Pondering the Gospel narratives, Gregory of Nyssa – Augustine’s slightly older peer – suggested that we read Christ’s life as something like a 33-year ruse. The Devil had deceived Adam and Eve into disobeying God’s command not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Making a bad deal seem good, he promised them that contrary to what God had told them, they would not die if they ate the fruit, that they would be like God himself. Deceived, they ate, and in eating they became Satan’s slaves, subject to death and disease, pain and suffering.
To undo this tangle of despair, Gregory argues, God decided it would be best to deal with the Devil much as the Devil had dealt with Adam and Eve. The Devil had disguised himself as a serpent, so God disguises himself as a sinless man, the only sinless man in the world, a man whose virtuous purity is worth more than every other sinful person combined. And so, much like the Devil, God makes a bad deal sound good as he tempts the Devil to overreach, to crucify the innocent Jesus and, in so doing, to lose his grip on all of humanity.
Of course, the Devil would act in so foolhardy a fashion only if he failed to recognise that Jesus is Christ. ‘It was beyond the Devil’s power,’ Gregory writes, ‘to look upon the unveiled appearance of God, he would see only in Christ a part of the fleshly nature which he had of old subdued through wickedness.’ Gregory summarised this divine plot in a striking metaphor: ‘The divine nature was concealed under the veil of our human nature so that, as with a greedy fish, the hook of divinity might be swallowed along with the bait of flesh.’