Satan in the Evolution of Christianity
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The Persian traditions of dualism and apocalyptic, no longer prominent in Judaism, passed into Christianity, and still characterize the religion today. Christianity is more true to Zoroastrianism than Rabbinic Judaism, though both have the same roots. Here we discuss Christianity in relation to the evolution of the idea of Satan. Satan or the Devil, a …read more…
Christianity Satan in the Evolution of Christianity
Rabbinic Judaism was a different religion from what Judaism had been originally, and even different fromPharisaism, except that it remained liberal in outlook. Rabbinism bases God’s role in a personal struggle withevil on the assistance that God has to offer. Yet, the Jewish Qabala, which emerged about 1150 in Provence,had retained the dualism of the Jewish religion before Jamna, where Rabbinic Judaism was devised. In theSefiroth of the Qabala, ten good principles are set against ten wicked ones. The Rabbis had not succeeded ingetting rid of Satan. The form of Judaism that was closer to the original was Essenism, and it becameChristianity. The Persian traditions of dualism and apocalyptic, no longer prominent in Judaism, passed intoChristianity, and still characterise the religion today. Christianity is more true to Zoroastrianism than RabbinicJudaism, though both have the same roots. Christianity in relation to the evolution of the idea of Satan. © Dr M D MageeContents Updated: Friday, 20 February 2004A Religion of ConflictA Cosmic BattleThe Jewish SatanThe Persian ReligionEssenesGentilesTitles and CodeJohn’s GospelSatan as the Jewish GodPaulChristian MartyrdomHow Church Fathers Saw SatanThe Devil in the Dark AgesThe Demiurgos Today
A Religion of Conflict
Satan or the Devil, a negative god, is an important part of Christianity, although quite why is hard to fathom. God is described as almighty but is not almighty enough to get rid of His evil opponent until the end of time. The reason is quite plain, although no Christiansrealize it. Satan is
Time
. Time is the great corrupter, eventually the ultimate corrupter of life, because given time, all life dies. The punishment God inflicted on the human racethrough the disobedience of Adam and Eve was death, and the promised reward forobedience to the Christian creed is eternal life. Yet eternity can only be experienced in a world without time, and so it assumes the cessation of time. The supposed kingdom of God is a place of complete perfection, in which nothing corrupts. But time is the corrupterand so time has ceased in the Christian heaven.In this one paragraph, the concept of the Devil has been explained. Why go on? Christiansnever like answers that explain things. They always like answers that are mysterious, andleave the faithful still puzzling. They attribute this to the wonder of God, and is the reasonthey hate science. The Devil has been the most important aspect of Christian discipline fortwo millennia, and in most of this time, his threat was so fearful that the only salvationfrom it was to hide behind Christ, like an infant hiding behind its grandmother’s skirts. Inother words the threat of Satan was far more real than the salvation of Jesus, even thoughthe Christian was told that Satan was really cowed in defeat by the resurrection of Christ.Latterly, many churches have been embarrassed by the notion of such a triumphant Devil.They realise that God ought to be able to squash Satan like a troublesome mosquito, andfree the world of his machinations, but choses not to do so. This is not good news for
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Christians and so the Devil is not spoken of as much as he once was.The inclination of the more advanced churches to reject the Devil as an actually existingsupernatural principle of evil in favour of being just a symbol of the wickedness in men,though it seems sensible, does not incline them also to reject Jesus as simply a symbol of goodness. The point of the myth would be that goodness struggles and seems to lose butmuch particular good is done in the struggle and goodness eventually re-emerges to liveon with a greater good coming out of it. Christians are now too deeply attached to theirdidactic myth being a historical supernatural fact for them now to reject it for the moresensible and more meaningful interpretation. They will reject the Devil as being toomedieval, too primitive and too difficult to sustain when God is supposed to be utterly good and omnipotent. Jesus Christ cannot be rejected, though. He really is the son of God.He is not just a Harvey the Rabbit for incompletely developed mentalities as some say! NoChristians can contemplate all the posters outside churches saying, “Jesus Lives!” being wrong.The excessive spallation of Christian unity into myriads of sects has given Satan a bit of living room, particularly American fundamentalists who continue to make a lot of Satan.They like to promote military and murderous ideas of God’s vengeance against His enemy and His Satanic supporters, namely anyone who disagrees with them or that they don’tlike. These people are dangerous and perhaps insane, and by any just reckoning, are theSatanic ones, they are so intolerant of everyone else. They illustrate the problem of Christianity from the outset. It began as intolerance and remains intolerant at its corestill. The reason is that it was devised as a religion of conflict from the start.
A Cosmic Battle
It arose from the treatment of Jews by the Romans from 63 BC until 136 AD. Jews weretreated much as the Arabs are treated by the Americans today. It is one of God’s jokes, nodoubt, that the Herodians of today are the Israelis who claim to be the descendants of theoriginal Jewish inhabitants dispersed by the Romans in 136. Occupied people have few rights but have to be grateful to their oppressors for ruling them for no more reward thantheir natural assets. The people are treated with contempt by the imperial power, and any lack of gratitude by them is rewarded with a harsh and heavy hand. Despite the cruel biblical gloss that Jesus was the enemy of the Jews and the friend of the Romans, thetruth is revealed in the last book of the Christian bible,
Revelation
. Rome is allegorized asa Great harlot and a Satanic beast harassing the poor Christians just as it had the Jews.The earliest gospel,
Mark
, has the innocent Jesus facing up to the Romans and theircollaborators among the Jews, the priesthood and the Sanhedrin. The myth is depicted asGood versus Evil, Christ versus the Devil, and it begins in
Mark
straight after Jesus’s baptism when the spirit of God in the shape of a dove descended upon him from heaven,denoting his commission by God as the saviour on earth. For forty days, the cosmic battleof Good and Evil raged in the wilderness, standing for the forty years Essenes consideredit really to have been raging until then. The beginning of the ministry of Jesus wasthought to be the climax of the battle.The gospels tell the story of this final battle in the cosmic war of Good and Evil. Jesus wasalways victorious against the Devils he met, and plainly expected God’s heavenly armies toarrive, as prophesied, from the Mount of Olives to begin the purification of the world of Evil. Jesus thought the corrupt world would end the night he sat till dawn praying in theGarden of Gethsemane. It did not, and he was crucified, an apparent victory for the Devil, but one which his disciples then turned into a victory for God. Jesus rose from the dead,the victor. A victory over death was a victory over the inevitability of time—a victory overSatan. Time and death did not inevitably win. Christians believe it still, 2000 years later.
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The Jewish Satan
The popular Christian name for the principle of Evil that Jesus fought against is Satan, aJewish word that means “an opponent”, and written as a proper name means “TheOpponent”. In the Jewish scriptures, this “opponent” does not usually appear with aninitial capital letter except conventionally in
Job
. God’s “satans” are His assistants sent tooppose humanity for their disobedience or vanity, but naturally they were not God’sopponents, and nor is the one in
Job
, although there he seems to be successfully manipulating God.The Satan of
Job
is a son of God, interpreted by contemporary theologians as an angel,there being only one god, but originally sons of God were gods. God was El, the Canaanitehigh god, and his sons were the various powers of nature and the senior gods of the various nations of the Canaanite race. In this scheme, Jews considered Yehouah to be thegod of the nations of Israel and Judah, although the word Israel seems to mean “we arethe seed (or sons) of El”, declaring them to be the direct children of the high god. Anyway,the Satan of
Job
has the task of roaming the earth, a pun on the word “satan” which,however, suggests a link with the spies or prophets who commonly infiltrated the peoplelooking and listening for dissent. The Assyrians and Persians had such people, anddoubtless the Romans too. Paul was one. From his observations of humanity, Satan doesnot trust that Job, an apparently utterly devout man, is sincere, and urges God to test him,confident that Job will quickly succumb to the tests. God agrees, and Satan tests Job tothe limits of human endurance—doubtless a useful precedent for the Christian torturersof witches and heretics in the European middle ages. Satan is here an opponent of humanity, but can only do what God permits him to do.Perhaps a more significant mention of Satan is in
Zechariah
3:1-2, where the opponentstands up for the natives of Yehud who were left behind when the leaders of Judah weresent into Babylonian exile. These Am ha Eretz were treated as strangers by the “returners”to the land, the Persian colonists. So, the genuine Judahites were depicted as theopponents of the false Judahites sent in by the imperial power, and proof of it was thattheir god was Satan, not Yehouah. Job is considered to be a Phœnician work, andPhœnicia and Yehud became politically part of the same entity when they were joinedtogether in the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara just about the time when the temple state of Yehud was set up.The internal division within the population of the artificial state continued unabating withramifications that will never be clear. The deportation of foreigners into the small country having the authority of rulers caused an on-going dissension between them and thepeople who had lived there before. The Edomites were an Arab people displaced causing along-term enmity. The Am ha Eretz were refused full citizenship except under the termsof the colonists. Some separated out eventually forming the Samaritan sect. Yehud became a fractious and distrusting society, and continued to split politically for centuries.Mutual hatred became a norm.The defeat of the Persians by the Greeks introduced new reasons for dissension anddistrust. The opponents of the temple priesthood could use modernisation as a reason forattacking the Persian colonists. Alexander’s generals were spreading Greek ways in thecultural change now called Hellenisation. But initially the Ptolemies were favourable tothe temple, and poured aid and assistance into it, as a barrier against the Seleucids,adding substantially to Jewish myths—including the Exodus from Egypt—and translatingthem into Hebrew and Greek. The Seleucids then took over Palestine, and the situation was reversed. The old priesthood associated with the Egyptians were surely evicted, andnew Greek-inclined priests, later called Sadducees, were installed. The traditional Persianparties were incensed, defended the traditional forms of the religion, and eventually rebelled in the Maccabean revolt. It is presented as a national uprising against an
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oppressive occupying power, the Seleucid Greeks of Babylonia, but was at least equally acivil war.The rebels, the religious traditionalists, eventually won the war but only by allyingthemselves with Rome, the new Hellenistic force that had arisen in the west, that hadcunningly used the Jewish rebels to undermine the power of the Seleucid Greeks of Babylonia to further Roman geopolitical ambitions. The Hasmoneans effectively were aRoman dependency and had to adopt Roman ways, gravely disappointing theirtraditionalist supporters, the Hasids. To secure their own power and, more important, toassure the Romans that the country could not revert to favouring Roman enemies to theeast, the Hasmoneans took the priesthood for themselves, completely reversing thesupposed purpose of the revolt which was to return the priesthood to the traditionalpriestly families, and thus re-establish the religion as it was. The inevitable result of this was further spallation in Jewish society. The Hasids split into a conservative faction and aprogressive faction. It is likely that the Hasidic party had the nickname, Pharisees,meaning Persians, and the conservative faction, disillusioned, split from them in disgust becoming the Essenes, apparenly meaning the Salvationists. So, in the second century BC,the main philosophies of the Jews, described over 200 years later by Josephus had beenestablished, and so too had the other sects and dissenting peoples met in the
NewTestament
, except the Herodians who were yet to come.
The Persian Religion
What has it all to do with Satan? The Persian religion was the very source of the idea of Satan. It was dualist in having two opposed gods, a Good Spirit and a Wicked Spirit—Ahuramazda and Ahriman. The colonists had been sent into Yehud with the task of moulding the old and popular Canaanite god, Yehouah, into a type of Ahuramazda, a godacceptable to the Persians in being a universal god of obedience and good order. That was why the local people, the Am ha Eretz, could have no say in the “restoring” of the worshipof the old god. It was not the old worship restored but a new god worshipped under theold name and with a purpose that suited the imperialists. The line they took towards thelocal people was that God had abandoned them as apostates, idolaters and sinners! They were the opponents of anything that God desired, and the explanation of that was thattheir god was the opponent god or Satan. Just as Ahriman opposed Ahuramazda, so toodid Satan oppose Yehouah. Those who stood out against the Persian colonists were thehuman agents or dupes of the opponent god, Satan, against Yehouah.Peter Stanford, a Catholic writer (
The Devil
, 1996), accepts that the Persian religion hasinfluenced Judaism and Christianity, but claims “the time scale allows for two way traffic,and it is never entirely clear who is influencing whom”. It is the usual special pleading thatought bluntly to be called what it really is—lying. The time scale he means is the biblicalone that puts Moses some time in 1400 BC, 600 years before there is any sign of a state inSamaria other than Canaanite city states. The epic of Moses was not actually written in itspresent form until about 300 BC. Christians and Jews think the “return from exile”happened under the Persian king, Cyrus, about 540 BC. It actually happened about420 BC, but both dates are long before
Exodus
and
Numbers
were written, so the Jewishreligion depends on the Persian one and not the reverse. Not only that, it is quite clear who influenced whom from the coherence of the respective theologies. Persian theology iscoherent, whereas the Jewish one is full of puzzles and gaps that the Persian religion cananswer. The Persian religion was incompletely transferred to Yehud—the task permanently stopped by the defeat of Persia by Alexander.The need of the Persians was for a universal god, whereas when the Hasmoneans securedthe free state of Judah in the second century, they needed a national god. Moreover, anational god had to be able to succeed at anything, so could not possibly have an equalgod that could foil him at anything! The dualist idea did not suit the Hasmonaeans,
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