The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

by Elaine Pagels

What fascinates us about Satan is the way he expresses qualities that go beyond what we ordinarily recognize as human. Satan evokes more than the greed, envy, lust, and anger we identify with our own worst impulses, and more than what we call brutality, which imputes to human beings a resemblance to animals (“brutes”). Thousands of years of tradition have characterized Satan instead as a spirit. Originally he was one of God’s angels, but a fallen one. Now he stands in open rebellion against God, and in his frustrated rage he mirrors aspects of our own confrontations with otherness. Many people have claimed to see him embodied at certain times in individuals and groups that seem possessed by an intense spiritual passion, one that engages even our better qualities, like strength, intelligence, and devotion, but turns them toward destruction and takes pleasure in inflicting harm. Evil, then, at its worst, seems to involve the supernatural—what we recognize, with a shudder, as the diabolic inverse of Martin Buber’s characterization of God as “wholly other.” Yet—historically speaking, at any rate—Satan, along with diabolical colleagues like Belial and Mastema (whose Hebrew name means “hatred”), did not materialize out of the air.

The social and cultural practice of defining certain people as “others” in relation to one’s own group may be, of course, as old as humanity itself. The anthropologist Robert Redfield has argued that the worldview of many peoples consists essentially of two pairs of binary oppositions: human/nonhuman and we/they.5 These two are often correlated, as Jonathan Z. Smith observes, so that “we” equals “human” and “they” equals “not human.”6 The distinction between “us” and “them” occurs within our earliest historical evidence, on ancient Sumerian and Akkadian tablets, just as it exists in the language and culture of peoples all over the world.

Yet this virtually universal practice of calling one’s own people human and “dehumanizing” others does not necessarily mean that people actually doubt or deny the humanness of others. Much of the time, as William Green points out, those who so label themselves and others are engaging in a kind of caricature that helps define and consolidate their own group identity: A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them, by selecting, isolating, and emphasizing an aspect of another people’s life, and making it symbolize their difference.7

While writing this book I often recalled a saying of Søren Kierkegaard: “An unconscious relationship is more powerful than a conscious one.”

Especially since the nineteenth century, however, increasing numbers of scholars have applied literary and historical analysis to the gospels—the so-called higher criticism. Their critical analysis indicated that the authors of Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source from which to construct their amplified gospels. Many scholars assumed that Mark was the most historically reliable because it was the simplest in style and was written closer to the time of Jesus than the others were. But historical accuracy may not have been the gospel writers’ first consideration. Further analysis demonstrated how passages from the prophetic writings and the psalms of the Hebrew Bible were woven into the gospel narratives. Barnabas Lindars and others suggested that Christian writers often expanded biblical passages into whole episodes that “proved,” to the satisfaction of many believers, that events predicted by the prophets found their fulfillment in Jesus’ coming.

What historical basis is there, if any, to the gospels’ claim that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death? What makes this question of vital interest is the gospels’ claim that this deed was inspired by Satan himself. One group of scholars pointed out discrepancies between Sanhedrin procedure described in the Mishnah and in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ “trial before the Sanhedrin,” and questioned the accuracy of the accounts in Mark and Matthew. Simon Bernfield declared in 1910 that “the whole trial before the Sanhedrin is nothing but an invention of a later date,”13 a view that has found recent defenders among Christian literary analysts.14 Noting that the charge against Jesus and the form of execution are characteristically Roman, many scholars, including Paul Winter in his influential book On the Trial of Jesus, published in 1961, argued that it was the Romans who executed Jesus, on political grounds, not religious ones.15 Others, recently including the Roman historian Fergus Millar, have placed more credence in the accounts of Luke or John, which indicate that the Sanhedrin held only a hearing concerning Jesus, not an actual trial.

I agree as a working hypothesis that Jesus’ execution was probably imposed by the Romans for activities they considered seditious—possibly for arousing public demonstrations and (so they apparently believed) for claiming to be “king of the Jews.” Among his own people, however, Jesus appeared as a radical prophetic figure whose public teaching, although popular with the crowds, angered and alarmed certain Jewish leaders, especially the Temple authorities, who probably facilitated his capture and arrest.

Despite the hostility and suspicion he and his movement aroused among both Jews and Gentiles, including, of course, the Romans, Mark wrote to proclaim the “good news of Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah of Israel” (1:1). Yet Mark knows that to justify such claims about Jesus, he has to answer obvious objections. If Jesus had been sent as God’s anointed king, how could the movement he initiated have failed so miserably? How could his followers have abandoned him and gone into hiding, while soldiers captured him like a common criminal? Why did virtually all his own people reject the claims about him—not only the townspeople in Galilee but also the crowds he attracted on his travels throughout Judea and in Jerusalem? And wasn’t Jesus, after all, a seditionist himself, tainted in retrospect by association with the failed war, having been arrested and crucified as a rebel?

The figure of Satan becomes, among other things, a way of characterizing one’s actual enemies as the embodiment of transcendent forces. For many readers of the gospels ever since the first century, the thematic opposition between God’s spirit and Satan has vindicated Jesus’ followers and demonized their enemies.

The New Testament gospels almost never identify Satan with the Romans, but they consistently associate him with Jesus’ Jewish enemies, primarily Judas Iscariot and the chief priests and scribes. By placing the story of Jesus in the context of cosmic war, the gospel writers expressed, in varying ways, their identification with the embattled minority of Jews who believed in Jesus, and their distress at what they saw as the apostasy of the majority of their fellow Jews in Jesus’ time, as well as in their own. As we shall see, Jesus’ followers did not invent the practice of demonizing enemies within their own group, although Christians (and Muslims after them) carried this practice further than their Jewish predecessors had taken it, and with enormous consequences.

The biblical book of Daniel, for example, which tells the story of the prophet Daniel, who, although threatened with a horrible death—being torn apart by lions—nevertheless defies the king of Babylon in the name of God and of the people of Israel (Dan. 6:1–28). The first book of Maccabees tells the story of the priest Mattathias, who defies Syrian soldiers when they order him to worship idols. Mattathias chooses to die rather than betray his devotion to God.

The trial was only a pretense in order “to put him to death” (14:55). After hearing a series of trumped-up charges and lying witnesses, some accusing Jesus of having threatened to destroy the Temple, the chief priest interrogates Jesus, demanding that he answer the charges against him. Jesus, however, remains silent. Finally the chief priest asks, “Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?” (14:61). Here, for the first time in Mark’s gospel, Jesus publicly admits his divine identity to people other than his disciples, and goes on to warn his accusers that they will soon witness his vindication: “I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (14:62). Then, Mark continues, the high priest, tearing his robe, says, “ ‘You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?’ And they all condemned him as deserving death” (14:64).

We cannot, of course, know what actually happened, but Mark’s second version, which agrees with Luke’s, sounds more likely—that the council convened in the morning, and decided that the prisoner should be kept in custody and turned over to Pilate to face charges.31 The gospel of John, relying upon a source independent of Mark’s, offers another reconstructed account that gives a plausible interpretation of these events.32 According to John, the chief priests, alarmed by the crowds Jesus attracted, feared that his presence in Jerusalem during Passover might ignite public demonstrations, “and the Romans will come and destroy our holy place and our nation” (11:48). The civil strife that preceded the Jewish war, as John and his contemporaries well knew, had verified the accuracy of such concerns about possible Roman reprisals.

Jesus’ followers did not invent the practice of demonizing enemies within their own group. In this respect, as in many others, as we shall see, they drew upon traditions they shared with other first-century Jewish sects. The Essenes, for example, had developed and elaborated images of an evil power they called by many names—Satan, Belial, Beelzebub, Mastema (“hatred”)—precisely to characterize their own struggle against a Jewish majority whom they, for reasons different from those of Jesus’ followers, denounced as apostate.

Excluded from the Hebrew Bible were writings of Jewish sectarians, apparently because such authors tended to identify with one group of Jews against another, rather than with Israel as a whole. Christians later came to call the writings of such dissidents from the main group the apocrypha (literally, “hidden things”) and pseudepigrapha (“false writings”).

The people of Sodom, although they are Abraham’s allies, not his enemies, are said to be criminally depraved, “young and old, down to the last man,” collectively guilty of attempting to commit homosexual rape against a party of angels, seen by the townspeople as defenseless Hebrew travelers (Gen. 19:4). These accounts do not idealize Abraham or his progeny—in fact, the biblical narrator twice tells how the self-serving lies of Abraham and Isaac endangered their allies (Gen. 20:1–18; 26:6–10). Nevertheless, God ensures that everything turns out well for the Israelites and badly for their enemies.

Many anthropologists have pointed out that the worldview of most peoples consists essentially of two pairs of binary oppositions: human/not human and we/they.3 Apart from anthropology, we know from experience how people dehumanize enemies, especially in wartime.

As he first appears in the Hebrew Bible, Satan is not necessarily evil, much less opposed to God. On the contrary, he appears in the book of Numbers and in Job as one of God’s obedient servants—a messenger, or angel, a word that translates the Hebrew term for messenger (mal’āk) into Greek (angelos). In Hebrew, the angels were often called “sons of God” (benē ’elōhīm), and were envisioned as the hierarchical ranks of a great army, or the staff of a royal court.

In biblical sources the Hebrew term the satan describes an adversarial role. It is not the name of a particular character.8 Although Hebrew storytellers as early as the sixth century B.C.E. occasionally introduced a supernatural character whom they called the satan, what they meant was any one of the angels sent by God for the specific purpose of blocking or obstructing human activity. The root śṭn means “one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as adversary.”

The book of Job, too, describes the satan as a supernatural messenger, a member of God’s royal court.10 But while Balaam’s satan protects him from harm, Job’s satan takes a more adversarial role. Here the Lord himself admits that the satan incited him to act against Job (2:3). The story begins when the satan appears as an angel, a “son of God” (ben ’elōhīm), a term that, in Hebrew idiom, often means “one of the divine beings.”

The Lord agrees to test Job, authorizing the satan to afflict Job with devastating loss, but defining precisely how far he may go: “Behold, all that belongs to him is in your power; only do not touch the man himself.” Job withstands the first deadly onslaught, the sudden loss of his sons and daughters in a single accident, the slaughter of his cattle, sheep, and camels, and the loss of all his wealth and property.

More radical than their predecessors, these dissidents began increasingly to invoke the satan to characterize their Jewish opponents; in the process they turned this rather unpleasant angel into a far grander—and far more malevolent—figure. No longer one of God’s faithful servants, he begins to become what he is for Mark and for later Christianity—God’s antagonist, his enemy, even his rival.19 Such sectarians, contending less against “the nations” than against other Jews, denounce their opponents as apostate and accuse them of having been seduced by the power of evil, whom they call by many names—Satan, Beelzebub, Semihazah, Azazel, Belial, Prince of Darkness.

The author of Jubilees, echoing the warnings of Isaiah and other prophets, suggests that belonging to the people of Israel does not guarantee deliverance from evil. It conveys a legacy of moral struggle, but ensures divine help in that struggle.

Like the authors of Jubilees and Watchers, the author of Daniel, too, sees moral division within Israel, and warns that some people “violate the covenant; but the people who know their God shall stand firm and take action” (Dan. 11:32).

The spirits of truth and falsehood struggle within the human heart.… According to his share in truth and right, thus a man hates lies; and according to his share in the lot of deceit, thus he hates truth (1 QS 4:12–14).

The gospel of Luke, probably written by the only Gentile author in the New Testament for a predominantly Gentile community, insists that his group has inherited Israel’s legacy as God’s people.

In writing his gospel, Matthew was concerned to refute damaging rumors about Jesus—for example, that his birth was illegitimate, which would disgrace and disqualify him as a suitable candidate for Israel’s Messiah. Furthermore, Jesus was known to have come from Nazareth in Galilee, and from a common family—not from the royal, Davidic dynasty established in Bethlehem, as would befit a king of Israel. Even more serious, perhaps, was the charge that Jesus, according to Mark, neglected or even violated observance of Sabbath and kosher laws.

Scholars know that many Jewish teachers at the time of Jesus—teachers like Hillel and Shammai, Jesus’ contemporaries—engaged in moral interpretation of the law. One famous story tells how Hillel answered a student who asked him to teach the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel replied, “Whatever you do not want others to do to you, do not do to them. That is the whole of the Torah.” Yet even a liberal like Hillel would have opposed a movement that claimed to reinterpret the Torah morally but put aside the ritual precepts that define Jewish identity. Many Jews of the first century saw such tendencies in the Christian movement. Many Pharisees, concerned to keep Israel holy and separate through Torah observance, may well have regarded Jesus’ followers as threatening Israel’s integrity—even its existence.

Luke, unlike Matthew, reports no animosity on the part of Herod or the people of Jerusalem toward the infant Jesus. As in Mark, however, the moment Jesus appears as a grown man, baptized and “full of the holy spirit,” the devil immediately challenges him. The devil is thrice defeated, and Luke says that “the devil departed from him until an opportune time [achri kairou]” (emphasis added). Frustrated in his initial attempt to overpower Jesus, the devil finds his opportunity only at the end of the story, when the chief priests and scribes “sought to kill Jesus.” At that point, Luke says, “Satan entered into Judas Iscariot,” who “went and conferred with the chief priest how he might betray him; and they were glad, and agreed to give him money.” From that time, Luke says, Judas “sought an opportunity [eukairan] to betray him.”

Luke says, Jesus’ enemies decided to bring him to Pilate, accusing him of three charges calculated to arouse the governor’s concern: “We found this man guilty of perverting our nation [apparently, of teaching in opposition to the designated religious leaders], forbidding us to pay tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Messiah, a king” (23:2).

Mark and Matthew said that Pilate was skeptical of the charges, but Luke’s Pilate pronounces Jesus innocent no less than three times. At first Pilate says, “I find no crime in this man.” Then, after the chief priests and the crowds object and insist that Jesus is guilty of disturbing the peace, Pilate tries to rid himself of responsibility by sending Jesus to King Herod. While Mark and Matthew show Pilate’s soldiers mocking and beating Jesus, Luke further exonerates Pilate by showing that it was Herod and his officers (like the Jewish officers involved in the arrest) who abused and mocked Jesus as a would-be king (23:11).

In earlier passages, nevertheless, Luke had followed Mark in saying that Jesus’ enemies delivered him “to the Gentiles” (18:32); later, Luke, like Mark, will mention a Roman centurion present at the crucifixion. These clues, along with Luke’s acknowledgment that the written accusation was that Jesus had claimed to be “king of the Jews,” and the charge was sedition (23:38), indicate that Luke knew that the Romans had actually pronounced sentence and carried out the execution. Yet as Luke tells the story, he allows, and perhaps even wants, the reader—especially one unfamiliar with other accounts—to infer that after Jews had arrested Jesus and a Jewish court had sentenced him to death, it was Jewish soldiers who actually crucified him.

The well-known French commentator Alfred Loisy says that according to Luke, “The Jews are the authors of all evil.”6 Loisy’s comment oversimplifies, yet as we have seen, Luke wants to show that those who reject Jesus accomplish Satan’s work on earth.

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.

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 knows of cases in which believers or their slaves, including women and children, had been tortured until they “admitted” seeing Christians engage in atrocities, including ritual eating of human flesh and drinking blood from freshly slaughtered infants.

Their irrational public hatred of Christians proves, Justin says, that their minds have been captured by the same evil spirits who incited the Athenians to kill Socrates; now, for the same reason, these spirits are driving them to kill Christians.

When he was offered acquittal from the death penalty if he sacrificed to the gods, Justin defiantly refused: “No person in his right mind turns from piety to impiety.”

Although many pagans had come to believe that all the powers of the universe are ultimately one, only Jews and Christians worshiped a single god and denounced all others as evil demons. Only Christians divided the supernatural world into two opposing camps, the one true God against swarms of demons; and none but Christians preached—and practiced—division on earth.61 By refusing to worship the gods, Christians were driving a wedge between themselves and all pagans, between divine sanctions and Roman government—a fact immediately recognized by Rusticus, Marcus’s teacher in Stoicism and his personal friend, who, in his public role as prefect of Rome, personally judged and sentenced Justin and his students to death.

Tatian ridicules such superstitious people for failing to see that disease and other sufferings happen simply because of elements intrinsic to our physical constitution: surprisingly, he secularizes disease, accident, and death, removing them from the supernatural. Although everyone is vulnerable to these contingencies, Tatian says, they hold no real power over people who belong to God, since baptism breaks the bonds that once bound us to destiny and to nature.

Origen admits that the astounding success of the Christian movement has occurred principally among the poor and illiterate, but only because “the illiterate necessarily outnumber the educated.” Yet “some persons of intelligence and education”—he might have mentioned Justin, Tatian, even himself—have committed their lives to the Christian faith.

If the suffering of the Jews proves that God is punishing them, what does that say about the suffering of Christians? And what about those innocent people who suffer disease, catastrophe, or human brutality?

Unlike many later Christians, Origen refuses to attribute the sufferings of the innocent simply to “God’s will,” for, he says, “not everything that happens happens according to God’s will, or according to divine providence.” Some things, he says, are “accidental by-products” of the works of providence; others occur when human beings—and, for that matter, supernatural beings as well—violate the divinely ordered administration of the universe and intentionally inflict harm. Many instances of human evil, as well as certain seemingly gratuitous natural catastrophes, like floods, volcanoes, and earthquakes, are instigated by “evil daimones and evil angels.”87

According to the authors of such teachings, the human condition, involving work, marriage, and procreation, does not reflect divine blessing, but demonstrates enslavement to cosmic forces that want to blind human beings to their innate capacity for spiritual enlightenment. Such radical Christians believe that most people, including most Christians, have fallen prey to the rulers of darkness and so, like most Jews and pagans, remain entangled in sexual, social, and economic bondage.

Christians, Tertullian says, quoting Paul, should “all speak and think the very same things.”49 Whoever deviates from the consensus is, by definition, a heretic; for, as Tertullian points out, the Greek word translated “heresy” (hairesis) literally means “choice”; thus a “heretic” is “one who makes a choice.”50 Tertullian notes that heretics actually pride themselves on the points at which they differ from the majority, regarding these as evidence of their own deeper insight.

But Tertullian insists that making choices is evil, since choice destroys group unity. To stamp out heresy, Tertullian says, church leaders must not allow people to ask questions, for it is “questions that make people heretics”52—above all, questions like these: Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted? And what is the origin of human beings? Tertullian wants to stop such questions and impose upon all believers the same regula fidei, “rule of faith,” or creed. Tertullian knows that the “heretics” undoubtedly will object, saying that Jesus himself encouraged questioning, saying, “Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7). But Tertullian has no patience with such people: “Where will the end of seeking be? The point of seeking is to find; the purpose in finding, to believe.”53 Now that the church can provide a direct and simple answer to all questions in its rule of faith, Tertullian says, the only excuse for continuing to seek is sheer obstinacy: Away with the one who is always seeking, for he never finds anything; for he is seeking where nothing can be found.

The true Christian, Tertullian declares, simply determines to “know nothing … at variance with the truth of faith.” But when people “insist on our asking about the issues that concern them,” Tertullian says, “we have a moral obligation to refute them.… They say that we must ask questions in order to discuss,” Tertullian continues, “but what is there to discuss?” When the “heretics” object that Christians must discuss what the Scriptures really mean, Tertullian declares that believers must dismiss all argument over scriptural interpretation; such controversy only “has the effect of upsetting the stomach or the brain.”

The faith that Christ has conquered Satan assures Christians that in their own struggles the stakes are eternal, and victory is certain. Those who participate in this cosmic drama cannot lose. Those who die as martyrs win the victory even more gloriously and are assured that they will celebrate victory along with all of God’s people and the angels of heaven. Throughout the history of Christianity, this vision has inspired countless people to take a stand against insuperable odds in behalf of what they believe is right and to perform acts that, apart from faith, might seem only futile bravado. This apocalyptic vision has taught even secular-minded people to interpret the history of Western culture as a moral history in which the forces of good contend against the forces of evil in the world.

To this day, many Christians—Roman Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, and Orthodox—invoke the figure of Satan against “pagans” (among whom they may include those involved with non-Christian religions throughout the world) and against “heretics” (that is, against other Christians with whom they disagree), as well as against atheists and unbelievers. Millions of Muslims invoke similar apocalyptic visions and switch the sides, so that those who Christians believe are God’s people become, for many Muslims, allies of “the great Satan.”

Many Christians, then, from the first century through Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century and Martin Luther King, Jr., in the twentieth, have believed that they stood on God’s side without demonizing their opponents. Their religious vision inspired them to oppose policies and powers they regarded as evil, often risking their well-being and their lives, while praying for the reconciliation—not the damnation—of those who opposed them. For the most part, however, Christians have taught—and acted upon—the belief that their enemies are evil and beyond redemption.