The Origin of Satan (22 page)

independent supernatural character (if, indeed, he knew of it, as

I suspect he did). Instead, as John tells the story, Satan, like God

himself, appears incarnate, first in Judas Iscariot, then in the

Jewish authorities as they mount opposition to Jesus, and finally

in those John calls “the Jews”—a group he sometimes charac-

terizes as Satan’s allies, now as separate from Jesus and his

followers as darkness is from light, or the forces of hell from the

armies of heaven.

The evangelists’ various depictions of the devil correlate with

the “social history of Satan”—that is, with the history of

increasing conflict between groups representing Jesus’ followers

and their opposition. By presenting Jesus’ life and message in

these polemical terms, the evangelists no doubt intended to

strengthen group solidarity. In the process, they shaped, in ways

that were to become incalculably consequential, the self-

understanding of Christians in relation to Jews for two

millennia.

V

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM:

CHRISTIANS AGAINST PAGANS

Between 70 and 100 C.E.—the interval between the writing of

the gospel of Mark and of the gospel of John—the Christian

movement became largely Gentile. Many converts found that

having become Christians placed their lives in danger, and that

they were threatened not by Jews but by pagans—Roman

officers and city mobs who hated Christians for their “atheism,”

which pagans feared could bring the wrath of the gods upon

whole communities. Only two generations after Mark and

Matthew, Gentile converts, many of them former pagans from

Roman provinces—Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Africa, and

Greece— adapted the gospel vocabulary to face a new enemy. As

earlier generations of Christians had claimed to see Satan among

their fellow Jews, now converts facing Roman persecution

claimed to see Satan and his demonic allies at work among
other

Gentiles.

The pressures of state persecution complicated such

characterizations of Gentiles as we found in Matthew and Luke;

those writers, hoping for a favorable hearing among Gentile

audiences, had depicted Romans and other Gentiles in generally-

favorable ways, as we have seen.1 So long as Christians remained

a minority movement within Jewish communities, they tended

to regard other Jews as potential enemies, and Gentiles as

potential converts. Although the apostle Paul, writing c. 55 C.E.,

complained that he had faced danger at every turn—“danger

from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gen-

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 113

tiles, even danger from false brethren” (2 Cor. 11:26)—he

mentions actual persecution only from his fellow Jews: “Five

times I received at the hands of the Jews forty lashes save one;

three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned” (2

Cor. 11:24). According to Luke's account in Acts, Paul regarded

Roman magistrates as his protectors against Jewish hostility; and

Paul himself, writing to Christians in Rome, orders them to

“obey the higher powers; for there is no authority except from

God, and the powers that exist are instituted by God,” even in

their God-given right to “bear the sword” and “execute God's

wrath” (Rom. 13:1).

But Paul himself was executed, probably by order of a Roman

magistrate; and about ten years later, when many Romans

blamed the emperor Nero for starting a fire that devastated much

of Rome, the emperor ordered the arrest of a group of

Christians, charged them with arson, and had them hung up in

his garden and burned alive as human torches.2

One follower of Paul, aware of the circumstances of his

teacher’s death and of the various dangers Christians faced,

warned in a letter attributed to Paul, called the Letter to the

Ephesians, that Christians are not contending against mere

human beings:

Our contest is not against flesh and blood [human beings] but

against powers, against principalities, against the world rulers

of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in

heavenly places (6:12).

This Pauline author articulates the sense of spiritual warfare

experienced by many Christians, especially by those who face

persecution. The author of Revelation, claiming to have suffered

exile “on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus”

(Rev. 1:9), and aware of others suffering imprisonment, torture,

and death at the hands of Roman magistrates, describes horrific

and ecstatic visions that invoke traditional prophetic images of

animals and monsters to characterize the powers of Rome, which

he identifies with “the devil and Satan” (20:2; pas-

114 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

sim). Despite the gospels’ generally conciliatory attitude toward

the Romans, the crucifixion account nevertheless invites

Christians to see demonic forces working through Roman

officials as well as through Jewish leaders; Luke goes so far as to

suggest that Jesus’ crucifixion forged an unholy alliance between

Pilate and Herod, so that the Roman and Jewish authorities

became friends “that day” (23:12).

Gentile converts who were hated by other Gentiles—often

members of their own families, their townspeople, and their city

magistrates—believed that worshipers of the pagan gods were

driven by Satan to menace God's people. As Christian preachers

increasingly appealed to Gentiles, many found that what had

offended most Jews about Christianity offended pagans even

more: “Christians severed the traditional bonds between religion

and a nation or people,” and, as the historian Robert Wilken

points out, “Ancient people took for granted that religion was

indissolubly linked to a particular city, nation or people.”3 Jews

identified their religion with the Jewish people as a whole,

united by tradition, however dispersed throughout the world;

for pagans,
pietas
consisted precisely in respecting ancient

customs and honoring traditional mores. The Christian

movement, however, encouraged people to abandon ancestral

customs and break the sacred bonds of family, society, and

nation.

The movement that began as a sect within Judaism and was

rejected by the majority of Jews, whom it repudiated in turn,

now appealed to people of every nation and tribe to join the new

“Christian society” and to break all former bonds of kinship and

affiliation. “In Christ,” the apostle Paul had declared, “there is

no longer Jew nor Greek . . . slave nor free, male nor female” (Gal.

3:28); for those “born again” in baptism (John 3:5-8), the world

consists of only two kinds of people—those who belong to God’s

kingdom, whose citizenship is in heaven (Heb. 12:22-24; 13:14),

and those still ruled by the evil one, subjects of Satan.

Despite official Roman censure and popular pagan hostility,

the movement grew. The North African convert Tertullian

boasts in an appeal to the Roman emperors:

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 115

Those who once hated Christianity . . . now begin to hate what

they formerly were, and to profess what they formerly hated. . . .

The outcry is that the State is filled with Christians—that they

are in the fields, in the cities, in the islands; many people

lament, as if for some calamity, that both men and women,

every age and condition, even people of high rank, are passing

over to professing the Christian faith.4

What would impel pagans to “profess what they formerly

hated”— even at the cost of endangering their lives? Tertullian

and a few others—Justin, from the coast of Asia Minor, his

student Tatian, from Syria, and Origen, an Egyptian—have left

us some clues.

Justin, a young man who had come to Rome from Asia Minor

about 140 C.E. to pursue his study of philosophy, went one day

with friends to the amphitheater to see the spectacular

gladiatorial fights held there to celebrate imperial birthdays. The

spectators cheered the men who recklessly courted death, and

thrilled to the moment of the death blow. The crowd would go

wild when a defeated gladiator defiantly thrust out his neck to

meet his antagonist’s sword; and they jeered and hooted when a

loser bolted in panic.5

Justin was startled to see in the midst of this violent

entertainment a group of criminals being led out to be torn apart

by wild beasts. The serene courage with which they met their

brutal public execution astonished him, especially when he

learned that these were illiterate people, Christians, whom the

Roman senator Tacitus had called “a class of people hated for

their superstitions,” whose founder, Christos, had himself

“suffered the extreme penalty under Pontius Pilate” about a

hundred years before.6 Justin was profoundly shaken, for he saw

a group of uneducated people actually accomplishing what Plato

and Zeno regarded as the greatest achievement of a philosopher

—accepting death with equanimity, an accomplishment which

the gladiators’ bravado merely parodied. As he watched, Justin

realized that he was witnessing something quite beyond nature,

a miracle; somehow these people had tapped into a great,

unknown source of power.

116 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Justin would have been even more startled had he known that

these Christians saw themselves not as philosophers but as

combatants in a cosmic struggle, God’s warriors against Satan.7

As Justin learned later, their amazing confidence derived from

the conviction that their own agony and death actually were

hastening God’s victory over the forces of evil, forces embodied

in the Roman magistrate who had sentenced them, and, for that

matter, in spectators like Justin himself.

Sometime later, while taking a solitary walk in a field near the

sea, Justin unexpectedly met an old man who turned out to be a

member of this group.8 At first the old man questioned Justin

about his pursuit of philosophy; but instead of being impressed,

as Justin expected, the old man challenged him and said he could

never find illumination in philosophy.

What Justin sought in philosophy was not simply intellectual

understanding but self-realization: How shall I live in order to

be happy? What are the steps toward transformation?9 At an

earlier stage of his philosophical search, Justin says, he had

“surrendered himself” to a Stoic teacher, hoping to transcend his

ordinary, “human” point of view. Stoic teachers promised that

by studying physics—literally, “nature”—one could learn to

place each event, obstacle, or circumstance in one’s life within a

universal perspective, and to participate in the divine, which is

synonymous with nature. Justin says he became frustrated

because his teacher seldom spoke about the divine and

discouraged questions on the subject; so Justin left, and began to

study with a peripatetic philosopher. After a few days, when his

new teacher demanded a tuition fee, Justin quit in disgust,

deciding that the man “was no philosopher at all.” Justin did not

give up; next he tried a Pythagorean master, who offered to teach

physical and mental discipline to attune the soul to the divine.

Told that he would have to master astronomy, mathematics, and

music before he could even begin to understand “what makes for

a happy life,” Justin left this teacher as well.

Defeated and helpless, Justin finally discovered in the

teachings of a brilliant expositor of Plato what he believed was

the true path. He says he had already made great progress toward

enlight-

SATAN’S EARTHLY KINGDOM / 117

enment and expected soon to be able to raise his mind to

apprehend the divine. But the old Christian he met walking by

the sea challenged his basic philosophic premise: “Is there, then,

such a great power in our mind? Will the human mind ever see

God through its own capacity?” The old man voiced Justin’s

worst fear—that he was wasting his time; that the human mind,

however one educates and increases its capacity, is intrinsically