It seems to me that this is resolved quite simply, by understanding the temptation [“has been tempted”] of Jesus as {someone doing, to Him, actions that count as “tempting someone”}, and the statement about God [“cannot be tempted”] as meaning that He is not susceptible to such actions.
This would allow us to say the same of Jesus, as of God — that He is not susceptible to temptation.
[I think this might [Edit_01: or might not] be broadly the same as Levan Gigineishvili’s answer.]
P.S. I do not think that the idea is that temptation is, to Jesus, infinitely trivial, or (so to speak) a category error. In other words, I do not think the exercise was like shooting bullets at Superman just to show that it is quite futile. The account of His temptation says that “angels came and ministered to him” (Matthew 4: 11, RSV) after it was over. Similarly, we see Him in the Garden of Gethsemane wrestling with something that is not vanishingly trivial. Further, there is the quoted verse that says that He has been tempted [just] as we are. Rather, I think that the point is that God is perfectly good… and holy and that that is why He can not be tempted. (Philosophically, I would say that it is immediately theoretically possible to efficaciously tempt Jesus. In other words, there is some reason why God/Jesus is not susceptible to temptation, other than that the concept is inapplicable to Him… being [again] that He is perfectly good.)
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Edit_02{As follows, I consider the most up-voted answer to be untenable. See {more relevant comments at the end}. Apologies for going off on a tangent. The academic reader might well stop after reading my response to that answer… but I have left the final point in for obvious reasons. The material between those is just me being thorough. P.S. This comes across as arrogant, on the third reading. It is not supposed to be so, but I will be here for several (more) hours if I try to fix that. I apologize instead. (I am normally verbose, and I was trying to be brisk.)}
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I consider {the answer that [at the time of writing] has been scored the most highly} to be untenable, as follows.
There is nothing incoherent in Christianity. (Of course, an opponent of Christianity might well think it to be internally or externally inconsistent, but… an adherent of Christianity has no reason — neither in what Christianity teaches nor in {their (“correct”) view of the world} versus {what it teaches} — to think that Christianity appeals to irrational beliefs and/or thinking.)
An example is the Trinity. It is popular to hold that the concept of the Trinity is that God is three persons who are one person. This is incoherent and can be immediately rejected for that simple reason. Turning to the Bible to explain how to make sense of an incoherent conception of anything is certain to be unhelpful at best. Neither is it to be believed, that any incoherent view has arisen from [correct] Biblical Theology. (The correct view is that the Trinity is three persons who are one God. The only additional information needed is that, within the Trinity, one of these three is the boss of the three (or of the other two, if you will.) [Hence the horrifyingly and shockingly awful and awesome promise in Rev 3: 21 (also Rev 2: 26-27), if you want a distraction.] It is that simple. Much of the disturbingly huge amount of argumentation about this putatively difficult concept is simply misguided (being informed by the view that Christianity entertains internal incoherence).) To repeat… anyone who rejects this view (particularly) in favour of some other view that appeals to paradox or is otherwise incoherent is misguided. [Of course, that is not an argument for this view, against some other view that ostensibly is Biblical and is not incoherent.]
The issue here is around — as some might think — some tension between the tenet that Jesus is God [in some sense] and is human [in some sense].
The starting point, in resolving this issue, is that {any understanding of this that is partly or wholly inconsistent or incoherent or irrational or what-have-you} can be rejected without any consideration (beyond establishing that it is indeed incoherent).
No answer to the question here need be taken seriously, no matter how impressive it might sound, nor how eloquent its reasoning might appear… if it endorses a picture that is incoherent in any aspect.
Tangentially… there is a fancy term “hypostatic union”, which represents the view that — citing the following…
https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-the-hypostatic-union
… “Jesus has two complete natures: one fully human and one fully divine. What the doctrine of the hypostatic union teaches is that these two natures are united in one person in the God-man.” This goes on to make it clear that is supposed to be incoherent. “Jesus is not two persons. He is one person. The hypostatic union is the joining (mysterious though it be) of the divine and the human in the one person of Jesus.” Apparently, the intent of this concept is that these two natures each represent a kind of person, such that one person having these two natures is incoherent… or, as that page puts it, “infinitely precious — and worshipfully mind-stretching”.
I call it incoherent, and it must be rejected out of hand if it is supposed to be so. (Of course, one might mean, by “hypostatic union”, some concept that is not incoherent. That is fine… but it is not apparent why we need a fancy term for the simple, plain, straightforward reality [as below].)
Of course, there is nothing incoherent about the nature of Jesus. One clue about it is the fact that human beings are “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27), and another is that they are both body and spirit (e.g. James 2: 26, John 3: 6, Luke 23: 46, 1 Cor 15: 44), and another is that God is spirit (John 4: 24). [Arguing through the issue of the difference between “spirit” and “soul” (if any) is complex. My point here is that human beings are not merely physical (and they are not merely {body and soul}, where the latter means like a brain with mind supervening on it).] My view arises simply and easily from the foregoing; I am not going to bother writing it out here, as that would be distracting; the point is simply that a coherent view is possible (noting that I have not actually given one).
So…
• At the time of writing, the highest-scoring answer (by “Nigel J”) sets out its position clearly, from the outset. “Human nature can be tempted. Divine nature cannot be tempted.” The body elaborates on this… including notably saying in (partly) bold print, “the Divine nature and human nature of Jesus of Nazareth are separate things that need to be considered separately.” The conclusion is that these two “natures” “meet” in Jesus, but do not, “somehow connect to one another, or merge with one another or mingle in some way” [emphasis omitted]. On the one hand, it appears that this is not expressly incoherent. Jesus has two natures. On the other hand, it neatly resolves the issue at hand — the divine aspect of Jesus can not be tempted by evil, and… and what?
Apparently, this is supposed to appeal to the “hypostatic union” concept [according to what is left of the comments] and be a species that insists that Jesus is two persons — in the sense that it is impossible for anyone else to be like this. Of course, that is not “hypostatic union”. Perhaps there is some other fancy term I should know. I venture that it is clearly incoherent since the idea appears to be, again, that Jesus instantiates something that can not be instantiated… but let us initially gloss over this problem.
I have said, in my answer, that the reason that Jesus did not sin is that He is perfectly good, and even holy… because He is God. The answer under discussion has forsaken that option; it separates out the aspect of Jesus that is immune from temptation and leaves us with the second person inside this Jesus anomaly, that is (ostensibly) just as susceptible to temptation as (for instance) I am.
Presumably, the next move would be to postulate that Jesus, unlike every other human being in existence (since the Fall), does not have a sinful nature. That is quite ad hoc since the reason for that [Jesus is divine] has been discarded. Let us gloss over this problem, as well.
This position fails even though we have glossed over its incoherence. The reason has to do with the core of Christian belief — the Cross. The Christian gospel is that God became a man [human being, for the postmodernist, who can not countenance disagreement], and died for our sins. If we postulate that Jesus incorporates two natures/persons, then arguably the human aspect died on the Cross… and arguably the divine aspect did not. Ostensibly, then, the death of Jesus on the Cross would be sufficient for only one other person… the same as if (for instance) I died for other’s sins.
Of course, one could continue in the standard pattern, with everyone arguing endlessly over the issue… which follows almost necessarily from the fact of it being incoherent… but it would be more sensible to stop at the initial point at which we observe that it is incoherent, and simply not waste all that time.
•[This one is not relevant to my theme about incoherence, but I thought I would include what I wrote about it, just as a rebuttal, just because I have already put in the effort.]
The second-highest scoring answer, at the time of writing, (by “Nihil Sine Deo”) begins with an illustration. The idea appears to be that Jesus has some non-“physical“ attributes, that He can temporarily decline to appeal to. As it relates to the question, the position seems to be like the “in conclusion” says — “even when Jesus was 100% a man He remained 100% God though He suppressed His divine attributes voluntarily for a greater purpose…”.
This appears to me to leave us with a bet both ways [I can not think of an appropriate technical term offhand]. That is… we are left to wonder whether {what has been laid aside temporarily} includes, or does not include, what is relevant to the concept of temptation.
It seems to me that we are left to infer that, in respect of temptation, Jesus remained divine (even though He was “voluntarily suppress/ing/” his divinity).
I suggest that, although this accords with the Biblical picture [in implying that Jesus did not sin because He was divine], it does not actually expressly deal with the question of how Jesus could be meaningfully tempted in the first place… unless the idea is that He was, so to speak, pretending.
• [If I understand it correctly] the third […ATToW…] answer (by “Ozzie Ozzie”) boils down to an endorsement of the tenet that Jesus was fully human (and not divine). The pivotal point, then, is the concluding statement — that Jesus was perfect.
I concede [offhand] that this successfully deals with the issue of Jesus not sinning. However, I venture that the position espoused is not Christianity; particularly, it is not apparent how Jesus’s death might pay for the sins of more than one other person.
• …4… (“Levan Gigineishvili”). This answer is similar to mine; it positions the concept of {tempting Jesus} as definitively the actions of those doing the tempting and asserts that Jesus was quite above actually sinning. It appears to me to be very clear on the point that trying to tempt Jesus was utterly futile, and absolutely misguided — presumably the same as the overwhelming majority of Christians would think about God.
This might not actually be within the purview of the author, but there is a question that I suggest to be fundamental, around whether or not the idea is that the concept of being tempted is simply inapplicable to Jesus. One might position this as the question of whether or not it is theoretically possible for Jesus to sin. [I fully appreciate that the idea is initially quite horrifying, to a Christian, that there is any sense in which it is possible — theoretically, hypothetically or what-have-you — that Jesus could sin.]
However horrifying the idea might be, of it being theoretically possible for Jesus to sin… I suggest that the alternative is objectively untenable. The alternative is that it is not theoretically possible for Jesus to sin. I do not mean, by all this, that it is sheer arbitrary luck (and possibly scarily unlikely) that Jesus did not, for instance, step down from the Cross and destroy the world instead, or get distracted with some romantic relationship and give away the whole enterprise. Rather, what I mean by all this is that [it is certainly Biblical truth that] God and Jesus are moral beings… in the sense that it could not be true, otherwise, that God is good.
I imagine that one could write a thesis on this — laying out the parameters of the discussion carefully, and so on. Nonetheless, the core concept is simple enough. It says in Hebrews that Jesus was tempted as we are, yet without sin — that He can sympathize with our weaknesses. Are we supposed to think that the reality is that Jesus is a machine, programmed to do particular kinds of things, such that, however painful the Cross might have been, He could not step down from it and destroy the world instead, even if he [hypothetically, if necessary] wanted to?
Arguably, that is no nobler than it would be if (for instance) I never sinned… with the reason being that, although I desperately wanted to, I simply could not… or perhaps even if a robot never sinned.
I suggest that it is unarguable that — regardless of whether or not we are comfortable with the notion — Jesus desperately wanted to not have to endure the Cross. I venture that the notion is definitive of temptation — He wanted (in some sense, and at some level — however you feel constrained to put it) to behave one way, and chose to behave another. Jesus was tempted. The idea that He was utterly incapable of any kind of inclination towards anything not perfectly good… is a direct contradiction of the quoted verse in Hebrews, I venture.
I suggest that — horrifying though the idea is, initially — the Biblical picture is that Jesus is good, not as a machine, but as a moral person who makes real moral choices, such that He could not be called good otherwise.
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I am going to stop there. My intent was to make the original point about incoherence. I have gone off on the tangent of addressing the other answers one by one. Part of the reason for that was to respect the work of others enough to read all the answers carefully (theoretically, anyway). I hope I have not insulted anyone; apologies if I have. I enjoy a good [academic] argument (at least in the sense that I enjoy thinking through what others have said, and weighing it against my own position)… but not at the price of hurting anyone. (Conversely… apologies to those whose answers I have not read carefully!)
