The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics
- Jun 18, 2019
- 3 min read
★★★☆☆
Podcasts continue to be one of my main sources, albeit indirectly, of book recommendations. The Origin of Satan came to my attention by way of the 666th episode of This American Life, “The Theme that Shall Not Be Named,” wherein host Ira Glass interviews Elaine Pagels about what, exactly, the Bible says about the figure we know variously as the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub, Evil One, or Prince of Darkness.
As you might find surprising, in the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament), the devil, as we think of that figure today, does not exist. In Hebrew, the term satan (pronounced sa-tahn) translates as “accuser” or “adversary” and is rooted in a verb primarily meaning “to obstruct, oppose.” References to the satan are rare in the Old Testament. Most are to normal human adversaries (satan), though in two books, Job and Zechariah, are specifically to the heavenly accuser (ha-satan). Who was this heavenly accuser? He was one of the “sons of God” (that is, an angel) who was sent to test, punish, or torture people—on behalf of God. Sometimes the satan asks God’s permission to test someone’s faith, as with Job. More often than not, though, the satan is the one who gets sent out to do God’s dirty work, as when he is instructed to inflict a plague against Israel that killed 70,000 people because King David conducted a census without clearing it with the Big Guy. If that satan became the Satan, who would have blamed him?
So where does the Satan we think of today come from? Largely from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, written in the first century C.E. when upstart Christianity was under attack from all sides, was still grappling with its identity, and was having a very hard time attracting new converts. While the underlying message of the Gospels may have been peace and love, positive messaging, as we very well know today, doesn’t generate the buzz that negative messaging does. To gain converts, early Christians went negative, first demonizing their own people (Jews) as agents of the Prince of Darkness. Despite all the “you’re going to hell” attacks, however, not many Jews converted. But as the first century progressed, more and more gentiles (polytheistic, or pagan, Romans) came into the fold. Pagans, in turn, became the new bad guy, demonized as servants of Satan. Finally, at the close of the first century as Christianity began to mature, it was heretics (Christians with contrary opinions) who were subsequently vilified as the Devil’s messengers.
Pagels writes, “What may be new in Western Christian tradition … 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.” This dichotomy, though, is not new. In fact, as Pagels has traced back to each of the Gospels and other early writings, it is a fundamental aspect embedded in the original Christian message. This us-them worldview ultimately gave rise to a whole host of atrocities committed in the name of God over the past two thousand years; a reality that, despite our seeming enlightenment in the intervening centuries, is unlikely to wane.
All well and good (or bad), but none of that really lives up to the promise of the book’s title. Instead, Pagels spends a great deal of time exploring gnostic and philosophical texts of the day, which, in addition to feeling like recycled material from her other books, has little to do with Satan or his origins. Also curious is the time spent examining the differing accounts between the Gospels of Jesus’s crucifixion—who was involved, what they did, who bore responsibility, which interpretations are likely to be the most accurate—that also has little or nothing to do with Satan’s origins. What is telling is that, though the book claims to be based on research originally presented in scholarly publications and reworked here for general consumption, this only applies to material from the first two chapters.
This might explain why so much of the book seems to come out of left field, and why it never actually lives up to its title. My copy came without the subtitle that accompanies The Origin of Satan wherever I look online (and, so far as I can tell, only appears on the cover artwork for the audiobook edition): How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics. Its inclusion may not have resolved all of my issues with the book, but certainly would have put me in a frame of mind more in tune with the content being delivered. Me? I would have preferred the journal articles. You? Consider yourself warned …
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