The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels

My first inkling that there was something wrong with our typical ideas about Satan came as a result of reading the Bible in its entirely. Until one does that, one is usually blind to the fact that Satan is hardly in the Old Testament at all. And when he is mentioned (primarily in the Book fof Job), he doesn’t seem to be the same guy that Christians are familiar with. He’s not the head of a kingdom of fallen angels in opposition to God. Instead, he’s keeping company with the regular angels. And he doesn’t step out of line. When God gives him instructions, he carries them out to the letter. The only “satanic” thing about him is the fact that he has a dirty job; he’s a sort of prosecutor. When God boasts about how much Job loves him, Satan is inclined to be sceptical, claiming that Job is only playing nice because God plays nice. “Take away the benefits and Job will curse you,” says Satan. And so the trials of Job begin.

The Christian depiction of Satan as the powerful “anti-God” is not shared by mainstream Judaism and never was. It was the exclusive view of a few minor sects, such as the Essenes and the one that would blossom into what we now call Christianity. Pagels chief concern is to examine the effects of this rebranding of Satan. The subtitle of the book is “How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics.” The Satan of Christianity represents all that is evil. So the moral dramas of our lives now take on a cosmic significance, as battles between God and Satan. The dangerous side of this is when we come to view the wider arena of the world in the same terms. When we view our enemies as allied with Satan and ourselves as allied with God, we are provided with immediate justification for killing others in the name of God. And that is, of course, the tragedy what has happened in history.

It could have been a much shorter work, except the author painstakingly sets the historical scene – assuming that the reader knows little to nothing of the Biblical period. If the reader is expecting a book all about Satan, he may be disappointed. It’s more of a general history book with a particular emphasis. My only disappointment was that I had been hoping Pagels would shed more light on the influence of Zoroastrianism upon Judaism, as it looks very much as if the modern depiction of Satan originated with the Zoroastrian belief in the struggle between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu.

This book is a non-sensationalist scholarly work that provides a massive challege to Christian theology.