The Origin of Satan (14 page)

III

MATTHEW’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST

THE PHARISEES:

DEPLOYING THE DEVIL

Jesus’ followers succeeded, far more than many of them

expected—or perhaps even hoped—in attracting Gentiles (from

the Latin term for “nations,”
gentes
) but, to their disappointment,

largely failed to attract Jews. Between 70 and 100 C.E., this

movement, which began, as George Nickelsburg says, as “a

relative latecomer among the sects and groups in post-exilic

Judaism,”1 grew rapidly. Although many of Jesus’ followers were

Jewish, they tended increasingly to separate from other Jews,

often meeting for worship in the homes of fellow members,

rather than in synagogues. This situation distressed many of

them, who insisted that they didn't want to depart from

traditional ways but had been forced into it, having been rejected

by Jewish leaders, sometimes even expelled from their home

synagogues.

As the Jesus movement spread throughout the Roman world,

various adherents began to drop distinctively Jewish practices,

most notably circumcision, and then also dietary and Sabbath

laws. By 100 C.E., in regions that include Greece, Asia Minor,

Italy, and Egypt, many Christian churches had become

predominantly Gentile. They still insisted, nonetheless, that

they alone were the true embodiment of Israel. George

Nickelsburg points out the irony of their situation:

A young, upstart group, whose membership had rapidly and

radically changed, was asserting that it was more authentic

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than its parent group; and this attitude of superiority and

exclusion was derived, in part, from ideas and attitudes already

present in the parent body.2

As the historian and New Testament scholar Wayne Meeks

notes, the path to separation was by no means simple or

uniform.3 We have already seen that Jewish communities

scattered throughout Palestine and the provincial cities of the

Roman empire not only were internally diverse but were also

undergoing complex postwar changes. The various groups of

converts to Christianity were, if anything, even more diverse

internally, since they often included Gentiles along with Jews.

These groups of Jesus' followers struggled to find a place to stand

in relation to the Jewish communities whose Scriptures and

traditions they largely appropriated.

Not all Christians abandoned Jewish practices at the same

time. In the decades after Jesus’ death, many of his followers may

not have meant to abandon them at all. The group centered in

Jerusalem around Jesus’ brother James, for example, remained

observant of the law, like James himself (hence his nickname,

“James the Just,” or “the Righteous”). Other groups, like those

who followed teachings associated with Peter, modified

observance of dietary and sexual laws. Groups that identified

with Paul, the converted Pharisee, largely adopted his conviction

that “Christ is the end of the law to everyone who believes,”

whether Jew or Gentile.4 Most believers took Paul to mean that

practicing circumcision and observing kosher laws and Jewish

festivals were antithetical to embracing the gospel, and his

preaching attracted many converts among the Gentiles who

associated themselves with Jewish synagogue congregations.

When we look at the three other gospels included with Mark

in the New Testament, all written between 70 and 100 C.E., we

can see three representative communities, each in the process of

separating from particular Jewish groups and attempting to forge

a new and distinctively Christian pattern of community identity.

New Testament scholar Krister Stendahl characterizes Matthew’s

gospel as a kind of “community rule,” considerably

MATTHEW’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE PHARISEES / 65

more liberal than that of the Essenes.5 The gospel of Luke,

probably written by the only Gentile author in the New

Testament for a predominantly Gentile community, insists that

his group has inherited Israel’s legacy as God’s people. The

author of John, probably Jewish himself, describes a close-knit

group of “Jesus’ own”—insiders who follow Jesus’ command to

“love one another” (15:12) while regarding their Jewish

opponents as offspring of Satan.

That such patterns of group identity are found in these

gospels—patterns that have shaped Christian churches ever

since—is certainly no accident. The four gospels collected in the

New Testament were canonized around 200 C.E., apparently by

a consensus of churches ranging from those in provincial Gaul to

the church in the capital city of Rome; they were chosen not

necessarily because they were the earliest or the most accurate

accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching but precisely because they

could form the basis for church communities.

The canonical gospels were not by any means the only

accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching. During the years following

his death, stories about him and his disciples were told and

retold, not only in Palestine, but throughout Asia Minor,

Greece, Egypt, Africa, Gaul, and Spain. Some twenty years after

Jesus’ crucifixion, when Paul traveled to synagogues in Antioch,

the capital of Syria, and in Greece and Rome to proclaim “the

gospel of Jesus Christ,” there were as yet no written gospels.

According to Paul, “the gospel” consisted of what he preached,

which he summarized as follows: “that Christ died for our sins,

according to the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was

raised on the third day” (1 Cor. 15:3-4). Although Paul preached

in synagogues, he found his audience largely among Gentiles,

most often among Gentiles attracted to Jewish congregations.

Many were people who had moved from their native towns to

sprawling, heterogeneous cities like Syrian Antioch, Asian

Ephesus, and Greek Corinth. Proclaiming that Jews and

Gentiles, slaves and free people, men and women, could now

become “one in Christ” (Gal. 3:28), Paul formed from those he

baptized the close-knit groups that Wayne Meeks calls “the first

urban Christians”—ethnically

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diverse communities where tradespeople, slaves, and the groups1

wealthy patrons mingled together, now bound to help and

support one another as they awaited the time when Christ would

return in glory.6 Writing to various congregations as he traveled,

Paul sometimes invoked a “saying of the Lord.” Once he invoked

Jesus’ authority to prohibit divorce (1 Cor. 7:10); another time

he explained how Jesus had told his followers to ritually eat

bread and drink wine “in order to manifest the Lord's death, until

he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26).

Paul had no interest in Jesus’ earthly life, however, and none

in collecting his sayings. But other Christians did begin to collect

Jesus’ sayings and write them down.7 The
Secret Book of James
,

one of the many traditions that circulated after Jesus’ death,

gives a stylized description of this process:

The twelve disciples were all sitting together at one time and

remembering what the savior said to each one of them,

whether secretly or openly, and putting it into books (NHC

1.27.15).

In fact, many people, not just “the twelve” enshrined in

Christian tradition, gathered Jesus’ sayings into various

collections. Most scholars agree that a collection of Jesus’

sayings, translated from the Aramaic he spoke into Greek,

circulated widely during the first century, although we do not

have an actual copy of that source. If each of the gospel writers

had individually translated Jesus’ sayings, we would expect to

see some variation in the way each presented his words. But

gospels as diverse as Matthew and Luke, as well as the

suppressed
Gospel of Thomas
, all quote sayings of Jesus in

identical translation. This suggests that they relied on the

common source, which scholars call Q (for
Quelle
, the German

word for “source”).8 To this source we owe many familiar sayings,

including the Beatitudes (“Blessed are you poor; for yours is the

kingdom of heaven . . .”) and what we know from Matthew’s

gospel as the Sermon on the Mount (which becomes, in Luke’s

gospel, the Sermon on the Plain). Still other sayings are known

to us from scraps of papyrus that have been found preserved in

dry climates like that of Upper Egypt. From the late 1800s

through this century, archaeologists working in Egypt

MATTHEW’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE PHARISEES / 67

have found papyrus leaves that contain glimpses of Jesus

tradition—for example, a story of Jesus healing a leper, or

another of Jesus raising a dead young man to life.9 Other papyrus

fragments yield enigmatic sayings otherwise unknown:

Jesus said, “I am the light which is above them all. It is I who

am the all. From me did all come forth and to me the all extends.

Split a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up the stone, and you

will find me there” (NHC 11.46.23-38).

As stories, sayings, and anecdotes proliferated, various

interpretations of Jesus’ life and teaching circulated among

diverse Christian groups throughout the Roman world. What

Jesus actually taught often became a matter of bitter dispute, as

we can see from the
Gospel of Mary Magdalene
, another early

source, discovered in 1896 on papyrus fragments in Egypt. This

remarkable text, like other noncanonical texts, depicts Mary

Magdalene among the disciples—indeed, as one of Jesus’ most

beloved disciples, to whom he entrusted secret teaching.10 In the

following passage (17:18-18:15), Peter first addresses Mary with

a request.

“Sister, we know that the savior loved you more than the rest

of women. Tell us the words of the savior which you

remember, which ... we do not [know] and have not heard.”

After Mary answers, revealing to Peter secret teaching on the

soul’s spiritual journey, Andrew objects:

“Say what you want about what she has said. I, at least, do not

believe that the savior said this. For certainly these teachings

are strange ideas.”

Peter joins in, challenging Mary’s veracity:

“Did he really speak with a woman without our knowledge,

and in secret? Are we all to turn around and listen to her? Did

he love her more than us?”

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Mary protests:

“My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think I made

this up in my heart? Do you think I am lying about the Lord?”

Then Levi breaks in to mediate the dispute, saying that “the

Savior knew her very well, and made her worthy” to receive

such teachings. The
Gospel of Mary
concludes as the disciples

agree to accept what they learn from Mary, and they all prepare

to go out to preach. But most Christian groups, including the one

in Rome identified with Peter, who was often depicted as Mary’s

antagonist, rejected such claims of revelation given through

Mary, since she was not one of the twelve, and rejected many

other widely circulating “gospels” as well. By the late second

century, certain church leaders began to denounce such

teachings as heresy.

In 1945, the extraordinary discovery of a hidden library of

early Christian writings at Nag Hammadi greatly extended our

understanding of the early Christian movement.11 This is not the

place to describe that discovery, discussed in my book
The

Gnostic Gospels
; but when we glance at one of the gospels

discovered there, one that most church leaders who knew it

rejected, we can see more clearly their reasons for preferring the

gospels of the New Testament. The
Gospel of Thomas
begins

with these words: “These are the secret words which the Living

Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down.”

Did Jesus have a twin brother, as this text implies? Could this be

an authentic record of Jesus’ sayings? According to its tide, the

text contained the gospel according to Thomas. Yet unlike the

gospels of the New Testament, this text identified itself as a

secret
gospel. It contained many sayings that parallel those in the

New Testament, particularly sayings from the Q source; yet

others were strikingly different—sayings as strange and

compelling as Zen koans:

Jesus said, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you

bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is

within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”

(NHC 11.45.29-33).

MATTHEW’S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE PHARISEES / 69

Although the complete text of
Thomas
, written in Coptic,

probably dates to the third or fourth century C.E., the original

probably was written in Greek, perhaps much earlier.12 New

Testament scholar Helmut Koester has argued that the
Gospel of

Thomas
contains a collection of sayings that
predates
the gospels