Thomas, Pagels remarks, “teaches that when one comes to know oneself, at the deepest level, one simultaneously knows God as the source of one’s being,” and one thus becomes an identical twin to Jesus. She finds substantial palliation of its unfortunate demonizing tendency in ancient gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas, in which the kingdom of God is not a place or an event but, as she puts it, “a state of self-discovery” or “transformed consciousness” brought about by the attainment of self-knowledge. To Pagels, this cumulative evidence of orthodox Christian association of Jews, pagans, and heretics with Satan compels her central thesis: “Satan” is the ancient Jewish and Christian name for the human “other,” for people who are different from ourselves and pose a challenge to our identity.ĭespite this grim picture, however, and despite her abundant personal distaste for orthodox theology, Pagels is not ready to give up on Christianity. who had rejected God’s messiah” and thus proved themselves “insane or possessed of demons.” Mark tends, in fact, “to minimize the role of the Romans and to place increasing blame instead upon Jesus’ Jewish enemies,” and he does so, Pagels observes, by “plac the story of Jesus within the context of God’s struggle with Satan.”

Thus, the New Testament Gospel of Mark, a book written (according to Pagels) in the aftermath of the great 1st-century Jewish revolt against imperial Rome, works hard to establish that “Jesus’ followers had no quarrel with the Romans” rather, their quarrel was “with the Jewish leaders. The irony is that in the next turn of events, which saw the emergence of Christianity, the Jews themselves would come to be identified with the antagonist, and the Christian minority would assume the mantle of the righteous remnant allied with the faithful Jewish God. These dissident Jews projected their opponents into the heavens, and interpreted their own struggles as merely the terrestrial manifestation of a cosmic war between the God of Israel and His demonic antagonist. If the ancient idea of a chosen people laid the groundwork, Pagels writes, it was Jewish sectarians of the late-Second Temple period who developed the biblical Satan into the familiar devil of Western tradition.

This process of selection Pagels repeatedly connects to the anthropological theory that “the world view of most peoples consists essentially of two pairs of binary oppositions: human/not human and we/they,” with the result that people “dehumanize enemies, especially in wartime.” Nevertheless, she detects the origins of a figure somewhat foreshadowing the Satan of the Christians as early as the book of Genesis, when God singles out Abraham and his descendants for an especially exalted destiny and a special blessing. But who is Satan? In the Hebrew Bible, Pagels acknowledges, “Satan” refers only to someone in an adversarial posture and not to a fallen angel.

The origin of satan by elaine pagels