Matthew 4:1-11 orders the temptations: (1) stones to bread, (2) pinnacle of the temple, (3) kingdoms of the world from a mountain. Luke 4:1-13 orders them: (1) stone to bread, (2) kingdoms of the world from a mountain, (3) pinnacle of the temple. The second and third temptations are swapped between the two evangelists.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Stones to bread, temple dive, kingdoms of the world
1Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.2When he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was hungry afterward.3The tempter came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.”
5Then the devil took him into the holy city. He set him on the pinnacle of the temple,6and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and, ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you don’t dash your foot against a stone.’ ”
8Again, the devil took him to an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory.9He said to him, “I will give you all of these things, if you will fall down and worship me.”
1Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness2for forty days, being tempted by the devil. He ate nothing in those days. Afterward, when they were completed, he was hungry.3The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.”
5The devil, leading him up on a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.6The devil said to him, “I will give you all this authority, and their glory, for it has been delivered to me; and I give it to whomever I want.
9He led him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, cast yourself down from here,10for it is written, ‘He will put his angels in charge of you, to guard you;’
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This is a Q-source contradiction: Matthew and Luke draw on the same hypothetical sayings source for the temptation narrative (it is a rare Q passage that is narrative rather than pure saying), and they redactionally reorder the second and third temptations toward different theological climaxes.
Matthew 4 runs bread → temple → kingdoms-from-a-mountain. The cycle climaxes on 'an exceedingly high mountain' where Satan offers 'all the kingdoms of the world and their glory' (*pasas tas basileias tou kosmou kai tēn doxan autōn*), and Jesus dismisses him: *hypage, satana* ('Begone, Satan'). Mountains are theophanic loci throughout Matthew — the Sermon on the Mount, the Transfiguration mountain, and the closing mountain of the Great Commission (28:16) — so a mountain climax to the temptation cycle coheres with Matthew's redactional geography and his Mosaic typology for Jesus.
Luke 4 runs bread → kingdoms-from-a-height → temple. Luke's cycle climaxes at 'Jerusalem,' on the pinnacle of the temple. Luke's Gospel is famously Jerusalem-oriented: the infancy narrative begins in the temple (1:8-23) and ends there (2:41-50), the travel narrative is a long march toward Jerusalem (9:51ff.), and the Gospel closes in the temple (24:53) with Acts opening there. Ending the temptation in Jerusalem fits this structural gravitation.
The ordering also differs in detail: Matthew's transitions use 'then' (*tote*) and 'again' (*palin*) and have Satan physically transporting Jesus, while Luke softens the third scene's verb (*ēgagen*, 'he led him') and adds that Satan showed the kingdoms 'in a moment of time' (4:5). These are the fingerprints of two independent redactions of shared material.
Two harmonizations recur. The first holds that one evangelist gives chronological order and the other thematic order. This concedes the key point — that at least one Gospel narrates the temptations non-chronologically inside a narrative that otherwise reads as sequential — and it cannot specify which order is the 'real' one without circular appeal. The second posits two separate temptation cycles, one reported by each evangelist. This is *ad hoc*: both accounts share the forty-day frame, the same three temptations, the same scripted exchanges built on Deuteronomy citations (Deut 8:3; 6:16; 6:13), and the same conclusion with Satan's departure. Two distinct yet verbally near-identical cycles is precisely the kind of unfalsifiable multiplication scholars treat as a harmonization of last resort.
The critical consensus (Fitzmyer, Davies-Allison, Bovon, Marshall, Nolland) is straightforward redactional reordering of shared Q tradition, each evangelist arranging the temptations to climax in his preferred locus — mountain for Matthew, temple/Jerusalem for Luke. The harder question is which order stood in Q. A majority (Fitzmyer, Kloppenborg) favors Luke's order as more original, partly because Matthew elsewhere reorders Q more freely than Luke, and partly because Matthew's *hypage, satana* makes a more natural climactic dismissal where Matthew has placed it, suggesting Matthew moved the kingdoms scene to the end to create that climax. A minority argues Matthew preserves Q's order with its scriptural citations in canonical-Deuteronomy sequence. The debate over the direction of editing does not affect the fact of editing.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine compositional contradiction in sequence; the most economical reading is that Matthew and Luke independently reordered a shared Q narrative for theological climax, with Luke probably closer to Q's order. The two-cycles harmonization is unparsimonious, and the topical-order harmonization concedes non-chronological narration.
Sources for this reading
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (Anchor Bible 28; Doubleday, 1981) pp. 506-520on the temptation order and Q
W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 1 (ICC; T&T Clark, 1988) pp. 351-374on Matthew 4:1-11Matthew 4:1-11
François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1-9:50 (Hermeneia; Fortress, 2002) pp. 138-147on the Jerusalem climax
John Nolland, Luke 1-9:20 (Word Biblical Commentary 35A; Word, 1989) pp. 175-188on Luke's redaction
John S. Kloppenborg, Q, the Earliest Gospel (Westminster John Knox, 2008) pp. 84-92on the Q temptation narrative
Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary, rev. ed. (Hermeneia; Fortress, 2007) pp. 149-160on Matthew 4Matthew 4
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This is a Q-source contradiction: Matthew and Luke draw on the same hypothetical sayings source for the temptation narrative (it is a rare Q passage that is narrative rather than pure saying), and they redactionally reorder the second and third temptations toward different theological climaxes.
Matthew 4 runs bread → temple → kingdoms-from-a-mountain. The cycle climaxes on 'an exceedingly high mountain' where Satan offers 'all the kingdoms of the world and their glory' (*pasas tas basileias tou kosmou kai tēn doxan autōn*), and Jesus dismisses him: *hypage, satana* ('Begone, Satan'). Mountains are theophanic loci throughout Matthew — the Sermon on the Mount, the Transfiguration mountain, and the closing mountain of the Great Commission (28:16) — so a mountain climax to the temptation cycle coheres with Matthew's redactional geography and his Mosaic typology for Jesus.
Luke 4 runs bread → kingdoms-from-a-height → temple. Luke's cycle climaxes at 'Jerusalem,' on the pinnacle of the temple. Luke's Gospel is famously Jerusalem-oriented: the infancy narrative begins in the temple (1:8-23) and ends there (2:41-50), the travel narrative is a long march toward Jerusalem (9:51ff.), and the Gospel closes in the temple (24:53) with Acts opening there. Ending the temptation in Jerusalem fits this structural gravitation.
The ordering also differs in detail: Matthew's transitions use 'then' (*tote*) and 'again' (*palin*) and have Satan physically transporting Jesus, while Luke softens the third scene's verb (*ēgagen*, 'he led him') and adds that Satan showed the kingdoms 'in a moment of time' (4:5). These are the fingerprints of two independent redactions of shared material.
Two harmonizations recur. The first holds that one evangelist gives chronological order and the other thematic order. This concedes the key point — that at least one Gospel narrates the temptations non-chronologically inside a narrative that otherwise reads as sequential — and it cannot specify which order is the 'real' one without circular appeal. The second posits two separate temptation cycles, one reported by each evangelist. This is *ad hoc*: both accounts share the forty-day frame, the same three temptations, the same scripted exchanges built on Deuteronomy citations (Deut 8:3; 6:16; 6:13), and the same conclusion with Satan's departure. Two distinct yet verbally near-identical cycles is precisely the kind of unfalsifiable multiplication scholars treat as a harmonization of last resort.
The critical consensus (Fitzmyer, Davies-Allison, Bovon, Marshall, Nolland) is straightforward redactional reordering of shared Q tradition, each evangelist arranging the temptations to climax in his preferred locus — mountain for Matthew, temple/Jerusalem for Luke. The harder question is which order stood in Q. A majority (Fitzmyer, Kloppenborg) favors Luke's order as more original, partly because Matthew elsewhere reorders Q more freely than Luke, and partly because Matthew's *hypage, satana* makes a more natural climactic dismissal where Matthew has placed it, suggesting Matthew moved the kingdoms scene to the end to create that climax. A minority argues Matthew preserves Q's order with its scriptural citations in canonical-Deuteronomy sequence. The debate over the direction of editing does not affect the fact of editing.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine compositional contradiction in sequence; the most economical reading is that Matthew and Luke independently reordered a shared Q narrative for theological climax, with Luke probably closer to Q's order. The two-cycles harmonization is unparsimonious, and the topical-order harmonization concedes non-chronological narration.
Sources for this reading