Reading 196, from Elaine Pagels

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.
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. 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).

… 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
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.

The Origin of Satan
Elaine Pagels