The Origin of Satan Quotes

“Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of Christianity I find disturbing.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“Instead, as we shall see, such figures emerged from the turmoil of first-century Palestine, the setting in which the Christian movement began to grow.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“For example, in opposition to the rumor that Jesus was born illegitimate, Matthew and his predecessors found vindication for their faith in Jesus in Isaiah 7:14. There the Lord promises to give Israel a “sign” of the coming of God’s salvation. Apparently Matthew knew the Hebrew Bible in its Greek translation, where he would have read the following: “The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son; and shall call his name Immanuel—God with us” (Isaiah 7:14). In the original Hebrew, the passage had read “young woman” (almah), apparently describing an ordinary birth. But the translation of almah into the Greek parthenos (“virgin”), as many of Jesus’ followers read the passage, confirmed their conviction that Jesus’ birth, which unbelievers derided as sordid, actually was a miraculous “sign.”21 Thus Matthew revises Mark’s story by saying that the spirit descended upon Jesus not at his baptism but at the moment of his conception. So, Matthew says, Jesus’ mother “was discovered to have a child in her womb through the holy spirit” (1:18); and God’s angel explains to Joseph that the child “was conceived through the holy spirit.” Jesus’ birth was no scandal, Matthew says, but a miracle—one that precisely fulfills Isaiah’s ancient prophecy.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“Christians like Justin Martyr, one of the fathers of the church, shared such aspirations for self-mastery. Justin wholeheartedly admired Christians who practiced renunciation and celibacy; he even singled out for special praise a young convert in Alexandria who had petitioned Felix, the governor,asking that permission might be given to a surgeon to castrate him. For the surgeons had said they were forbidden to do this without the governor’s permission. And when Felix absolutely refused to sign such a permission, the young man remained celibate. (Justin, First Apology 29.) Origen, also revered as a father of the church, had been so determined to win his struggle against passion that as a young man he had castrated himself, apparently without asking anyone’s permission, least of all the governor’s.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“[...] When Israelite writers excoriated their fellow Jews in mythological terms, the images they chose were usually not the animalistic or monstrous ones they regularly applied to their foreign enemies. Instead of Rahab, Leviathan, or “the dragon,” most often they identified their Jewish enemies with an exalted, if treacherous, member of the divine court whom they called the satan. The satan is not an animal or monster but one of God’s angels, a being of superior intelligence and status; apparently the Israelites saw their intimate enemies not as beasts and monsters but as superhuman beings whose superior qualities and insider status could make them more dangerous than the alien enemy.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“The narratives that we know as the New Testament gospels were written by certain followers of Jesus who lived through the war, and who knew that many of their fellow Jews regarded them as a suspect minority. They wrote their own accounts of some of the momentous events surrounding the war, and the part that Jesus played in events preceding it, hoping to persuade others of their interpretation. We cannot fully understand the New Testament gospels until we recognize that they are, in this sense, wartime literature.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“Conversion from paganism to Judaism or Christianity, I realized, meant, above all, transforming one’s perception of the invisible world. To this day, Christian baptism requires a person to solemnly “renounce the devil and all his works” and to accept exorcism. The pagan convert was baptized only after confessing that all spirit beings previously revered—and dreaded—as divine were actually only “demons”—hostile spirits contending against the One God of goodness and justice, and against his armies of angels.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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. 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.

”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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. [...] But Tertullian insists that making choices is evil, since choice destroys group unity.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“Celsus accuses Christians of “inventing a rebellion” (stasis, meaning “sedition”) in heaven to justify rebellion here on earth.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“George Nickelsburg points out that from the time of Alexander the Great, Greek kings had claimed to be descended from gods as well as from human women; the Greeks called such hybrid beings heroes. But their Jewish subjects, with their derisive tale of Semihazah, may have turned such claims of divine descent against the foreign usurpers.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“What mattered primarily, these rigorists claimed, was not whether one was Jewish—this they took for granted—but rather “which of us [Jews] really are on God’s side” and which had “walked in the ways of the nations,” that is, adopted foreign cultural and commercial practices. [...]

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.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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.” Here this angel, the satan, comes with the rest of the heavenly host on the day appointed for them to “present themselves before the Lord.” When the Lord asks whence he comes, the satan answers, “From roaming on the earth, and walking up and down on it.” Here the storyteller plays on the similarity between the sound of the Hebrew satan and shût, the Hebrew word “to roam,” suggesting that the satan’s special role in the heavenly court is that of a kind of roving intelligence agent, like those whom many Jews of the time would have known—and detested—from the king of Persia’s elaborate system of secret police and intelligence officers. Known as “the king’s eye” or “the king’s ear,” these agents roamed the empire looking for signs of disloyalty among the people.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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” — 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.” 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. 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.

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.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“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. The Essenes never admitted Gentiles to their movement. But the followers of Jesus did— cautiously and provisionally at first, and against the wishes of some members. 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.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of Christianity I find disturbing. During the past several years, rereading the gospels, I was struck by how their vision of supernatural struggle both expresses conflict and raises it to cosmic dimensions. This research, then, reveals certain fault lines in Christian tradition that have allowed for the demonizing of others throughout Christian history—fault lines that go back nearly two thousand years to the origins of the Christian movement. While writing this book I often recalled a saying of Søren Kierkegaard: "An unconscious relationship is more powerful than a conscious one."
For nearly two thousand years, for example, many Christians have taken for granted that Jews killed Jesus and the Romans were merely their reluctant agents, and that this implicates not only the perpetrators but (as Matthew insists) all their progeny in evil. Throughout the centuries, countless Christians listening to the gospels absorbed, along with the quite contrary sayings of Jesus, the association between the forces of evil and Jesus’ Jewish enemies. Whether illiterate or sophisticated, those who heard the gospel stories, or saw them illustrated in their churches, generally assumed both their historical accuracy and their religious validity.
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.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics