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

by Elaine Pagels

But as the Christian movement became increasingly Gentile during the second century and later, the identification of Satan primarily with the Jewish enemies of Jesus, borne along in Christian tradition over the centuries, would fuel the fires of anti-Semitism.

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.

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.

Satan, Beelzebub, Semihazah, Azazel, Belial, Prince of Darkness.

Nearly two and a half thousand years after Isaiah wrote, this luminous falling star, his name translated into Latin as Lucifer (“light-bearer”) was transformed by Milton into the protagonist of Paradise Lost.

Satan is not the distant enemy but the intimate enemy—one’s trusted colleague, close associate, brother. He is the kind of person on whose loyalty and goodwill the well-being of family and society depend—but one who turns unexpectedly jealous and hostile. Whichever version of his origin one chooses, then, and there are many, all depict Satan as an intimate enemy—the attribute that qualifies him so well to express conflict among Jewish groups. Those who asked, “How could God’s own angel become his enemy?” were thus asking, in effect, “How could one of us become one of them?”

Matthew, following Mark’s lead, implies that political success and power (such as the Pharisees enjoy under Roman patronage) may evince a pact with the devil—

Within the ancient world, so far as I know, it is only Essenes and Christians who actually escalate conflict with their opponents to the level of cosmic war.

Luke also goes further than Mark and Matthew in making explicit what Mark and Matthew imply—the connection between Jesus’ Jewish enemies and the “evil one,” the devil. In Luke, Jesus himself, at the moment of his arrest, suggests that the arresting party of “chief priests and scribes and elders” is allied with the evil one, whom Jesus here calls “the power of darkness.”

In one explosive scene, Jesus accuses the Jews of trying to kill him, saying, “You are of your father, the devil!” and “the Jews” retaliate by accusing Jesus of being a Samaritan—that is, not a real Jew—and himself “demon-possessed,” or insane.

Anyone who reads the gospel of John can see that “the Jews” have become for John what Bultmann sees as a symbol of human evil.20 But those who agree with Rudolph Bultmann and Heinrich Schneider that the use of the term is merely symbolic and thus has no social or political implications seem to be engaging in apologetic evasions. John’s decision to make an actual, identifiable group—among Jesus’ contemporaries and his own—into a symbol of “all evil” obviously bears religious, social, and political implications.

My purpose here is not to define precisely John’s use of the term “Jew.” Instead, it is much simpler: to show how the gospel of John, like the other gospels, associates the mythological figure of Satan with specific human opposition, first implicating Judas Iscariot, then the Jewish authorities, and finally “the Jews” collectively.

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.

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.

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.

Christians saw themselves not as philosophers but as combatants in a cosmic struggle, God’s warriors against Satan.

the entire universe as a battleground where cosmic forces clash.

the forces that play upon a helpless humanity are neither human nor divine, as pagans imagined, but demonic.

the universe of spiritual energies, which pious pagan philosophers called daimones, as, in his words, “foul daimones.”19 By the time the Christian movement had swept across the Western world, our language would reflect that reversed perception, and the Greek term daimones, “spirit energies,” would become, in English, demons.

now he and his fellow Christians, once driven, like most others by passion, greed, and hatred, stand apart from demons and follow God;… we, who once took pleasure in fornication, now embrace self-control; we, who … valued the acquisition of wealth and possessions above everything else, now put what we have into a common fund, and share with everyone in need; we, who hated and killed one another, and would not share our lives with certain people because of their ethnic differences from us, now live intimately with them.24

Ironic that US Fundamental Xtians do the things they once turned against, in the name of their religion.

Does the universe simply function chaotically, “with no design and no direction”?49 Does honesty require us to become atheists?

On the contrary, this indiscriminateness shows that “living and dying, reputation and disgrace, pain and pleasure, wealth and destitution, actually are neither good nor evil”; instead, all alike are simply part of “nature’s work.” What does involve good and evil, however, is how we respond to what nature does:

none but Christians preached—and practiced—division on earth.

Origen complained in a sermon that conversion had become so common and even fashionable that it was no longer dangerous.

Xtian complaining that too many people liked Xtians and they were not being persecuted. 😒🙄

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?

What makes the Christians’ message dangerous, Celsus writes, is not that they believe in one God, but that they deviate from monotheism by their “blasphemous” belief in the devil. For all the “impious errors” the Christians commit, Celsus says, they show their greatest ignorance in “making up a being opposed to God, and calling him ‘devil,’ or, in the Hebrew language, ‘Satan.’ ” All such ideas, Celsus declares, are nothing but human inventions, sacrilegious even to repeat: “it is blasphemy … to say that the greatest God … has an adversary who constrains his capacity to do good.” Celsus is outraged that the Christians, who claim to worship one God, “impiously divide the kingdom of God, creating a rebellion in it, as if there were opposing factions within the divine, including one that is hostile to God!”92

Celsus accuses Christians of “inventing a rebellion” (stasis, meaning “sedition”) in heaven to justify rebellion here on earth.

Among themselves, Christians debated whether converts should maintain ordinary social and familial relationships or break them, as Jesus in the gospels required when he said, “Whoever does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).

What Barnabas says of the Jews—that they have been deceived by an “evil angel”—and what the majority of Christians say about pagans—that they unwittingly worship demons spawned by fallen angels—this author says about other Christians.

this teacher “discovers” that it reveals truth only when one reads it in reverse, recognizing that God is actually the villain, and the serpent the holy one!

The true Christian, Tertullian declares, simply determines to “know nothing … at variance with the truth of faith.”

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.”

What concerns the bishop, among other things, is the enormous appeal that Valentinian teaching had for women believers, who were increasingly excluded during the second century from active participation in Irenaeus’s church.

Instead of commanding one to “eat this, do not eat that,” as did the former “tree” of the law, the true tree of gnosis will convey perfect freedom: In the place where I shall eat all things is the tree of knowledge.… That garden is the place where they will say to me, “Eat this, or do not eat that, just as you wish.”88

Interesting as this is what Satanism is to many — freedom to do as thou wilt.

Let those persons, therefore, who blaspheme the creator, either by openly expressed disagreement … or by distorting the meaning [of the Scriptures], like the Valentinians and all the falsely called gnostics, be recognized as agents of Satan by all who worship God.

Everyone who questions things or doesn’t blindly obey my kind of faith is an agent of Satan. 🙄

In the sixteenth century, for example, Martin Luther, founder of Protestant Christianity, denounced as “agents of Satan” all Christians who remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, all Jews who refused to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah, all who challenged the power of the landowning aristocrats by participating in the Peasants’ War, and all “protestant” Christians who were not Lutheran.

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.

Paul, writing about twenty years before the evangelists, holds a still more traditionally Jewish perception that Satan acts as God’s agent not to corrupt people but to test them; at one point he suggests that a Christian group “deliver to Satan” one of its errant members, not in order to consign him to hell, but in the hope that he will repent and change (1 Cor. 5:5).

For the most part, however, Christians have taught—and acted upon—the belief that their enemies are evil and beyond redemption.