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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |