In Pagels’s view this is the source of Christian anti-Semitism. The followers of Jesus, beginning with the Evangelists themselves, adopted the folk traditions that tell of Satan and other personal evil powers to denigrate their opponents and to justify hostility to - and later, mistreatment of - such opponents. In this way the first chapter previews the thesis of the book. “The subject of cosmic war serves primarily to interpret human relationships…For many readers of the gospels ever since the first century, the thematic opposition between God’s spirit and Satan has vindicated Jesus’ followers and demonized their enemies” (13). The Evangelists’ preoccupation - and indeed that of Jesus Himself - with supernatural beings such as angels and demons, and especially the Devil, is most important. Mark’s gospel is not history, but is rather eschatological prophecy.
She does not explicitly deny the concept of divine inspiration she simply ignores it. Pagels looks on the Scriptures as nothing more than human products. If either a Gospel or the putative Q source - which contains many of the references to Satan - is earlier than A.D. The Gospels present the work of the historic Jesus as a conflict between God and Satan, one that came to a preliminary climax on Calvary. 70), a dating accepted by many but far from all New Testament scholars. For this reason, it is necessary for Pagels to assume that all four Gospels are later than the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 1 In Pagels’s view, the war poisoned the relationship between the Jews and Jewish converts to Christianity and gave those converts the idea of identifying personal human adversaries - in this case, the other Jews - as servants of Satan. The chapter headings of her six chapters suggest the trend of her thinking: 1, “The Gospel of Mark and the Jewish War” 2, “The Social History of Satan: from the Hebrew Bible to the Pharisees” 3, “Matthew’s Campaign against the Pharisees: Deploying the Devil” 4, “Luke and John Claim Israel’s Legacy: The Split Widens” 5, “Satan’s Earthly Kingdom: Christians against Pagans” 6, “The Enemy Within: Demonizing the Heretics.”Ĭhapter 1 begins with a discussion of the role of Jewish historian and Roman collaborator Flavius Josephus, who recorded the events of the Jewish Wars of A.D 66-73.
As she indicates in her introduction, her interest in the Prince of Darkness was motivated by a desire to demonstrate how Christians have developed and utilized this mysterious figure to identify their opponents, “whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan” (p. Professor Elaine Pagels, well-known for her contributions to the study of early Christian-era Gnostic movements and documents, has produced a gracefully written study of the development and utilization of one of the prominent figures of Christian literature and theology - “the Adversary,” the Diabolos, or Satan.
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