Word: satanic
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...Elaine Pagels. Her much honored 1979 work, The Gnostic Gospels, was one of the rare volumes of religious scholarship to find a general readership. In her new book, The Origin of Satan (Random House; $23), Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, examines how the earliest Christians made their opponents out to be the devil. First the Jews who spurned Christ, then the Romans who persecuted his followers, then other Christians who departed from the orthodoxies of the newly consolidating church -- each group in turn, she says, appears in early Christian texts not just as a philosophical contender...
...personal tragedy that brought Pagels to reflect on Satan. In 1987 her six-year-old son Mark died of a respiratory illness. Fifteen months later, her husband Heinz, a physicist, fell to his death while hiking in Colorado. Eventually, Pagels found herself reflecting on the ways in which an invisible presence, like her missing loved ones, holds power over the living. In that frame of mind she turned to the early church and its invisible enemy...
...Satan makes few appearances in the Old Testament and never as a figure of consequence. In the Book of Job, he's an imp in God's retinue, a challenger tolerated by a confident Creator. The New Testament enlarges him. Like most religious scholars, Pagels believes the Gospels were set down in the latter half of the first century, after the defeat of the Jewish rebellion against Rome. "Wartime literature," she calls them, reflecting the divisions among Jews traumatized by the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of their temple...
...still hoping to persuade other Jews that Jesus was the Messiah, though he appeared to have died in defeat. It was to account for Christ's arrest and execution, Pagels believes, that the Gospel writers framed the life of Jesus as an episode in the conflict between God and Satan. Their explanation for his death, Pagels says, is that "his divine mission met with supernatural opposition...
Seen in that light, the Jews who rejected Jesus were instruments of Satan. The Evangelist Mark treats them as chiefly responsible for the Crucifixion, while softening the role of the Roman authorities. In Mark, the Roman governor Pilate, whom other sources of the period describe as a provincial tyrant, becomes a man helpless to oppose the Jewish elders demanding Christ's death. The later Evangelists expanded Mark's themes, paving the way for early Christian fathers who glimpsed the devil in their own adversaries...