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August 3 - October 16, 2023
All of the New Testament gospels, with considerable variation, depict Jesus’ execution as the culmination of the struggle between good and evil—between God and Satan—that began at his baptism.
gospel writers realize that the story they have to tell would make little sense without Satan.
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.
Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and so passes out of him? What comes out of a man is what defiles him; for from within, from the human heart, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder,… envy, pride, foolishness.… All these evils come from within” (7:14–23).
A young, upstart group, whose membership had rapidly and radically changed, was asserting that it was more authentic than its parent group; and this attitude of superiority and exclusion was derived,
in part, from ideas and attitudes already present in the parent body.
The author of John, probably Jewish himself, describes a close-knit group of “Jesus’ own”—insiders who follow Jesus’ command to “love one another” (15:12) while regarding their Jewish opponents as offspring of Satan.
they were chosen not necessarily because they were the earliest or the most accurate accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching but precisely because they could form the basis for church communities.
The Gospel of Philip makes the same point more succinctly: one is to “become not a Christian, but a Christ.”
“What kind of god is this god?… Surely he has shown himself to be a malicious envier,”36 says the author of the Testimony. Not only is this god jealous of his own creation, he is also ignorant and vindictive. And what of the serpent, whom God cursed and called “devil”?
When he said this, he sinned against the whole place. And a voice came forth from above the realm of absolute power, saying, “You are wrong, Samael,” that is, “God of the blind.” … And he said, “If anything else exists before me, let it become visible to me!” And immediately Wisdom stretched forth her finger and brought light into matter.… And he said to his offspring, “It is I who am the god of the whole.” And Life, daughter of Faith-Wisdom, cried out and said, “You are wrong, Saklas!” (that is, “fool”). She breathed into his face, and her breath became for her a fiery angel; and that angel
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By declaring himself to be the supreme and unique God of the universe, he “sinned against the whole,” refusing to recognize himself as part of a much larger divine reality. His boasts reveal him to be only a lesser, ignorant being whose power has led him into overweening pride (hybris) and into destruction.
Moreover, they threw humankind into great distraction and into a life of toil, so that humankind might be occupied with worldly affairs, and might not have the opportunity of being devoted to the holy spirit.41
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.
Those who have “the spirit of truth within them” refuse to enter into marriage, business, or any other worldly entanglements, in order to remain an “undominated generation,” free “to devote themselves to the holy spirit.”
and they steered the people who followed them into great distraction; the people became old without having joy; they died without having found truth, and without knowing God.… And thus the whole creation became enslaved to them, from the foundation of the world until now.
But Tertullian insists that making choices is evil, since choice destroys group unity.
Away with the one who is always seeking, for he never finds anything; for he is seeking where nothing can be found. Away with the one who is always knocking, for he knocks where there is no one to open; away with the one who is always asking, for he asks of one who does not hear.
Heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the Scriptures, since we … prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For since they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians.
While he took for granted that accepting baptism and professing the common faith in God and Christ were necessary for those making a beginning in the faith, he urged his fellow believers to go beyond what Christian preachers taught and beyond the literal interpretation of the Scriptures to question the gospels’ deeper meaning.
Abandon the search for God, and creation, and similar things of that kind. Instead, take yourself as the starting place. Ask who it is within you who makes everything his own saying, “my mind,” “my heart,” “my God.” Learn the sources of love, joy, hate, and desire.… If you carefully examine all these things, you will find [God] in yourself.
One who takes the path of gnosis discovers that the gospel is more than a message about repentance and forgiveness of sins; it becomes a path of spiritual awakening, through which one discovers the divine within.
According to Valentinus, he is an anthropomorphic image of the true divine Source underlying all being, the ineffable, indescribable source Valentinus calls “the depth,” or “the abyss.”
When Irenaeus accuses Marcus’s followers of adultery, he is invoking a traditional biblical image for participating in “illicit” religious practices. The prophets Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for example, often used the metaphors of adultery and prostitution to indict those they accused of being “unfaithful” to God’s covenant.77
Valentinus himself, commenting on Jesus’ saying that “God alone is good,” says that apart from God’s grace, the human heart is a “dwelling place for many demons. But when the Father, who alone is good, looks upon it, he purifies and illuminates it with his light; thus the one who has such a heart is blessed, because he sees God.”
This author admonishes, “Do not fear the flesh, nor love it. If you fear it, it will gain mastery over you; if you love it, it will devour and paralyze you.”84 Philip intends to follow Paul’s insight that for one person marriage may be the appropriate “diet,” for another, celibacy.
The great Christian ascetic Anthony, who lived in Egypt c. 250–355 C.E. and became a pioneer among the desert fathers, taught his spiritual heirs in monastic tradition to picture Satan as the most intimate enemy of all—the enemy we call our own self.
Philip ridicules such belief: Some said, “Mary conceived by the holy spirit.” They are in error. They do not know what they are saying; for when did a female ever conceive through a female?
As Philip sees it, Jesus, born of Mary and Joseph as his human parents, was reborn of the holy spirit, the feminine element of
the divine being (since the Hebrew term for spirit, Ruah, is feminine) and of the “Father in heaven,” whom Jesus urged his disciples to address in prayer (“Our Father, who art in heaven …”). Yet, the author adds, the very mention of a feminine spiritual power “is a great anathema to the Hebrews, who are the apostles, and apostolic people.”93
when we were Hebrews, we … had only our mother; but when we became Christians, we had both father and mother.94
Whoever is reborn of the heavenly Father and heavenly Mother becomes a whole person again, receiving back a part of the human self that had been lost in the beginning of time—“the spirit, the partner of one’s soul.”
What matters, apparently, is not so much what one does but the quality of one’s intention.
Instead of envisioning the power of evil as an alien force that threatens and invades human beings from outside, the author of Philip urges each person to recognize the evil within, and consciously eradicate it.
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. Through their agency Satan even now, and not earlier, has been seen to speak against God … the same God who has prepared eternal fire for every kind of apostasy.102
Justin himself praises those he calls Hebrews—that is, the ancient Israelites, revered ancestors of his own faith—but expresses condescension toward those of his contemporaries he calls not Hebrews but Jews for their “blindness” to God’s revelation and their “misunderstanding” of their own Scriptures.
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.
The faith that Christ has conquered Satan assures Christians that in their own struggles the stakes are eternal, and victory is certain.
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.
The words Matthew places in Jesus’ mouth characterize his opponents as people accursed, whom the divine judge has already consigned “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift (5:23–24).
You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your father in heaven.”
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
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.
Concluding this book, I hope that this research may illuminate for others, as it has for me, the struggle within Christian tradition between the profoundly human view that “otherness” is evil and the words of Jesus that reconciliation is divine.
