The Origin of Satan (20 page)

Jews are the authors of all evil.”6 Loisy’s comment over-

simplifies, yet as we have seen, Luke wants to show that those

who reject Jesus accomplish Satan’s work on earth.

Writing independently of Luke and probably a decade later,

the author of the gospel of John, who most scholars think was a

Jewish convert to the movement, speaks with startlingly similar

bitterness of the Jewish majority.7 In one explosive scene, Jesus

accuses the Jews of trying to kill him, saying, “You are of your

father, the devil!” and “the Jews” retaliate by accusing Jesus of

being a Samaritan—that is, not a real Jew—and himself “demon-

possessed,” or insane.

Most scholars agree that Jesus probably did not make these

accusations, but that such strong words reflected bitter conflict

between a group of Jesus’ followers to which John belonged (c.

90-100 C.E.) and the Jewish majority in their city, especially the

synagogue leaders. Writing from within a Jewish community,

perhaps in Palestine, John is anguished that after a series of

clashes with Jewish leaders, he and his fellow Christians have

been forcibly expelled from the synagogues, and denied

participation in common worship. We do not know for certain

what happened; John says only, “The Jews had already agreed

that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put

out of the syna-

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 99

gogue”—literally, would become
aposynagoge
, expelled from

one's home synagogue. New Testament scholar Louis Martyn has

shown that whatever it meant in particular, this traumatic

separation defined how John's group saw itself—as a tiny

minority of God’s people “hated by the world,” a group that

urged its members to reject in turn the whole social and religious

world into which they had been born.8

Martyn suggests, too, that the crisis in John’s community

occurred when a group of Jewish scholars, led by the rabbi

Gamalial II (80-115 C.E.), introduced into synagogue worship the

so-called
birkat ha-minim
(literally, “benediction of the heretics”),

a prayer that invoked a curse upon “heretics,” including

Christians, here specifically identified as “Nazarenes.” This

might have enabled synagogue leaders to ask anyone suspected

of being a secret “Nazarene” to “stand before the ark” and lead

the congregation in the benediction, so that anyone guilty of

being a Christian would be calling a curse upon himself and his

fellow believers. The historian Reuven Kimelman disagrees, and

argues that this ritual curse entered synagogue services

considerably later and so could not have precipitated a first-

century crisis. The author of John speaks, however, as if

synagogue leaders had taken measures more drastic than the

birkat ha-minim
, suggesting that they actually excluded Jesus’

followers to prevent them from worshiping alongside other Jews.

Whatever the actual circumstances, John chooses to tell the

story of Jesus as a story of cosmic conflict—conflict between

divine light and primordial darkness, between the close-knit

group of Jesus’ followers and the implacable, sinful opposition

thev encountered from “the world.” Ever since the first century,

John’s version of the gospel has consoled and inspired groups of

believers who have found themselves an oppressed minority—

but a minority that they believe embodies divine light in the

world. Whereas Mark begins his narrative with Jesus’ baptism,

and Luke and Matthew go beyond Jesus’ birth to his conception,

John goes back to the very origin of the universe. John begins his

gospel with the opening words of Genesis, which tell how “in

the beginning” God separated light from darkness. Echoing the

grand cosmology of Genesis 1, John’s prologue identifies the

logos
, God's

100 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

energy acting in creation, with life (
zoe
) and light (
phos
) that is,

the “light of human beings.” Anticipating the message of his

entire gospel, John declares that “the light shines in the

darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” According to

John, “the light of humankind” finally came to shine in and

through Jesus of Nazareth, who is revealed to be the Son of God.

Thus John takes the primordial elements separated in

creation—light and darkness—and casts them in a human drama,

interpreting them simultaneously in religious, ethical, and social

terms. According to John, this divine “light” not only “became

human, and dwelt among us,” but also is the spiritual progenitor

of those who “become the children of God” (1:12), the “sons of

light” (12:35). The crisis of Jesus’ appearance reveals others as

the “sons of darkness”; thus Jesus explains to the Jewish ruler

Nicodemus that

“this is the judgment [literally,
crisis
]: that the light came into

the world and people loved darkness rather than light, because

their deeds were evil. . . . But whoever does the truth comes to

the light.” (3:19-21).

By the end of the gospel, Jesus’ epiphany will have

accomplished in human society what God accomplished

cosmologically in creation: the separation of light from

darkness—that is, of the “sons of light” from the offspring of

darkness and the devil. Having first placed the story of Jesus

within this grand cosmological frame, John then sets it entirely

within the dynamics of the world of human interaction, so that

“the story of Jesus in the gospel is all played out on earth.”9 The

frame, nevertheless, informs the reader that both Jesus’ coming

and
all
his human relationships are elements played out in a

supernatural drama between the forces of good and evil.

Casting the struggle between good and evil as that between

light and darkness, John never pictures Satan, as the other

gospels do, appearing as a disembodied being. At first glance,

then, the image of Satan seems to have receded; the German

scholar Gustave Hoennecke goes so far as to claim that “in John,

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 101

the idea of the devil is completely absent.”10 More accurate,

however, is Raymond Brown’s observation that John, like the

other gospels, tells the whole story of Jesus as a struggle with

Satan that culminates in the crucifixion.11 Although John never

depicts Satan as a character on his own, acting independently of

human beings, in John’s gospel it is
people
who play the tempter's

role. All of the three “temptation scenes” in Luke and Matthew

occur in John, but Satan does not appear directly. Instead, as

Raymond Brown has shown, Satan’s role is taken first by “the

people,” members of Jesus’ audience, and finally by his own

brothers.12 For example, Matthew and Luke show Satan

challenging Jesus to claim earthly power (Matt. 4:8-9; Luke 4:5-

6); but according to John, this challenge occurs when “the people

were about to come and take him by force to make him king”

(6:15). Here, as in the other gospels, Jesus resists the temptation,

eludes the crowd, and escapes. In another temptation, Matthew

and Luke, following Q, relate that the devil challenged Jesus to

prove his divine authority by making “these stones into bread.”

But John says that those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles—and in

particular his multiplication of five loaves into many—then

challenged him to perform
another
miracle as further proof of his

messianic identity. Like the devil who quotes the Scriptures in

Luke and Matthew, “the people” in John quote them as they urge

Jesus to produce bread miraculously:

So they said to him, “What sign do you do, that we may see

and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate

manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread

from heaven to eat’ ” (6:30-31).

Jesus resists this temptation as well, and just as Matthew’s

Jesus had answered the devil with a response about spiritual

nourishment (“Man does not live by bread alone, but by everv

word which proceeds from the mouth of God”), so, in John,

Jesus speaks of the “true bread from heaven” (6:32). The

temptation in which the devil asks Jesus to display his divine

powers in public (Matt. 4:5-6; Luke 4:9-12) is echoed in John

when Jesus’

102 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

own brothers, who, John says, did not believe in him, challenge

Jesus to “go to Judea,” to “show yourself to the world” in

Jerusalem where, as he and they are well aware, his enemies

want to kill him (7:1-5). This temptation, too, Jesus rejects.

According to John, it is Jesus himself who reveals the identity

of the evil one. When Jesus hears Peter declare that “we

[disciples] believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God,” he

answers brusquely:

“Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He

spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he that

would betray him, being one of the twelve (6:70-71).

Anticipating his betrayal, Jesus again identifies his betrayer,

Judas, along with the accompanying posse of Roman and Jewish

soldiers, as his supernatural enemy appearing in human form.

According to Matthew, Jesus signals Judas’s arrival in Gethse-

mane with the words, “Rise; let us be going; my betrayer is

coming” (26:46); but in John, Jesus announces instead that “the

ruler of this world [that is, the “evil one”] is coming. . . . Rise, let

us be going” (14:30-31). Shortly before, Jesus had accused “the

Jews who had believed in him” of plotting his murder: twice he

charged that “you seek to kill me.” When they find his words

incomprehensible, Jesus proceeds to identify “the Jews” who

had previously believed in him as Satan's own: “You are of your

father, the devil; and you want to accomplish your father's

desires. He was a murderer from the beginning” (8:44).

Raymond Brown comments that in these passages,

for the first time the fact that the devil is Jesus’ real antagonist

comes to the fore. This motif will grow louder and louder as

the “hour” of Jesus [’s death] approaches, until the passion is

presented as a struggle to the death between Jesus and Satan.13

This is true, but Brown is concerned only with theological

observations. What do these passages mean in terms of human

conflict? Many commentators, along with countless Christian

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 103

readers, have agreed with the blunt assessment of the influential

German New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann: “There can

be no doubt about the main point of the passage, which is to

show that
the Jews’ unbelief,
with its hostility to truth and life,

stems from their being children of the devil
” (emphasis added).14

Bultmann adds that John, like Matthew and Luke, in effect

charges the Jews with “intentional murder.”15 (Elsewhere, as we

shall see, Bultmann makes statements bearing different impli-

cations.) In recent decades these passages from John have elicited

a flurry of discussion, often from Christian commentators

insisting that these words do not—or morally
cannot
—mean

what most Christians for nearly two millennia have taken them

to mean.

Many scholars have observed that the term “Jews” occurs

much more frequently in John than in the other gospels, and that

its usage indicates that John’s author and his fellow believers

stand even further from the Jewish majority than do the other

evangelists. Dozens, even hundreds, of articles propose different

solutions to the question of how John uses the Greek term

Ioudaios
, usually translated “Jew.”16 Sometimes, of course, John’s

usage coincides with general contemporary usage in passages that

simply describe people who are Jewish and not Gentile: twice, in

John, outsiders, first a Samaritan woman and later the Roman

governor, Pontius Pilate, identify Jesus himself as “a Jew” (John

4:9; 18:34). In other passages, the term apparently designates

Judeans—that is, people who live in or around Jerusalem—as

distinct from Galileans and Samaritans. In still other passages,

the term “the Jews” clearly serves as a synonym for the Jewish

leaders. But in certain passages that may overlap with these, John

uses “the Jews” to designate people alien to Jesus and hostile to

him; he repeatedly says, for example, that “the Jews sought to

kill [him],” and that Jesus at times avoided travel to Jerusalem

“for fear of the Jews.”

In chapter 8, when Jesus engages in a hostile dialogue with

“the Jews who had believed in him,” and finally denounces “the

Jews” as Satan's offspring, he is obviously not making a simple

ethnic distinction, since, of course, in that scene Jesus and all his

disciples are Jews as well as their opponents. Here, just as Jesus

embodies the