The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels

At first glance these stories of Satan may seem to have little in common. Yet they all agree on one thing: that this greatest and most dangerous enemy did not originate, as one might expect, as an outside, an alien, or a stranger. Satan is not the distant enemy but the intimate enemy--one's trusted colleague, close associate, brother. He is the kind of person on whose loyalty and good will the well-being of family and society depend--but one who turns unexpectedly jealous and hostile. Whichever version of his origin one chooses, then, and there are many, all depict Satan as an intimate enemy--the attribute that qualifies him so well to express conflict among Jewish groups. Those who asked, "How could God's own angel become his enemy?" were thus asking, in effect, "How could one of us become one of them?"

Elaine Pagels' thoughtful and comprehensive The Origin of Satan is a great companion to another book I read this year, Miguel de la Torre and Albert Hernandez's The Quest for the Historical Satan: De la Torre and Hernandez trace the conception of Satan from the early church up to the present, but here Pagels (with some overlap) lays out the roots of the idea of Satan, first in the Hebrew Bible and then in the Gospels. Like De la Torre and Hernandez, she makes clear something I think would surprise a lot of Christians: the idea of Satan as a literal character with his own agency and designs on the Earth is not a fundamental part of the Hebrew Bible, and comes from the later Christian tradition, and even the Gospels are not unanimous in promoting the idea.

So where does the idea of Satan come from? Both Pagels and the authors of The Quest for the Historical Satan start with what I imagine is intuitive for anyone who doesn't believe in a literalized Satan: Satan is the image of the other, used to characterize Christians' political, cultural, and religious enemies. Pagels' most significant contribution to this intuition, I think, is her observation that in both testaments the figure of Satan is most often associated not with foreign enemies like Babylon or Rome, but what she calls the intimate enemy: a competing faction within one's own in-group.

For the writers of the Old Testament, that means accommodationist Jews who favor cooperation with Rome over the Seleucids; for the writers of the New Testament, it's the Pharisees who oppose the Jesus movement within Judaism. (I'm oversimplifying; Pagels does an expert job of outlining the different viewpoints of each Gospel author and showing how each of them associates his own particular factional enemy with the Satan figure, and it's not always the Pharisees.) It's no wonder, then, that the idea of a literalized Satan comes into full bloom among the early fathers who are interested in formalizing church doctrine and defining orthodoxy against heresy. (Here Pagels' expertise in the Gnostic gospels of Nag Hammadi is invaluable.)

I've been reading these books because I'm writing a novel set during the Satanic Panic of the late 80's and early 90's. What was most useful about The Origin of Satan, for me, is that it answers a question I've had: if Satan is an image of the Other, why is it that the Satanic Panic focused primarily on white scapegoats? Why didn't it manifest more often as a fear of, say, immigrant religious practices? But like the authors of both the Old and New Testament, the purveyors of the Satanic Panic reserved their greatest fear for the enemy within: the mother, the daycare worker, the teenage son. The Panic spread the fear of the Satanist down the street, the person who looks normal but engages in ritual sacrifice behind closed doors. Suddenly this aspect of the Panic makes more sense in light of Pagels' observation that Satan is the intimate enemy, the fallen angel.