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The tester—also called the devil. Satan as a character becomes more prominent in the Gospels and the later epistolary literature. However, his nature and presence are simply assumed as part of the Jewish theological and mythological milieu of the first century. We must be careful not to assume that the Satan character has been operating covertly all along and that the trials Yahweh faced in the Old Testament were actually Satan’s doing. Such an assumption has no basis whatsoever in the Old Testament narrative and has very little to commend it even from the New.

Even Heiser, who’s committed to a thoroughgoing theology of Satan and his demons, admits that the presence of a devil character in the wilderness is derivative of the prevailing Jewish mythology at the time. But Heiser rightly points out that the emphasis of the temptation narrative lies not on the devil but on Jesus, who endures the temptation of both Adam and Israel and emerges victorious (Heiser, Unseen Realm, 276–78). Here, the devil seems to be functioning in much the same way as the satan character does in the book of Job—an accuser set to test the loyalty of the subject to Yahweh. That this is some kind of reprisal of an appearance made by the cosmological character we call Satan from Eden is entirely outside the bounds of the immediate context.

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The Sermon on the Mount as a recreation of Moses’s mountain experience. The Sermon on the Mount functions not as a removal of the Sinaitic law but and enshrining of it. Jesus specifically mentions that he has no intentions of getting rid of Moses’s law, but instead living it out in the fullest possible way (Matt. 5:17–20).

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Jesus doing what humanity was designed to do in the first place. For a fuller explanation of how Jesus reverses Adam’s failure in his obedience to the Father, see Brandon D. Crowe, The Last Adam: A Theology of the Obedient Life of Jesus in the Gospels (Baker Academic, 2017), 67–80.

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Jesus can’t be the new human if he isn’t divine in the first place. In his defense of Jesus’s divinity and humanity, church father Athanasius used the example of a painter who’d created a beautiful piece of art that an enemy destroyed. So marred was the painting that he could not repair it, so he had to invite the original subject back to sit again for a new painting.

By this, Athanasius points to Jesus. Because humans were original made in the image of the creator-God, they were the picture of the divine. Humanity’s fall however corrupted that image. So in Jesus, we have the divine re-imaging the creator-God. He must be divine because only the divine can accurately remake a race of beings that were meant to image God (On the Incarnation, 3.13).

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Jesus needs a kick in the pants to get the revolution going. Here I tip my hat to what I suspect the motivation behind Judas’s actions might have been. It’s difficult to assess from the presentation of Judas in the Gospels exactly what was going on in the mind of Jesus’s betrayer. But given the literary thrust of the book of Matthew, I believe seeing Judas as the only one of the Twelve to try and catalyze the kingdom they all expected (see Matthew 20:20–27) fits best. See Kim Paffenroth, Judas: Images of the Lost Disciple (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 86–92, for a more thorough documenting of this presentation of Judas.

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Jesus telling the Father, “Your will be done.” Jesus’s willing embrace of death stands at the center of the church’s earliest confessions about their Messiah. In Philippians 2, the Apostle Paul records what is likely a hymn that predates his own ministry. That hymn highlights the new-Adam relationship Jesus has with the Father, going so far as to show how his choices undo each of Adam’s failures.

Being in the image of God, Jesus does not claim godhood for himself. He humbly accepts his station of submitted obedience, and that obedience leads him into Adam’s curse—into death itself. But because of Jesus’s faithful obedience as the new Adam, he is in turn exalted to sit on Adam’s throne over the entire earth. See Yongbom Lee, The Son of Man as the Last Adam: The Early Church Tradition as a Source of Paul’s Adam Christology (Pickwick Publications, 2012), 1265–5279, Kindle, for more details on how that hymn functioned in the early church and informed Paul’s own perspective of who Jesus is.

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Jesus claims to be equal with Yahweh himself. In Matthew’s narrative, Jesus claims to be both the son of God and the son of man (Matt. 26:63–64). It’s that second title, though, that provokes the greatest reaction among the Jewish leaders. The title “son of man” comes from the book of Daniel, where the visions of the elderly prophet describe a divine being who stands at the right hand of Yahweh and comes riding on the clouds.

He’s described in the same terms that Daniel uses to talk about the eternal kingdom that will destroy all earthly kingdoms (Dan. 2:44). In Jesus’s day, that person—the son of man—had come to be equated with God himself (Heiser, Unseen Realm, 252–53). It’s precisely this connection—that there is a second ruler in the heavens alongside Yahweh, that gave rise to a whole movement with Judaism both during Jesus’s day and afterwards. For a thorough examination of the conflict, see Alan Segal’s definitive work, Two Powers in Heaven (Baylor Academic, 2012).