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5. καὶ ἀναγαγὼν αὐτόν. Probably “the devil” and “into a high mountain” are added from St Matthew. How the devil took Him up we are not told. Scripture, to turn away our thoughts from the secondary to the essential, knows nothing of those journeys through the air which we find in Apocrypha and in the ‘Gospel of the Hebrews.’
It is remarkable that St Luke (whom Milton follows in his Par. Regained) here adopts a different order of the temptations from St Matthew, perhaps because he thought that the temptation to spiritual pride (which he places third) was keener and subtler than that to temporal ambition; perhaps, too, because he believed that the ministering angels (whom however he does not mention) only appeared to save Christ from the pinnacle of the Temple. That the actual order is that of St Matthew is probable, because (1) he alone uses notes of sequence, “then,” “again;” (2) Christ closes the temptation by “Get thee behind me, Satan” (see on Luk 4:8); (3) as an actual Apostle he is more likely to have heard the narrative from the lips of Christ Himself. But in the chronology of spiritual crises there is little room for the accurate sequence of ‘before’ and ‘after.’ They crowd eternity into an hour, and stretch an hour into eternity. And psychologically St Luke’s order is the more correct, for the purely spiritual temptation to a proud exclusive challenge of God’s care was of a keener kind than the temptation to earthly ambition.
τῆς οἰκουμένης. See above on Luk 2:1.
ἐν στιγμῇ χρόνου. ‘In a second’; comp. 1Co 15:52, “in the twinkling of an eye”—in the sudden flash of an instantaneous vision. It was as Bengel says ‘acuta tentatio,’ concentrated as it were into one intense spasm. The first temptation had been through a natural appetite; the second was through a patriotic aspiration; the third was purely religious. The splendour of the temptation, and the fact that it appealed to
“the spur which the clear spirit doth raise,
The last infirmity of noble minds,”
might seem to Satan to make up for its impudent, undisguised character. He was offering to One who had lived as the Village Carpenter the throne of the world. The intensity of the temptation lay however yet more in the fact that it seemed to open a swift way to the fulfilment of the Messianic promises, and the deliverance of the land for which the Lord felt so deep a love (Luk 13:34, Luk 19:41).