Following his baptism, Jesus is described in Matthew, Mark and Luke as being led into the wilderness, where he fasted for forty days and was tempted by Satan. Mark's account, the briefest, states only that Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, among wild animals, attended by angels, without further elaboration. Matthew and Luke, drawing on additional shared material scholars generally attribute to a source independent of Mark, expand this into three specific temptations: to turn stones into bread after his long fast, to throw himself from the pinnacle of the Jerusalem temple to test God's protection, and to receive all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worshipping Satan.
In each case, Jesus responds by quoting scripture from the book of Deuteronomy, refusing the temptation on textual and theological grounds rather than through any display of miraculous power, a pattern later Christian tradition has read as a deliberate model for how believers should resist temptation using scripture as their primary defense.
The episode positions Jesus's own trial in the wilderness against Israel's forty years of wandering and testing in the wilderness after the Exodus, a parallel scholars generally regard as intentional, reinforcing a wider pattern in the Gospels of presenting Jesus as recapitulating and fulfilling earlier moments in Israel's scriptural history.