The Origin of Satan (3 page)

consideration. Further analysis demonstrated how passages from

the prophetic writings and the psalms of the Hebrew Bible were

woven into the gospel narratives. Barnabas Lindars and others

suggested that Christian writers often expanded biblical passages

into whole episodes that “proved,” to the satisfaction of many

believers, that events predicted by the prophets found their

fulfillment in Jesus’ coming.9

Those who accepted such analysis now realized that the gospel

of Mark, as James Robinson shows, is anything but a

straightforward historical narrative; rather, it is a theological

treatise that assumes the form of historical biography.10

Recognizing that the authors of Matthew and Luke revised Mark

in different ways, scholars have attempted to discriminate

between the source materials each accepted from earlier

tradition—sayings, anecdotes, and parables—and what each

writer added to interpret that material. Some hoped to penetrate

the various accounts and

INTRODUCTION / xxi

to discover the “historical Jesus,” recovering his authentic words

and deeds from the peripheral material that surrounds them. But

others objected to what Albert Schweitzer called the “quest of

the historical Jesus,”11 pointing out that the earliest of the

gospels was written more than a generation after Jesus’ death,

and the others nearly two generations later, and that sorting out

“authentic” material in the gospels was virtually impossible in

the absence of independent evidence.

Meanwhile, many other scholars introduced historical

evidence from the Mishnah, an ancient archive of Jewish

tradition, along with other Jewish sources, as well as from

Roman history, law, and administrative procedure.12 One of the

primary issues to emerge from these critical studies was the

question, What historical basis is there, if any, to the gospels'

claim that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death? What makes

this question of vital interest is the gospels’ claim that this deed

was inspired by Satan himself. One group of scholars pointed

out discrepancies between Sanhedrin procedure described in the

Mishnah and in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ “trial before the

Sanhedrin,” and questioned the accuracy of the accounts in Mark

and Matthew. Simon Bernfield declared in 1910 that “the whole

trial before the Sanhedrin is nothing but an invention of a later

date,”13 a view that has found recent defenders among Christian

literary analysts.14 Noting that the charge against Jesus and the

form of execution are characteristically Roman, many scholars,

including Paul Winter in his influential book
On the Trial of

Jesus
, published in 1961, argued that it was the Romans who

executed Jesus, on political grounds, not religious ones.15 Others,

recently including the Roman historian Fergus Millar, have

placed more credence in the accounts of Luke or John, which

indicate that the Sanhedrin held only a hearing concerning Jesus,

not an actual trial.16

Recently, however, one group of scholars has renewed

arguments to show that, in Josef Blinzler’s words,

anyone who undertakes to assess the trial of Jesus as a historical

and legal event,
reconstructing it from the gospel narratives,

xxii / INTRODUCTION

must come to the same conclusion as the early Christian

preachers did themselves, that the main responsibility rests on

the Jewish side (emphasis added).17

But scholars who take more skeptical views of the historical

plausibility of these narratives emphasize Roman responsibility

for Jesus’ execution, which, they suggest, the gospel writers

tended to downplay so as not to provoke the Romans in the

aftermath of the unsuccessful Jewish war against Rome.18

I agree as a working hypothesis that Jesus’ execution was

probably imposed by the Romans for activities they considered

seditious—possibly for arousing public demonstrations and (so

they apparently believed) for claiming to be “king of the Jews.”

Among his own people, however, Jesus appeared as a radical

prophetic figure whose public teaching, although popular with

the crowds, angered and alarmed certain Jewish leaders,

especially the Temple authorities, who probably facilitated his

capture and arrest.

But this book is not primarily an attempt to discover “what

really happened”—much less to persuade the reader of this or

any other version of “what happened”—since, apart from the

scenario briefly sketched above, I find the sources too

fragmentary and too susceptible of various interpretations to

answer that question definitively. Instead I try to show how the

gospels reflect the emergence of the Jesus movement from the

postwar factionalism of the late first century. Each author shapes

a narrative to respond to particular circumstances, and each uses

the story of Jesus to “think with” in an immediate situation,

identifying with Jesus and the disciples, and casting those

regarded as opponents as Jesus' enemies. To show this, I draw

upon a wealth of recent works by historical and literary scholars,

many of them discussing (and often disagreeing over) the

question of when and how Jesus’ followers separated from the

rest of the Jewish community.

In this book I add to the discussion something I have not

found elsewhere—what I call the social history of Satan; that is, I

show how the events told in the gospels about Jesus, his advo-

INTRODUCTION / xxiii

cates, and his enemies correlate with the supernatural drama the

writers use to interpret that story—the struggle between God's

spirit and Satan. And because Christians as they read the gospels

have characteristically identified themselves with the disciples,

for some two thousand years they have also identified their

opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil,

and so with Satan.

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THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

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I

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND

THE JEWISH WAR

In 66 C.E., a rebellion against Rome broke out among the Jews of

Palestine. Jewish soldiers, recruited at first from the countryside

by leaders of the revolt, fought with whatever weapons they

could find. But as the revolt spread to towns and cities, the

Jewish population divided. Some refused to fight: in Jerusalem,

the priestly party and their city-dwelling allies tried to maintain

peace with Rome. Among those who joined the revolt, many

were convinced that God was on their side: all were passionately

intent on ridding their land of foreign domination. Three years

into the war, the future emperor Vespasian and his son, the

future emperor Titus, marched against Jerusalem with no fewer

than sixty thousand well-trained, fully equipped foot soldiers

and cavalry and besieged the city.

Some twenty years later, the Jewish historian Joseph ben

Matthias, better known by his Romanized name, Flavius

Josephus, who had served as governor of Galilee before joining

in the fight against Rome, wrote an account of what he calls “not

only the greatest war of our own time, but one of the greatest of

all recorded wars.”1 Josephus is the only remaining guide to

these events. Other accounts of the war have not survived.

Although he is a vivid historian, Josephus is also partisan. Born

into a wealthy priestly family of royal lineage, Josephus had

traveled to Rome when he was about twenty-six—two years

before the war—to intervene with the emperor Nero on behalf

of several

4 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

arrested Jewish priests. Rome's wealth and military power

impressed the young man, who managed to meet one of Nero's

favorite actors—a Jew, as it happened—and, through him, Nero's

wife, Poppea. Poppea agreed to help with his mission, and

Josephus returned to Palestine. There, he says in his

autobiography,

I found revolutionary movements already begun, and great

excitement at the prospect of revolt from Rome. Accordingly, I

tried to stop those preaching sedition . . . urging them to place

before their eyes those against whom they were fighting; and

to remember that they were inferior to the Romans, not only in

military skill, but in good fortune. Although earnestly and

insistently seeking to dissuade them from their purpose,

foreseeing that the results would be disastrous for us, I did not

persuade them. The great insanity of those desperate men

prevailed.2

Wherever he traveled, Josephus says, he found Judea—the

Hebrew term for what others called Palestine—in turmoil.

Guerrilla leaders such as John of Gischala and his followers

dedicated themselves to fight for liberty in the name of God. In

the spring of 67, John’s fighting men, having routed the Romans

from Gischala, their provincial city, burst into Jerusalem. There,

urging people to join the revolution, they attracted tens of

thousands, Josephus says, and “corrupted a great part of the

young men, and stirred them up to war.”3 Others, whom

Josephus calls older and wiser, bitterly opposed the revolt. John

and other revolutionaries coming into Jerusalem from the

countryside escalated the conflict by capturing “the most

powerful man in the whole city,” the Jewish leader Antipas—the

city treasurer—and two other men also connected with the royal

dynasty. Accusing their three prisoners of having met with the

enemy while plotting to surrender Jerusalem to the Romans, the

rebels called them “traitors to our common liberty” and slit their

throats.4

Josephus says that he himself served at age thirty as governor

of Galilee, before joining in the war against Rome under pressure

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 5

from his countrymen, but doesn't explain why he violated his

own principles, though he does say that at first he pretended to

agree with the rebels in order not to arouse their suspicion. He

describes in detail his own battles against the Romans, and how-

he barely escaped a Roman massacre at the defeated city of Jota-

pata. Having managed first to hide and then to survive a suicide

pact he made with his fellow refugees, Josephus was captured by

the Romans. Brought before Vespasian, the Roman commander,

Josephus announced that God had revealed to him that

Vespasian would become emperor of Rome. Unimpressed,

Vespasian assumed that this was a trick Josephus had contrived

to save his life. But after Nero was assassinated, and three other

emperors rose and fell within months, Vespasian did become

emperor. One of his first acts was to order his soldiers to free

Josephus from prison. Henceforth Josephus traveled in

Vespasian's entourage as interpreter and mediator. He returned to

Jerusalem with Vespasian's son Titus when the young general

took over command of the war from his father in order to march

against the holy city.

By that time, Josephus says, three factions divided the city:

the priestly party working for peace; the revolutionaries from

the countryside; and contending against both of these, a second

anti-Roman party, led by prominent Jerusalemites, “men of the

greatest power,” who, according to Josephus, wanted to maintain

their power against the radicals from the surrounding

countryside. Even before the Roman armies arrived, Josephus

says, these “three treacherous factions” were fighting among

themselves, while “the people of the city . . . were like a great

body torn into pieces.”5 Josephus himself, serving the Roman

commander during the siege, stood between two fires: he was

bitterly hated by many of his own people as a traitor, and was

suspected of treason by the Romans whenever they experienced

a setback.

Josephus describes in fine detail the siege of Jerusalem,

including the horrors of the famine induced by Roman

blockades, in which, he says, “children pulled the very morsels

that their fathers were eating out of their mouths, and, what was