Last week, I read Pagels’ book The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics. According to Pagels, the idea of Satan as a malevolent supernatural human-like creature evolved over several centuries. Satan was at first merely a messenger of God. Then Satan became a fallen angel, a heavenly being who once enjoyed the favor of God but was then rejected due to insubordination. Satan was a kind of warning for Jews because he reflected their own situation. They believed they were in a covenantal relationship with God, and they believed God would bless them so long as they fulfilled their end of the covenant, but if they were insubordinate, they, too, could be rejected like Satan.
Eventually, Satan became a kind of rival, a leader of an army against God, and the army consisted of both supernatural and human soldiers. An individual was either on the side of God and righteousness or with Satan. This duality closely resembled another significant religion in the region, Zoroastrianism. It was this vision of a cosmic war between good and evil that the Orthodox Christians adopted.
The earliest Christians were, of course, Jews, and the Orthodox Christians first used their cosmic war leitmotif against fellow Jews who rejected their message. Their demonization made it into the New Testament canon, and it should be noted that the canon contains the writings the Orthodox Christians favored. They suppressed other points of view within the early Christian movement. The Gospels of the New Testament placed more blame for Jesus’ execution on his Jewish adversaries than the Romans, and the Gospel writers accused the Jews of being under the influence of Satan. Gospel writers paint an almost benign portrait of Pontius Pilate. But unlike Jesus, Pontius Pilate did leave a historical footprint, and it’s less than benign. Even ancient Roman writers viewed Pilate as ruthless and tyrannical. Moreover, crucifixion was a Roman form of execution, and the Romans regularly killed those suspected of sedition in this way throughout the empire. It was their way of keeping locals in check. If you challenged Roman authority in any way, you would be summarily dispatched. If Jesus was a real person, and if he did go about the countryside preaching to large crowds and urging them to question tradition and the status quo, the Romans would have more than likely viewed him as a troublemaker, and it’s likely they would have killed him without giving it much thought, just as they had killed thousands and thousands of others who dared to speak out.
Pagels speculates that the singling out of the Jews in the New Testament and the claim they are on the wrong side of the cosmic war is an expression, by and large, of a sectarian conflict—one group of Jews upset with another group of Jews. However, Christianity spread and became a separate religion with adherents who were mostly gentile. When this happened, the accusations of Satanic influence in the Gospels become the grounds for anti-Semitism.
By the late second century, Christianity had spread all over the Mediterranean, as far as Spain and northern Africa. By then, their primary rivals were not Jews but pagans, and rather than dismiss pagan gods as being merely false, the Christians incorporated them into their cosmic war. The Christians claimed these gods were really warriors in Satan’s army and their followers had been seduced by these demonic forces.
There were a number of Christian writings floating around these far-flung groups. Some of which were contradictory. So the Orthodox Christians began to favor certain writings over others. Over a period of time, this is how the New Testament canon that we have today was formed. These Orthodox Christians were interested in establishing a cohesive formalized church with specific rules and rituals. Of course, they saw themselves as the leaders of this emerging institution, and they chose the writings that reflected their viewpoint and underscored their authority.
Many of the other early Christian writings not only contradicted the Orthodox version, they were not conducive in establishing a formalized church. Some were, in fact, quite odd. Some of the manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi invert the Old Testament so that the God of the Old Testament becomes the devil and the serpent in the Garden of Eden becomes the true God, and as if Genesis wasn’t strange enough, they add other peculiar stories to it. But other writings are intriguing. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas rejects the cosmic war between good and evil. The author of the Gospel of Thomas even rejects the idea that Jesus’ divinity was unique. The author claims that we are all the children of God, just as Jesus, and we must look inward to discover our own divinity. The author of the Gospel of Thomas claims that he is revealing the “hidden” teachings of Jesus. They are hidden because in this version of Christianity, the disciples didn’t understand what Jesus was trying to tell them. When Jesus spoke of the coming the Kingdom of Heaven, the disciples assumed he meant a historical event, but Jesus was talking about the world being transformed for an individual after the completion of an inward spiritual journey. In this version of the religion, you will be in heaven at the very moment you realize your connection to the divine. When this happens, you will be transformed, and you will act accordingly. There are no rules or rituals, no creeds, nothing formal or established or anything to be regulated by authority figures. Just you and your experience of God within yourself.
The Gnostic Christian Valentinus taught that God generally worshiped by the Jews and Christians was a kind of anthropomorphic projecting and that the true God was more mysterious and harder to contemplate. He believed that God was neither male nor female but was the source of both energies, so there was no reason to insist women remain subordinate to males. He rejected the idea that good and evil were so easily and clearly delineated, and he advised his followers to do as they will so long as they act in love. However, he also warned them to remember that they are capable of self-deception, so they must guard against fooling themselves into believing their purely selfish acts are true expressions of love.
The Orthodox Christians were having none of this, of course. They demonized the “heretics” and claimed that Satan had seduced them. Church Fathers such as Tertullian even refused to debate them. According to them, they were the representatives of the truth and anyone, even fellow Christians, who disagreed with them were part of Satan’s army. They demanded that these other Christians be shunned and they insisted their writings should be destroyed.
I think the ultimate joke is on the Orthodox Christians. Their church fragmented anyway. Many Christians think for themselves. Many have rejected the cosmic war. Many view Jesus’ miraculous birth and resurrection as symbolic. Many Christians think of their religion as an inward spiritual journey that culminates in discovering their own connection with the divine. Many refuse to believe that non-Christians or “heretics” are part of a satanic army. Many believe that ethics are often complicated, grey and situational. Many believe that their God transcends our understanding and that our talk of God is anthropomorphic. And even some of those early non-orthodox Christian writings they tried so hard to eradicate have resurfaced.
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