The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics by Pagels Elaine

Author:Pagels, Elaine [Pagels, Elaine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307807366
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2011-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

By the end of the gospel, Jesus’ epiphany will have accomplished in human society what God accomplished cosmologically in creation: the separation of light from darkness—that is, of the “sons of light” from the offspring of darkness and the devil. Having first placed the story of Jesus within this grand cosmological frame, John then sets it entirely within the dynamics of the world of human interaction, so that “the story of Jesus in the gospel is all played out on earth.”9 The frame, nevertheless, informs the reader that both Jesus’ coming and all his human relationships are elements played out in a supernatural drama between the forces of good and evil.

Casting the struggle between good and evil as that between light and darkness, John never pictures Satan, as the other gospels do, appearing as a disembodied being. At first glance, then, the image of Satan seems to have receded; the German scholar Gustave Hoennecke goes so far as to claim that “in John, the idea of the devil is completely absent.”10 More accurate, however, is Raymond Brown’s observation that John, like the other gospels, tells the whole story of Jesus as a struggle with Satan that culminates in the crucifixion.11 Although John never depicts Satan as a character on his own, acting independently of human beings, in John’s gospel it is people who play the tempter’s role.

All of the three “temptation scenes” in Luke and Matthew occur in John, but Satan does not appear directly. Instead, as Raymond Brown has shown, Satan’s role is taken first by “the people,” members of Jesus’ audience, and finally by his own brothers.12 For example, Matthew and Luke show Satan challenging Jesus to claim earthly power (Matt. 4:8–9; Luke 4:5–6); but according to John, this challenge occurs when “the people were about to come and take him by force to make him king” (6:15). Here, as in the other gospels, Jesus resists the temptation, eludes the crowd, and escapes. In another temptation, Matthew and Luke, following Q, relate that the devil challenged Jesus to prove his divine authority by making “these stones into bread.” But John says that those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles—and in particular his multiplication of five loaves into many—then challenged him to perform another miracle as further proof of his messianic identity. Like the devil who quotes the Scriptures in Luke and Matthew, “the people” in John quote them as they urge Jesus to produce bread miraculously:

So they said to him, “What sign do you do, that we may see and believe you? What work do you perform? Our fathers ate manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat’ ” (6:30–31).

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