The Origin of Satan (2 page)

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C O N T E N T S

I

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR

3

II

THE SOCIAL HISTORY OF SATAN:

FROM THE HEBREW BIBLE TO THE GOSPELS

35

III

MATTHEW'S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE PHARISEES:

DEPLOYING THE DEVIL

63

IV

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL'S LEGACY:

THE

SPLIT

WIDENS

89

V

SATAN'S EARTHLY KINGDOM:

CHRISTIANS AGAINST PAGANS

112

VI

THE ENEMY WITHIN:

DEMONIZING THE HERETICS

149

CONCLUSION

179

NOTES

185

INDEX

205

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

In 1988, when my husband of twenty years died in a hiking

accident, I became aware that, like many people who grieve, I was

living in the presence of an invisible being—living, that is, with

a vivid sense of someone who had died. During the following

years I began to reflect on the ways that various religious

traditions give shape to the invisible world, and how our

imaginative perceptions of what is invisible relate to the ways we

respond to the people around us, to events, and to the natural

world. I was reflecting, too, on the various ways that people

from Greek, Jewish, and Christian traditions deal with

misfortune and loss. Greek writers from Homer to Sophocles

attribute such events to gods and goddesses, destiny and fate—

elements as capricious and indifferent to human welfare as the

“forces of nature” (which is our term for these forces).

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.

xvi / INTRODUCTION

Conversion from paganism to Judaism or Christianity, I realized,

meant, above all, transforming one's perception of the invisible

world. To this day, Christian baptism requires a person to

solemnly «renounce the devil and all his works» and to accept

exorcism. 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.1 The book of Genesis, for

example, insists that volcanoes would not have destroyed the

towns of Sodom and Gomorrah unless all the inhabitants of

those towns—all the inhabitants who concerned the storyteller,

that is, the adult males—had been evil, “young and old, down to

the last man” (Gen. 19:4).

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

INTRODUCTION / xvii

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.

While the gospel of Mark, for example, mentions angels only in

the opening frame (1:13) and in the final verses of the original

manuscript (16:5-7), 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.

To emphasize this element of the New Testament gospels does

not mean, of course, that this is their primary theme. “Aren't the

gospels about love?” exclaimed one friend as we discussed this

work. Certainly they
are
about love, but since the story they

have to tell involves betrayal and killing, they also include

elements of hostility which evoke demonic images. This book

concentrates on this theme.

What fascinates us about Satan is the way he expresses

qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human.

Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and anger we

identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we

call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to

animals (“brutes”). 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

xviii / INTRODUCTION

turns them toward destruction and takes pleasure in inflicting

harm. Evil, then, at its worst, seems to involve the

supernatural—what we recognize, with a shudder, as the

diabolic inverse of Martin Buber's characterization of God as

“wholly other.” 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;2 Walter

Wink and the psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung and some of his

followers have studied Satan’s theological and psychological

implications.3 Jeffrey Burton Russell and others have attempted

to investigate cross-cultural parallels between the figure of Satan

and such figures as the Egyptian god Set or the Zoroastrian evil

power Ahriman.4 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.” Satan

has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the “other”;

and so Satan defines negatively what we think of as human. The

social and cultural practice of defining certain people as “others”

in relation to one’s own group may be, of course, as old as

humanity itself. The anthropologist Robert Redfield has argued

that the worldview of many peoples consists essentially of two

pairs of binary oppositions: human/nonhuman and we/they.5

These two are often correlated, as Jonathan Z. Smith observes, so

that “we” equals “human” and “they” equals “not human.”6 The

distinction between “us” and “them” occurs within our earliest

historical evidence, on ancient Sumerian and Akkadian tablets,

just as it exists in the language and culture of peoples all

INTRODUCTION / xix

over the world. Such distinctions are charged, sometimes with

attraction, perhaps more often with repulsion—or both at once.

The ancient Egyptian word for Egyptian simply means “human”;

the Greek word for non-Greeks, “barbarian,” mimics the

guttural gibberish of those who do not speak Greek—since they

speak unintelligibly, the Greeks call them
barbaroi
.

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:

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.7

Conflict between groups is, of course, nothing new. 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.

Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of

Christianity I find disturbing. During the past several years,

rereading the gospels, I was struck by how their vision of

supernatural struggle both expresses conflict and raises it to

cosmic dimensions. 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. While writing this book I often

xx / INTRODUCTION

recalled a saying of Søren Kierkegaard: "An unconscious

relationship is more powerful than a conscious one."

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.

Especially since the nineteenth century, however, increasing

numbers of scholars have applied literary and historical analysis

to the gospels—the so-called higher criticism. 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