Elaine Pagel's "Origin of Satan"
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Posted by: Antonio H. ® 06/14/2002, 09:42:58 Author Profile Mail author

Elaine Pagels has offered an exciting and wondrous look at the years of Christianity's infancy. The trouble with your standing review is that it doesn't cover Pagels' exact findings. The Jews did indeed recognize "satan" [the word means "obstacle" or "obstruction"]-- Jews thought any angel could serve the Lord as a "satan". Later, the Jews came to see the "satan" as anyone opposed to Jewish Law [Halachah]. The Christians could not have pulled Satan out of a hat, but they did pull Satan out of Jewish folklore. In one case, Jewish teaching states that the Angel of Death once served as a "satan". But even in the book of Job there is a particularly adversarial "satan", who entices the Lord to test Job. Pagels does a marvelous, seamless job in showing how the "satan" was a weapon the Jews used against one another. Thus Christians in early times could use the "satan" as a term to describe anti-Christian Jews. They almost never identified pagans in this way, because, as Pagels points out, the pagans DID believe in the Lord in the first place. Thus the early Christians, having been expelled from Jewish life, began to blame the "satan" as manifested through these "apostate" Jews. They thought anyone who could not accept the Rabbi Y'shua as the Messiach was the "satan". The most important point Pagels drives home is that the "satan" in the Christian sense was originally nothing more than an adjective to describe an adversarial, oppressive person or group. Pagels makes a powerful case that early Christians established anti-Semitism as a way of surviving in their hostile Jewish environment. Thus "Satan entered into the Pharisees."

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