
Jost Zetzsche is a translator and the curator of Translation Insights & Perspectives (tips.translation.bible) for the United Bible Societies. His writing has appeared in Christianity Today, The Christian Century, and MultiLingual.
