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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.
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.
Those who first elaborated such stories, as we shall see, most often used them to characterize what they charged was the “fall into sin” of human beings—which usually meant the dominant majority of their Jewish contemporaries.
As Satan became an increasingly important and personified figure, stories about his origin proliferated. One group tells how one of the angels, himself high in the heavenly hierarchy, proved insubordinate to his commander in chief and so was thrown out of heaven, demoted, and disgraced, an echo of Isaiah’s account of the fall of a great prince:
How are you fallen from heaven, day star, son of the dawn! How are you fallen to earth, conqueror of the nations! You said in your heart, “I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God; I will set my throne on high … I will ascend upon the high clouds.…” But you are brought down to darkness [or: the underworld, sheol], to the depths of the pit (Isa. 14:12–15). Nearly two and a half thousand years after Isaiah wrote, this luminous falling star, his n...
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Finally, an apocryphal version of the life of Adam and Eve gives a third account of angelic rebellion. In the beginning, God, having created Adam, called the angels together to admire his work and ordered them to bow down to their younger human sibling. Michael obeyed, but Satan refused, saying, “Why do you press me? I will not worship one who is younger than I am, and inferior. I am older than he is; he ought to worship me!” (Vita Adae et Evae 14:3).
problem of evil begins in sibling rivalry.
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.
Stories of Satan and other fallen angels proliferated in these troubled times, especially within those radical groups that had turned against the rest of the Jewish community and, consequently, concluded that others had turned against them—or (as they put it) against God.
Book of the Watchers, one of the apocryphal books that would become famous and influential, especially among Christians, by introducing the idea of a division in heaven.
It tells how the “watcher” angels, whom God appointed to supervise (“watch over”) the universe, fell from heaven.
The first describes how Semihazah, leader of the watchers, coerced two hundred other angels to join him in a pact to violate divine order by mating with human women.
Interwoven with this story is an alternate version, which tells how the archangel Azazel sinned by disclosing to human beings the secrets of metallurgy, a pernicious revelation that inspired men to make weapons and women to adorn themselves with gold, silver, and cosmetics. Thus the fallen angels and their demon offspring incited in both sexes violence, greed, and lust.
the author of Watchers, without discarding ethnic identity, insists on moral identity. It is not enough to be a Jew. One must also be a Jew who acts morally.
A third anonymous writer whose work is included in the First Book of Enoch is so preoccupied with internal division that he virtually ignores Israel’s alien enemies. This author has Enoch predict the rise of “a perverse generation,”
The latest section of the First Book of Enoch, the “Similitudes,” written about the time of Jesus, simply contrasts those who are righteous, who stand on the side of the angels, with those, both Jews and Gentiles, seduced by the satans.
The author of Jubilees is concerned instead with the conflicts over assimilation that divide Jewish communities internally, and he attributes these conflicts to that most intimate of enemies, whom he calls by many names, but most often calls Mastema (“hatred”), Satan, or Belial.
According to Jubilees, the angels’ fall spawned the giants, who sow violence and evil, and evil spirits, “who are cruel, and created to destroy”
Jubilees says that God assigned to each of the nations a ruling angel or spirit “so that they might lead them astray” (Jub. 15:31); hence the nations worship demons (whom Jubilees identifies with foreign gods).
For according to this revisionist writer, it is Mastema—not the Lord—who commands Abraham to kill his son, Isaac.
Like the Book of the Watchers, Jubilees warns that those who neglect God’s covenant are being seduced by the powers of evil, fallen angels.
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”
In their sacred books, such as the great Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, the brethren could read how God had given them the Prince of Light as their supernatural ally to help them contend against Satan, and against his human allies. The Prince of Light thou has appointed to come to our support: but Satan, the angel Mastema, thou hast created for the pit; he rules in darkness, and his purpose is to bring about evil and sin (1 QM 19:10–12).
Had Satan not already existed in Jewish tradition, the Essenes would have invented him.
They invoke Satan—or Beliar—to characterize the irreconcilable opposition between themselves and the “sons of darkness” in the war taking place simultaneously in heaven and on earth. They expect that soon God will come in power, with his holy angels, and finally overthrow the forces of evil and inaugurate the Kingdom of God.
Now, they insist, whoever wants to belong to the true Israel must join in a new covenant—the covenant of their own congregation.
Whoever applies to enter the desert community must first confess himself guilty of sin—guilty, apparently, of participating in Israel’s collective apostasy against God. Then the candidate begins several years of probation, during which he turns over his property to the community leaders and swears to practice sexual abstinence, along with ritual purity in everything he eats, drinks, utters, or touches.
A candidate who finally does gain admission is required, at his initiation ritual, to join together with the whole community to bless all who belong to the new covenant and ritually curse all who are not initiates, who belong to the “men of Beliar.” The leaders now reveal to the initiate the secrets of angelology, and according to Josephus, he must solemnly swear to “keep secret the names of the angels”
Essene community worship—like the Christian liturgy to this day—reaches its climax as the community on earth joins with angels in singing the hymn of praise that the angels sing in heaven (“Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts; heaven and earth are filled with thy glory”).
The Essene covenant, as we have seen, was extremely exclusive, restricted not only to Jews, who must be freeborn and male, but to those devout few who willingly joined the “new covenant.”
When they depict the struggle of the Prince of Light against the Prince of Darkness, they do not identify the Prince of Light with the archangel Michael, the angelic patron of Israel.40 Instead, they envision the Prince of Light as a universal energy contending against an opposing cosmic force, the Prince of Darkness. For the Essenes these two energies represent not only their own conflicts with their opponents but a conflict within every person, within the human heart itself:
the gospel of John presents the viewpoint of a radically sectarian group alienated from the Jewish community because they have been turned out of their home synagogues for claiming that Jesus is the Messiah. Like the Essenes, John speaks eloquently of the love among those who belong to God (John 10:14); and yet John’s fierce polemic against those he sometimes calls simply “the Jews” at times matches in bitterness that of the Essenes.
According to Paul, “the gospel” consisted of what he preached, which he summarized as follows: “that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures; that he was buried; and that he was raised on the third day” (1 Cor. 15:3–4). Although Paul preached in synagogues, he found his audience largely among Gentiles, most often among Gentiles attracted to Jewish congregations.
Paul sometimes invoked a “saying of the Lord.” Once he invoked Jesus’ authority to prohibit divorce (1 Cor. 7:10); another time he explained how Jesus had told his followers to ritually eat bread and drink wine “in order to manifest the Lord’s death, until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26).
Paul had no interest in Jesus’ earthly life, however, and none in collecting his sayings. But other Christians did begin to collect Jesus’ sayings and write them down.
The Secret Book of James, one of the many traditions that circulated after Jesus’ death, gives a stylized description of this process: The twelve disciples were all sitting together at one time and remembering what the savior said to each one of them, w...
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many people, not just “the twelve” enshrined in Christian tradition, gathered Jesus’ sayings into various collections. Most scholars agree that a collection of Jesus’ sayings, translated from the Aramaic he spoke into Greek, circulated widely during the f...
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gospels as diverse as Matthew and Luke, as well as the suppressed Gospel of Thomas, all quote sayings of Jesus in identical translation.
What Jesus actually taught often became a matter of bitter dispute, as we can see from the Gospel of Mary Magdalene,
By the late second century, certain church leaders began to denounce such teachings as heresy.
Although the complete text of Thomas, written in Coptic, probably dates to the third or fourth century C.E., the original probably was written in Greek, perhaps much earlier.
Helmut Koester has argued that the Gospel of Thomas contains a collection of sayings that predates the gospels of the New Testament.13 If the earliest of the New Testament gospels, the gospel of Mark, dates from about 70 C.E., the Gospel of Thomas, he argues, may date back a generation earlier. Although many scholars dispute Koester’s dating of Thomas,
Originally part of the sacred library of the oldest monastery in Egypt, these books were buried, apparently, around 370 C.E., after the archbishop of Alexandria ordered Christians all over Egypt to ban such books as heresy and demanded their destruction.
Irenaeus declared that just as there are only four principal winds, and four corners of the universe, and four pillars holding up the sky, so there can be only four gospels. Besides, he added, only the New Testament gospels were written by Jesus’ own disciples (Matthew and John) or their followers (Mark, disciple of Peter, and Luke, disciple of Paul).
Few New Testament scholars today agree with Irenaeus.
Irenaeus wanted to consolidate Christian groups threatened by persecution throughout the world. The gospels he endorsed helped institutionalize the Christian movement.
Those he denounced as heresy did not serve the purposes of institutionalization.
Some, on the contrary, urged people to seek direct access to God, unmediat...
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But in the Gospel of Thomas the “kingdom of God” is not an event expected to happen in history, nor is it a “place.” The author of Thomas seems to ridicule such views: Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘Lord, the kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you” (NHC II.32.19–24).
Here the kingdom represents a state of self-discovery: “Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father” (NHC II.32.25–33.5).
