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Authors: Elaine Pagels

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everyone to “submit to the priests,” accepting the penance that

the priest will impose for their disobedience, “bending the knees

of your hearts, and bowing to [the priests’] superiority” (1

Clement
17:1). Perhaps hoping that those who had refused to

obey would now submit, Clement avoids associating them with

Satan, as later leaders would do with more entrenched dissidents.

We do not know the outcome of this dispute; none of the

opponents’ responses survive. But during the second century, as

such controversies plagued churches throughout the empire,

church leaders who identified themselves with the proper

“apostolic succession” widely copied Clement’s letter and

circulated it throughout the Roman world, along with several

other writings they included in a collection called “the apostolic

fathers of the church.” We know little about the process from

which this collection emerged; but we can see that the writings

it includes all tend to emphasize the growing authority of the

clergy and enjoin adherence to detailed and practical moral codes.

Most Christians apparently accepted, along with the emerging

“canon” of the Scriptures, this second “canon” of church

tradition. Several writings included in the “apostolic fathers”

sought to revise and, in effect, domesticate for the new influx of

converts such radical sayings of Jesus as these: “You cannot serve

God and money” (Matt. 6:24); “Give to whoever asks you”

(Matt. 5:42);

154 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

“Sell all that you have and give . . . the money to the poor;

then come, and follow me” (Luke 18:22). Included in the

“apostolic fathers,” for example, is a famous Christian handbook

called the
Teaching of the Twelve Apostles
, which paraphrases

Jesus’ primary teaching as follows: “Love God and your

neighbor; and whatever you do not want done to yourself, do

not do to others.” Weaving together sayings from the Sermon on

the Mount and canny advice, the
Teaching
qualifies Jesus’

categorical command “Give to everyone who asks of you” by

adding, “Let your money sweat in your hand until you know to

whom you are giving it.”10 The
Teaching
adapts and expands

some of the Ten Commandments, declaring that “the Second

Commandment of the apostles’ teaching is this: ‘You shall not

kill; you shall not commit adultery,’ ” and specifying that this

means in practice that “you [masc.] shall not have intercourse

with young boys; you shall not commit fornication; you shall

not steal; you shall not procure abortions; you shall not kill

newborns.”11

Another writing included in the “apostolic fathers,” the
Letter

of Barnabas
, attributes similar moral teaching to Paul's

companion and fellow preacher.
Barnabas
, like the
Teaching
,

invokes a traditional Jewish teaching of the “two ways”—the

“way of light,”consisting of a list of actions that are good, and

the “way of darkness,” consisting of evil actions.12
Barnabas

interprets the Ten Commandments for Christians as requiring at

least forty specific injunctions, including warnings against

“arrogance of power” and “advocating in behalf of the rich”

while denying justice to the poor, as well as the same sexual sins

denounced in the
Teaching
: “[male] intercourse with boys,”

“fornication” (which probably means extramarital sexual activity

of any kind), adultery, and abortion.13 Thus
Barnabas
outlines a

moral code that would dominate Christian teaching for

generations, even millennia, to come.

Barnabas
sets these contrasting ways of life in the context of

God’s spirit contending against Satan during “the present evil

time.”14 Reminding Christians that “the spirit of God has been

poured out on you from the Lord,”15
Barnabas
urges them to

exercise moral vigilance, so that “the devil may have no opportu-

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 155

nity to enter” the church, even though “the days are evil, and the

evildoer is still in power.”16 While encouraging Christians to

accept a modified version of Jewish ethical attitudes and

practices,
Barnabas
warns Christians not to fall into the ways of

the Jews, who, he says, “transgressed because an evil angel was

leading them into error.”17 The new people of God are to “shun

the way of darkness” and embrace the “way of light,” since “over

the one is set the light-bearing angels of God, but over the other,

angels of Satan.”

Although most converts accepted the bishops’ instructions

about what Christians must—and must not—do, some, probably

a minority, questioned the authority of priests and bishops and

rejected such practical moralizing. Around 180 C.E., Irenaeus,

claiming the authority of apostolic succession as bishop of a

congregation in Lyons, wrote a massive five-volume attack on

deviant Christians—whom he called heretics—attacking them as

secret agents of Satan.18 In the opening of his enormously

influential work,
Against Heresies
, Irenaeus acknowledges that

“error is never put forth nakedly,” as blatant folly, but only

“dressed out in clever and ingenious disguises.”19 There are

those, Irenaeus declares, who claim to be Christians, and are

taken by all to be such, who actually teach “an abyss of madness

and blasphemy against Christ.”20 Such false believers “use the

name of Christ Jesus [only] as a kind of lure,” in order to teach

doctrines inspired by Satan, “infecting the hearers with the bitter

and malignant poison of the serpent, the great instigator of

apostasy.”21 Irenaeus suggests that those who resist the bishops’

moral teaching do so because they themselves are driven by

passion; some, he warns, “yield themselves up to the lusts of the

flesh with utmost greed.”22

For nearly two thousand years, most Christians have taken

Irenaeus at his word, believing that many of those he called

heretics were deceptive, licentious, or both. But after many

writings by these so-called heretics were discovered in Upper

Egypt in 1945, near the town of Nag Hammadi, those Christians

whose works the bishops suppressed could speak for themselves,

virtually for the first time in history.23 When we read their

writings, we find in

156 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

some of them beliefs that sound bizarre; others seem to reflect

intense, inquiring minds engaged on a variety of spiritual paths.

One of the most extreme is the
Testimony of Truth
, a text that

raises the primary question that Christian reformers have asked

throughout two millennia, from the second century gnostic

teacher Valentinus through Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther,

George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, and Mary Baker

Eddy: What
is
“the gospel”? What is the “true testimony” about

Christ and his message? Like other would-be reformers, the

anonymous author of the
Testimony of Truth
begins by

addressing “those who know how to listen, not only with their

ears, but with their understanding.”24 Far from endorsing

licentiousness, the
Testimony
insists that Christians practice

asceticism. This author writes as a guardian of the true gospel; he

believes that the great majority of Christians—those who accept

the kind of leadership and domesticated morality advocated by

the “apostolic fathers”—have fallen into moral error. “Many have

sought the truth and have not been able to find it, because they

have been taken over by the ‘old leaven of the Pharisees and the

teachers of the law.’ ”25

Most Christians, this teacher says, unthinkingly accept the

Genesis account of creation, according to which the creator

“commands one to take a husband or a wife and to beget, to

multiply like the sands of the sea” (Gen. 1:28; 13:16).26 But, this

teacher objects, such Christians fail to realize that the gospel

stands in diametric opposition to the law: “The Son of man came

forth from incorruptibility,”27 and came into the world to end the

old order and initiate the new. He called on those who belong to

him to be transformed: “This is the true testimony: when a

person comes to know himself and the God who presides over

truth, he will be saved.”28 But coming to know God requires that

one renounce everything else: “No one knows the God of truth

except the one alone who renounces all the things of the

world.”29 Renunciation alone enables one to put off the old, false

self, riddled with fear, greed, anger, lust, and envy, and to

recover one’s own true self in God. The true Christian follows a

path shunned by most so-called Christians; such a person, this

author says,

THE ENEMY WITHIN / 157

thinks about the power which flowed over the whole universe,

which comes upon him . . . and he is a disciple of his mind. . . .

He begins to keep silent within himself . . . he rejects for

himself argument and disputation . . . he is patient with

everyone, makes himself equal with everyone, and he also

separates himself from them.30

Christians like Justin Martyr, one of the fathers of the church,

shared such aspirations for self-mastery. Justin wholeheartedly

admired Christians who practiced renunciation and celibacy; he

even singled out for special praise a young convert in Alexandria

who had petitioned Felix, the governor,

asking that permission might be given to a surgeon to castrate

him. For the surgeons had said they were forbidden to do this

without the governor’s permission. And when Felix absolutely

refused to sign such a permission, the young man remained

celibate.31

Origen, also revered as a father of the church, had been so

determined to win his struggle against passion that as a young

man he had castrated himself, apparendy without asking

anyone’s permission, least of all the governor’s.

The author of the
Testimony
never mentions castration, much

less endorses it, but he insists nevertheless that only those who

“renounce the whole world,” beginning with sexual activity and

commercial transactions, ever come to know God. The majority

of Christian churches, from the second century to the present,

have regarded such renunciation as a counsel of perfection,

achieved only by a heroic few—in orthodox churches

throughout the world by monastics, and in Roman Catholic

churches by all priests and bishops, as well as monks and nuns.

The author of the
Testimony
goes much further than Christians

like Justin or Origen, however, when he declares that

renunciation is not only admirable but essential for any true

Christian. He knows, of course, that the great majority of

Christians believe that God created male and female and

commanded all his creatures, animal

158 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

and human, to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). But the

author of the Testimony, reflecting on his own alienation from

the majority of “worldly” Christians, suddenly believes he

understands Jesus’ warning to his disciples to “beware of the

leaven of the scribes and Pharisees” (Mark 8:15). Jesus’ words are

not to be taken literally, as if they referred only to Jewish

teachers; instead, taken symbolically, they warn against

Christian
teachers like the author of
Barnabas
or the
Teaching of

the Twelve Apostles
, who invoke the Scriptures to sanction

ordinary life.

According to the
Testimony
, the “scribes and Pharisees” and

the “blind guides” against whom Jesus warns (Matt. 23) are none

other than the majority of Christians—Christians who have

been tricked into worshiping not God but supernatural “rulers”

who are less than divine. The author of the
Testimony
takes Jesus'

warning to mean that believers must shun the influence of the

“errant desire of the angels and demons”32—the fallen angels

who fell into error through their own lust. The
Testimony
even

claims that the God whom most Christians worship, the God of

the Hebrew Bible, is
himself
one of the fallen angels—indeed,

the chief of the fallen angels, from whose tyranny Christ came to

set human beings free: for, the
Testimony
declares, “the word of

the Son of man . . . separates us from the error of the angels.”33

What
Barnabas
says of the Jews—that they have been

deceived by an “evil angel”—and what the majority of Christians

say about pagans—that they unwittingly worship demons

spawned by fallen angels—this author says about
other

Christians.
This radical teacher does what millions of disaffected

Christians have done ever since: regarding the majority of

Christians as apostate, he reads them into the gospels as

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