The Origin of Satan - Chapter 1

Summary notes on Pagels, Elaine - The Origin of Satan_ How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (1996)

Introduction

In the ancient Western world, of which I am a historian, many—perhaps most—people assumed that the universe was inhabited by invisible beings whose presence impinged upon the visible world and its human inhabitants. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans envisioned gods, goddesses, and spirit beings of many kinds, while certain Jews and Christians, ostensibly monotheists, increasingly spoke of angels, heavenly messengers from God, and some spoke of fallen angels and demons. This was especially true from the first century of the common era onward.

The pagan convert was baptized only after confessing that all spirit beings previously revered—and dreaded—as divine were actually only “demons”—hostile spirits contending against the One God of goodness and justice, and against his armies of angels. Becoming either a Jew or a Christian polarized a pagan’s view of the universe, and moralized it. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber regarded the moralizing of the universe as one of the great achievements of Jewish tradition, later passed down as its legacy to Christians and Muslims. When I began this work, I assumed that Jewish and Christian perceptions of invisible beings had to do primarily with moralizing the natural universe, as Buber claimed, and so with encouraging people to interpret events ranging from illness to natural disasters as expressions of “God's will” or divine judgment on human sin. But my research led me in unexpected directions and disclosed a far more complex picture. Such Christians as Justin Martyr (140 C.E.), one of the “fathers of the church,” attributes affliction not to “God's will” but to the malevolence of Satan. His student Tatian allows for accident in the natural world, including disasters, for which, he says, God offers solace but seldom miraculous intervention. As I proceeded to investigate Jewish and Christian accounts of angels and fallen angels, I discovered, however, that they were less concerned with the natural world as a whole than with the particular world of human relationships. Rereading biblical and extra-biblical accounts of angels, I learned first of all what many scholars have pointed out: that while angels often appear in the Hebrew Bible, Satan, along with other fallen angels or demonic beings, is virtually absent. But among certain first-century Jewish groups, prominently including the Essenes (who saw themselves as allied with angels) and the followers of Jesus, the figure variously called Satan, Beelzebub, or Belial also began to take on central importance. Mark deviates from mainstream Jewish tradition by introducing “the devil” into the crucial opening scene of the gospel, and goes on to characterize Jesus’ ministry as involving continual struggle between God’s spirit and the demons, who belong, apparently, to Satan’s “kingdom” (see Mark 3:23-27). Such visions have been incorporated into Christian tradition and have served, among other things, to confirm for Christians their own identification with God and to demonize their opponents—first other Jews, then pagans, and later dissident Christians called heretics. This is what this book is about. Thousands of years of tradition have characterized Satan instead as a spirit. Originally he was one of God's angels, but a fallen one. Now he stands in open rebellion against God, and in his frustrated rage he mirrors aspects of our own confrontations with otherness. Many people have claimed to see him embodied at certain times in individuals and groups that seem possessed by an intense spiritual passion, one that engages even our better qualities, like strength, intelligence, and devotion, but turns them toward destruction and takes pleasure in inflicting harm. Yet— historically speaking, at any rate—Satan, along with diabolical colleagues like Belial and Mastema (whose Hebrew name means “hatred”), did not materialize out of the air. Instead, as we shall see, such figures emerged from the turmoil of first-century Palestine, the setting in which the Christian movement began to grow. I do not intend to do here what other scholars already have done well: The literary scholar Neil Forsyth, in his excellent recent book The Old Enemy, has investigated much of the literary and cultural background of the figure of Satan. What interests me instead are specifically social implications of the figure of Satan: how he is invoked to express human conflict and to characterize human enemies within our own religious traditions. In this book, then, I invite you to consider Satan as a reflection of how we perceive ourselves and those we call “others.” Yet this virtually universal practice of calling one's own people human and “dehumanizing” others does not necessarily mean that people actually doubt or deny the humanness of others. Much of the time, as William Green points out, those who so label themselves and others are engaging in a kind of caricature that helps define and consolidate their own group identity:

[!quote] A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them, by selecting, isolating, and emphasizing an aspect of another people's life, and making it symbolize their difference

What may be new in Western Christian tradition, as we shall see, is how the use of Satan to represent one’s enemies lends to conflict a specific kind of moral and religious interpretation, in which “we” are God’s people and “they” are God's enemies, and ours as well. Those who adopt this view are encouraged to believe, as Jesus warned his followers, that “whoever kills you will think he is offering a service to God” (John 16:2). Such moral interpretation of conflict has proven extraordinarily effective throughout Western history in consolidating the identity of Christian groups; the same history also shows that it can justify hatred, even mass slaughter. This research, then, reveals certain fault lines in Christian tradition that have allowed for the demonizing of others throughout Christian history—fault lines that go back nearly two thousand years to the origins of the Christian movement. For nearly two thousand years, for example, many Christians have taken for granted that Jews killed Jesus and the Romans were merely their reluctant agents, and that this implicates not only the perpetrators but (as Matthew insists) all their progeny in evil.8 Throughout the centuries, countless Christians listening to the gospels absorbed, along with the quite contrary sayings of Jesus, the association between the forces of evil and Jesus’ Jewish enemies. Whether illiterate or sophisticated, those who heard the gospel stories, or saw them illustrated in their churches, generally assumed both their historical accuracy and their religious validity. Their critical analysis indicated that the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source from which to construct their amplified gospels. Many scholars assumed that Mark was the most historically reliable because it was the simplest in style and was written closer to the time of Jesus than the others were. But historical accuracy may not have been the gospel writers’ first consideration. Further analysis demonstrated how passages from the prophetic writings and the psalms of the Hebrew Bible were woven into the gospel narratives. Barnabas Lindars and others suggested that Christian writers often expanded biblical passages into whole episodes that “proved,” to the satisfaction of many believers, that events predicted by the prophets found their fulfillment in Jesus’ coming.9 Those who accepted such analysis now realized that the gospel of Mark, as James Robinson shows, is anything but a straightforward historical narrative; rather, it is a theological treatise that assumes the form of historical biography. But others objected to what Albert Schweitzer called the “quest of the historical Jesus,”11 pointing out that the earliest of the gospels was written more than a generation after Jesus’ death, and the others nearly two generations later, and that sorting out “authentic” material in the gospels was virtually impossible in the absence of independent evidence. 2 One of the primary issues to emerge from these critical studies was the question, What historical basis is there, if any, to the gospels' claim that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death? What makes this question of vital interest is the gospels’ claim that this deed was inspired by Satan himself. One group of scholars pointed out discrepancies between Sanhedrin procedure described in the Mishnah and in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ “trial before the Sanhedrin,” and questioned the accuracy of the accounts in Mark and Matthew. Simon Bernfield declared in 1910 that “the whole trial before the Sanhedrin is nothing but an invention of a later date,”13 a view that has found recent defenders among Christian literary analysts.14 Noting that the charge against Jesus and the form of execution are characteristically Roman, many scholars, including Paul Winter in his influential book On the Trial of Jesus, published in 1961, argued that it was the Romans who executed Jesus, on political grounds, not religious ones. Recently, however, one group of scholars has renewed arguments to show that, in Josef Blinzler’s words:

[!quote] anyone who undertakes to assess the trial of Jesus as a historical and legal event, reconstructing it from the gospel narratives, must come to the same conclusion as the early Christian preachers did themselves, that the main responsibility rests on the Jewish side (emphasis added).

But scholars who take more skeptical views of the historical plausibility of these narratives emphasize Roman responsibility for Jesus’ execution, which, they suggest, the gospel writers tended to downplay so as not to provoke the Romans in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Jewish war against Rome.18 I agree as a working hypothesis that Jesus’ execution was probably imposed by the Romans for activities they considered seditious—possibly for arousing public demonstrations and (so they apparently believed) for claiming to be “king of the Jews.” “what really happened”—much less to persuade the reader of this or any other version of “what happened”—since, apart from the scenario briefly sketched above, I find the sources too fragmentary and too susceptible of various interpretations to answer that question definitively. Instead I try to show how the gospels reflect the emergence of the Jesus movement from the postwar factionalism of the late first century. In this book I add to the discussion something I have not found elsewhere—what I call the social history of Satan; that is, I show how the events told in the gospels about Jesus, his advocates, and his enemies correlate with the supernatural drama the writers use to interpret that story—the struggle between God's spirit and Satan. And because Christians as they read the gospels have characteristically identified themselves with the disciples, for some two thousand years they have also identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan.