Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 20 February 2004

A Religion of Conflict

Satan or the Devil, a negative god, is an important part of Christianity, although quite why is hard to fathom. God is described as almighty but is not almighty enough to get rid of His evil opponent until the end of time. The reason is quite plain, although no Christians realize it. Satan is Time. Time is the great corrupter, eventually the ultimate corrupter of life, because given time, all life dies. The punishment God inflicted on the human race through the disobedience of Adam and Eve was death, and the promised reward for obedience to the Christian creed is eternal life. Yet eternity can only be experienced in a world without time, and so it assumes the cessation of time. The supposed kingdom of God is a place of complete perfection, in which nothing corrupts. But time is the corrupter and so time has ceased in the Christian heaven.

In this one paragraph, the concept of the Devil has been explained. Why go on? Christians never like answers that explain things. They always like answers that are mysterious, and leave the faithful still puzzling. They attribute this to the wonder of God, and is the reason they hate science. The Devil has been the most important aspect of Christian discipline for two millennia, and in most of this time, his threat was so fearful that the only salvation from it was to hide behind Christ, like an infant hiding behind its grandmother’s skirts. In other words the threat of Satan was far more real than the salvation of Jesus, even though the Christian was told that Satan was really cowed in defeat by the resurrection of Christ. Latterly, many churches have been embarrassed by the notion of such a triumphant Devil. They realise that God ought to be able to squash Satan like a troublesome mosquito, and free the world of his machinations, but choses not to do so. This is not good news for Christians and so the Devil is not spoken of as much as he once was.

The inclination of the more advanced churches to reject the Devil as an actually existing supernatural principle of evil in favour of being just a symbol of the wickedness in men, though it seems sensible, does not incline them also to reject Jesus as simply a symbol of goodness. The point of the myth would be that goodness struggles and seems to lose but much particular good is done in the struggle and goodness eventually re-emerges to live on with a greater good coming out of it. Christians are now too deeply attached to their didactic myth being a historical supernatural fact for them now to reject it for the more sensible and more meaningful interpretation. They will reject the Devil as being too medieval, too primitive and too difficult to sustain when God is supposed to be utterly good and omnipotent. Jesus Christ cannot be rejected, though. He really is the son of God. He is not just a Harvey the Rabbit for incompletely developed mentalities as some say! No Christians can contemplate all the posters outside churches saying, “Jesus Lives!” being wrong.

The excessive spallation of Christian unity into myriads of sects has given Satan a bit of living room, particularly American fundamentalists who continue to make a lot of Satan. They like to promote military and murderous ideas of God’s vengeance against His enemy and His Satanic supporters, namely anyone who disagrees with them or that they don’t like. These people are dangerous and perhaps insane, and by any just reckoning, are the Satanic ones, they are so intolerant of everyone else. They illustrate the problem of Christianity from the outset. It began as intolerance and remains intolerant at its core still. The reason is that it was devised as a religion of conflict from the start.

A Cosmic Battle

It arose from the treatment of Jews by the Romans from 63 BC until 136 AD. Jews were treated much as the Arabs are treated by the Americans today. It is one of God’s jokes, no doubt, that the Herodians of today are the Israelis who claim to be the descendants of the original Jewish inhabitants dispersed by the Romans in 136. Occupied people have few rights but have to be grateful to their oppressors for ruling them for no more reward than their natural assets. The people are treated with contempt by the imperial power, and any lack of gratitude by them is rewarded with a harsh and heavy hand. Despite the cruel biblical gloss that Jesus was the enemy of the Jews and the friend of the Romans, the truth is revealed in the last book of the Christian bible, Revelation. Rome is allegorized as a Great harlot and a Satanic beast harassing the poor Christians just as it had the Jews.

The earliest gospel, Mark, has the innocent Jesus facing up to the Romans and their collaborators among the Jews, the priesthood and the Sanhedrin. The myth is depicted as Good versus Evil, Christ versus the Devil, and it begins in Mark straight after Jesus’s baptism when the spirit of God in the shape of a dove descended upon him from heaven, denoting his commission by God as the saviour on earth. For forty days, the cosmic battle of Good and Evil raged in the wilderness, standing for the forty years Essenes considered it really to have been raging until then. The beginning of the ministry of Jesus was thought to be the climax of the battle.

The gospels tell the story of this final battle in the cosmic war of Good and Evil. Jesus was always victorious against the Devils he met, and plainly expected God’s heavenly armies to arrive, as prophesied, from the Mount of Olives to begin the purification of the world of Evil. Jesus thought the corrupt world would end the night he sat till dawn praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. It did not, and he was crucified, an apparent victory for the Devil, but one which his disciples then turned into a victory for God. Jesus rose from the dead, the victor. A victory over death was a victory over the inevitability of time—a victory over Satan. Time and death did not inevitably win. Christians believe it still, 2000 years later.

The Jewish Satan

The popular Christian name for the principle of Evil that Jesus fought against is Satan, a Jewish word that means “an opponent”, and written as a proper name means “The Opponent”. In the Jewish scriptures, this “opponent” does not usually appear with an initial capital letter except conventionally in Job. God’s “satans” are His assistants sent to oppose humanity for their disobedience or vanity, but naturally they were not God’s opponents, and nor is the one in Job, although there he seems to be successfully manipulating God.

The Satan of Job is a son of God, interpreted by contemporary theologians as an angel, there being only one god, but originally sons of God were gods. God was El, the Canaanite high god, and his sons were the various powers of nature and the senior gods of the various nations of the Canaanite race. In this scheme, Jews considered Yehouah to be the god of the nations of Israel and Judah, although the word Israel seems to mean “we are the seed (or sons) of El”, declaring them to be the direct children of the high god. Anyway, the Satan of Job has the task of roaming the earth, a pun on the word “satan” which, however, suggests a link with the spies or prophets who commonly infiltrated the people looking and listening for dissent. The Assyrians and Persians had such people, and doubtless the Romans too. Paul was one. From his observations of humanity, Satan does not trust that Job, an apparently utterly devout man, is sincere, and urges God to test him, confident that Job will quickly succumb to the tests. God agrees, and Satan tests Job to the limits of human endurance—doubtless a useful precedent for the Christian torturers of witches and heretics in the European middle ages. Satan is here an opponent of humanity, but can only do what God permits him to do.

Perhaps a more significant mention of Satan is in Zechariah 3:1-2, where the opponent stands up for the natives of Yehud who were left behind when the leaders of Judah were sent into Babylonian exile. These Am ha Eretz were treated as strangers by the “returners” to the land, the Persian colonists. So, the genuine Judahites were depicted as the opponents of the false Judahites sent in by the imperial power, and proof of it was that their god was Satan, not Yehouah. Job is considered to be a Phœnician work, and Phœnicia and Yehud became politically part of the same entity when they were joined together in the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara just about the time when the temple state of Yehud was set up.

The internal division within the population of the artificial state continued unabating with ramifications that will never be clear. The deportation of foreigners into the small country having the authority of rulers caused an on-going dissension between them and the people who had lived there before. The Edomites were an Arab people displaced causing a long-term enmity. The Am ha Eretz were refused full citizenship except under the terms of the colonists. Some separated out eventually forming the Samaritan sect. Yehud became a fractious and distrusting society, and continued to split politically for centuries. Mutual hatred became a norm.

The defeat of the Persians by the Greeks introduced new reasons for dissension and distrust. The opponents of the temple priesthood could use modernisation as a reason for attacking the Persian colonists. Alexander’s generals were spreading Greek ways in the cultural change now called Hellenisation. But initially the Ptolemies were favourable to the temple, and poured aid and assistance into it, as a barrier against the Seleucids, adding substantially to Jewish myths—including the Exodus from Egypt—and translating them into Hebrew and Greek. The Seleucids then took over Palestine, and the situation was reversed. The old priesthood associated with the Egyptians were surely evicted, and new Greek-inclined priests, later called Sadducees, were installed. The traditional Persian parties were incensed, defended the traditional forms of the religion, and eventually rebelled in the Maccabean revolt. It is presented as a national uprising against an oppressive occupying power, the Seleucid Greeks of Babylonia, but was at least equally a civil war.

The rebels, the religious traditionalists, eventually won the war but only by allying themselves with Rome, the new Hellenistic force that had arisen in the west, that had cunningly used the Jewish rebels to undermine the power of the Seleucid Greeks of Babylonia to further Roman geopolitical ambitions. The Hasmoneans effectively were a Roman dependency and had to adopt Roman ways, gravely disappointing their traditionalist supporters, the Hasids. To secure their own power and, more important, to assure the Romans that the country could not revert to favouring Roman enemies to the east, the Hasmoneans took the priesthood for themselves, completely reversing the supposed purpose of the revolt which was to return the priesthood to the traditional priestly families, and thus re-establish the religion as it was. The inevitable result of this was further spallation in Jewish society. The Hasids split into a conservative faction and a progressive faction. It is likely that the Hasidic party had the nickname, Pharisees, meaning Persians, and the conservative faction, disillusioned, split from them in disgust becoming the Essenes, apparenly meaning the Salvationists. So, in the second century BC, the main philosophies of the Jews, described over 200 years later by Josephus had been established, and so too had the other sects and dissenting peoples met in the New Testament, except the Herodians who were yet to come.

The Persian Religion

What has it all to do with Satan? The Persian religion was the very source of the idea of Satan. It was dualist in having two opposed gods, a Good Spirit and a Wicked Spirit—Ahuramazda and Ahriman. The colonists had been sent into Yehud with the task of moulding the old and popular Canaanite god, Yehouah, into a type of Ahuramazda, a god acceptable to the Persians in being a universal god of obedience and good order. That was why the local people, the Am ha Eretz, could have no say in the “restoring” of the worship of the old god. It was not the old worship restored but a new god worshipped under the old name and with a purpose that suited the imperialists. The line they took towards the local people was that God had abandoned them as apostates, idolaters and sinners! They were the opponents of anything that God desired, and the explanation of that was that their god was the opponent god or Satan. Just as Ahriman opposed Ahuramazda, so too did Satan oppose Yehouah. Those who stood out against the Persian colonists were the human agents or dupes of the opponent god, Satan, against Yehouah.

Peter Stanford, a Catholic writer (The Devil, 1996), accepts that the Persian religion has influenced Judaism and Christianity, but claims “the time scale allows for two way traffic, and it is never entirely clear who is influencing whom”. It is the usual special pleading that ought bluntly to be called what it really is—lying. The time scale he means is the biblical one that puts Moses some time in 1400 BC, 600 years before there is any sign of a state in Samaria other than Canaanite city states. The epic of Moses was not actually written in its present form until about 300 BC. Christians and Jews think the “return from exile” happened under the Persian king, Cyrus, about 540 BC. It actually happened about 420 BC, but both dates are long before Exodus and Numbers were written, so the Jewish religion depends on the Persian one and not the reverse. Not only that, it is quite clear who influenced whom from the coherence of the respective theologies. Persian theology is coherent, whereas the Jewish one is full of puzzles and gaps that the Persian religion can answer. The Persian religion was incompletely transferred to Yehud—the task permanently stopped by the defeat of Persia by Alexander.

The need of the Persians was for a universal god, whereas when the Hasmoneans secured the free state of Judah in the second century, they needed a national god. Moreover, a national god had to be able to succeed at anything, so could not possibly have an equal god that could foil him at anything! The dualist idea did not suit the Hasmonaeans, obliged now to recognize their dependence on Hellenistic culture. The national god would have been opposed by an universal evil spirit —plainly an unequal comparison—and the Hellenistic culture did not entertain such an universal evil principle. The evil spirit was therefore downgraded into an angel, a mere creature of the Good God, and being His servant. The traditionalists went some way along with this, to nationalize Yehouah, but made Satan into a rebel angel—the supernatural equivalent of the Am ha Eretz—so that he was no longer just a servant of God but created evil in his own right, a much closer parallel with the original because this Satan could not be defeated until the Eschaton, just like Ahriman.

Satan has never got rid of this ambiguity in his nature under Christianity. Is he subject to God’s will and merely troubling humanity because God wants to test their faith, or is he a genuinely independent spirit not subject to God’s will, and whom God cannot defeat willy-nilly but only at the end of time? The Persian faction had its own literary tradition in which the apocalyptic was much more important than it is in modern Judaism, and this came to us most clearly through the Essenes, while the Hasmoneans, constrained by the practicalities of politics could not accept Satan as anything other than the executor of temporary punishments for transgressions. This came down to us through the Pharisees and then Rabbinic Judaism.

Eventually, after a series of wars between the Jews and the Romans, the Romans solved the problem by closing the temple, banning Jews from Jerusalem and dispersing them all over the world. The dispersion was made all the larger from the fact that the Phœnicians and the Syrians were all loyal to the Jerusalem temple and its god by this time, all of them being people of the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara that the temple had been set up to serve. The Pharisee party now effected a major revision away from the traditional position. Dualism was dropped, the battle of God and Evil on a cosmic level was erased, Satan was established merely as a rebel angel, and all apocalyptic ideas were expunged or watered down.

Rabbinic Judaism was quite a different religion from what it had been originally, and even different from Pharisaism, except in that it remained liberal in outlook. Jews concentrated on the central understanding of Zoroaster—people manifest good and evil, not supernatural beings. Jews called the inclination to do evil “yetzer hava ”, and modern Judaism bases God’s role in a personal struggle with evil on the assistance that God has to offer. Yet, the Jewish Qabala which emerged about 1150, once again, in Provence, had retained the dualism of the Jewish religion before Jamna, where Rabbinic Judaism was devised. In the Sefiroth of the Qabala, ten good principles are set against ten wicked ones. The Rabbis had not succeeded in getting rid of Satan. The form of Judaism that was closer to the original was Essenism, and it became Christianity. So the Persian traditions of dualism and apocalyptic, no longer prominent in Judaism, passed into Christianity, and still characterises the religion today. Christianity is more true to Zoroastrianism than Rabbinic Judaism, though both have the same roots.

The story of a rebellious angel is hardly coherent, and certainly not convincing, when heaven is meant to be a perfect place, and several versions of it were devised. One was that the rebellious angels were sex-mad and came to earth to screw human women. Judaism was excessively prudish, and both Christianity and Judaism frowned on sexuality, so the idea of heavenly beings having the wherewithal for sex provided for them by God seems strange. Angels are immortal and had no need of sexual tackle, as Jesus knew himself and said (Mk 12:25), so this explanation is dire. No doubt human women could have had psychological sex with an angel, an explanation of female wet dreams, and perhaps a woman’s explanation of getting mysteriously pregnant, just as the Virgin Mary did after she had been visited by an angel. Nor was she the first in the bible:

There was a certain man of Zorah whose name was Manoah, and his wife was barren, and bare not. And the angel of Yehouah appeared unto the woman, and said unto her, Behold now, thou art barren, and bearest not, but thou shalt conceive, and bear a son… Then the woman came and told her husband, saying, A man of God came unto me… and the angel of God came again unto the woman as she sat in the field, but Manoah her husband was not with her. And the woman made haste, and ran, and shewed her husband, and said unto him, Behold, the man hath appeared unto me, that came unto me the other day. And Manoah arose, and went after his wife…

Judges 13:2-3,6,9-11

Would your average Protestant husband—or father of a daughter—be like Manoah?

In another story, both Satan and the archangel Michael are sons of God, but Satan rebels against his father, creates the material world, and plants humans on it. Later Michael appears on earth as a saviour called Christ sent by God. This was a version favoured by gnostics but might have been the original one, being certainly akin to the creation of the two spirits in Zoroastrianism. A related version has God making Adam and Eve then calling his two sons, Satan and Michael to admire His work. Michael kneels before them in admiration but Satan is too proud to do so, because they were inferior creations to himself, and thus rebels.

A key point of the revision of Persian dualism into an imperfect monism is that Satan is originally one of us—one of the good creations of God. He is like us but rebels. It is easy to see this as a warning to the people of the Yehud colony after the creation of Judaism, and in the fractured society of Judah for the next 500 years. No Jew could even trust his brother, and this perfectly matched the myth of one of God’s own sons rebelling against his father and the rest of the heavenly society. Jew against Jew was a reflexion of angel against angel in heaven.

Jubilees and 1 Enoch seem to have been written in response to the loss of the Jerusalem priesthood by the traditional priests of the introduced Persian religion, perhaps around 130 BC when the Hasmoneans refused to hand it back. In the gnostic Pistis Sophia, the books of Ieou (Yehouah) were dictated by God to Enoch in paradise and preserved from destruction in the deluge. 1 Enoch explains God’s plan of the world. It is a conducted tour of the cosmos showing the poor state it is in. The book is not Christian but has doctrines of the sects which appeared as competitors of Christianity. The sons of God of Genesis who constitute the court of the High God, El, were cast out of heaven through lust, initiating the link between sex and evil deeply ingrained in Christian morality. Sex is a function of the transience of life. Heavenly bodies are immortal and have no need of it, and sex was seen as a necessary product of the evil agent—time itself—Satan! Paul links Satan directly with the sexual act (1 Cor 7:5). Jubilees makes sure the Hasmonaean’s new national God, Yehouah, is supreme by having Him allow a tenth of the wicked angels to remain active tempting human beings. Their leader was Mastema, but evil is tied to God, the Wicked Ones being answerable to Him, thus destroying the dualistic explanation of theodicy.

Various wicked spirits are named, unless they are just different names of the same one as magicians thought. The apotropaic scapegoat ritual of Leviticus 16:8-10 is another indication of dualism in the Jewish scriptures. The two goats were selected by lots and one sacrificed to Yehouah as a sin offering while the other is driven off to carry away the sins of the people to a devil called Azazel, a devil also in Islam. The god of war at Urfa is Asis, the Mighty One. Balaziz is Mighty Lord, and Roshaziz, the head of the Mighty One, is a promontory on the Phœnician coast. So, Azazel means “Might of El”, a complementary sounding name but another reference to the struggle in Yehud between the El and Yahu factions, the victorious Yehouah faction here besmirching the El faction into a desert demon fed on sin. Belial appears in 1 Samuel 25:17 and 30:22 seeming to mean something ignoble, becoming Satan (2 Cor 6:5). If it is read as “My Lord is El”, it is again a besmirching by the victorious faction. Others were Satanael, Sammael and Semiyaz.

In Tobit (150 BC), an evil spirit called Asmodi or Aeshma Daeva, indicating a Persian origin, tries to prevent Sarah’s marriage, because he is in love with her himself. In the Talmud, Asmodi develops into the demon of lust.

In The Book of the Watchers, part of 1 Enoch, God appointed watcher angels to watch the world. It is a myth that matches the Persian period, but probably most societies that followed them. Spies were used by the shahs of Persia, but the reference here is again to the Persian priests. These Watchers saw the delights of human women, lusted after them, and finally 200 under the leadership of Semihazah (Semiyaz) rebelled against divine order by violating the women procreating a race of giants called Nephilim, sounding like the Greek Titans. However, they became demons. God had to send four good angels, Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael to cast the Nephilim into the pit, originally an allegory of priests sent from Persia like Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah. Another story woven into this one in 1 Enoch is that of Azazel who shows humans the art of metallurgy, and therefore how weapons and jewelry could be made, tempting men into warfare and women into vanity, through adornments.

These stories have a suspiciously Greek stamp on them and will have been elaborated in the Hellenistic period. Greeks and Romans thought that exceptional human beings like kings and heroes were demi-gods, the fruit of Gods impregnating human women. Alexander the Great is an example. Gods and humans could interbreed but the Jewish angle is that the produce of such liaisons were giants which became demons. Greek gods like Orpheus showed humans how to do things, but again the Jewish angle was that these were demons, not God! Nothing could be better evidence that the Christian birth narratives were not Jewish in concept at all but Hellenistic. The new god of Christianity was born in a way that Jewish myth suggested was demonic. The interference the Jewish God had with human fertility was simply to open a womb that had seemed closed, but that is where it ceased. The Jesus of Matthew and Luke could only be demonic—one of the Nephilim.

The Book of Watchers may express a moral view rather than an ethnic one, harking back to the universality of the Persian religion, but overstamped with the nationalistic one of the Hasmonaean period. The Persian colonists were not an ethnos, but, although their culture was not negotiable, anyone willing to accept it was acceptable into it. Ezra was rejecting wives not over race but over religion. It was not acceptable for Jews to marry outside of their religion. As long as the wives became Jewish in religion, they were acceptable. Then they were no longer foreign. Initially people were accepted into the new Jewish cultus by accepting its moral teaching, not on the basis of where they had been born. Quite the opposite. Those who had been born in Judah when the “returners” “returned” were banned from helping to “restore” the religion. Ezra refused to let “returners” marry unconverted locals. Only the Persian morality was the right one.

Enoch has been called the Jewish Zoroaster, and seems to be an archetypal man who walked with God, although he now barely appears in Genesis at all. Once he must have been much more important, and the Essenes—most Persian in theology—treasured the books listed under his name. He walked with God, suggesting he was a god, or a son of God. Since the original High God was El, and Yehouah was a son of El, Enoch might have been another name for Yehouah. Both stood for the annual cycle of the sun. Enoch lived for 365 years, a year for each day in a year, suggesting that he was a god of the year just as Yehouah was. God, as the god of the year, like Enoch, and Satan were gods of time! He seems to be an earlier myth than even Abraham, and certainly than the Moses of the extended version we now have.

The author of Watchers is not concerned with these traditions. He addresses all people, not just Israel, and sees God’s law as a broad law of nature and justice, a Persian notion, then mocks Greek ideas—the formerly Holy Watchers defiling themselves dallying with human women. Here is surely a condemnation of the priesthood, considered to be akin to angels, if not angels already, in the traditional view, but under the Greek regimes, acting like Greek gods by sexually relating with profane women. The nation are sheep beset by raptors, but some of the sheep are blind, refusing to see what is happening, and therefore leaving themselves open to the consequences of allowing wolves into the sheep pen. They are admitting Satan.

The Book of Jubilees, written about the time of the Maccabean revolt, identifies the collaborating Jews with the gentiles, as would be expected. All are the subjects of Satan, but they are judged according to Persian criteria, by thoughts, words and deeds, not by the deceitful idea of mere faith or belief. Any traitor could say they believed in the traditonal religion, but only those who proved it by deeds could be believed. To be judged as righteous, people had to be righteous. Merely believing in God could not be sufficient. That could only have been a Satanic ruse.

Essenes

Satan was manifestly more important to the Jews at the time of the gospel events than the impression left by the present revision of the Jewish scriptures. Satan is mentioned repeatedly by the scribes and the people of Israel in the synoptic gospels, by the apostles, especially by Paul, and often in Revelation. It seems that the Essenes were closer to the original Judaism than Rabbinic Judaism is now.

The Essenes placed the cosmic struggle of God and Evil at the center of their world outlook. They were preparing themselves for that war which is why they practised chastity—sexual activity was forbidden to soldiers in wartime. Essenes were Sons of Light, and were led by the Prince of Light. Their enemies, gentile oppressors and the apostate and hypocritical Jews who helped them, were led by Satan, the Prince of Darkness. The Sons of Light were waiting to help the heavenly hosts in the Day of God’s Vengeance, when the armies of God would destroy all wickedness in the world. Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan (1995), explains:

The Essenes offer the closest parallel to Mark’s account of Jesus’ followers, as they invoke images of cosmic war to divide the universe at large… between God’s people and Satan’s.

Moreover, Jesus’s idea was that the kingdom of God would be an inversion of material existence, and thus the injustice of the material world would be rectified. Dives and Lazarus changed places:

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

Luke 16:25

The first would be last and the last first (Mt 9:35; 10:31). This reflects precisely Essene ideas of precedence based on humility and servitude to God, not on grandeur or superiority. The implication in both Christian and Essene notions is that justice in this wicked world is inverted.

Pagels cannot bring herself, despite this, to identify these two groups, because she thinks the Essenes were too exclusive. What she and most Christian commentators miss, often through holding the telescope to their blind eye, is the Messianic Rule (Geza Vermes) discovered at Qumran (Barthélemy’s Rule of the Congregation) which is unequivocal that at the End Time the Essenes were required to be evangelical. They were to give all Israel a last chance to change their sinful ways. The very first rule of the two column fragment remaining is the “Rule of the Congregation” by which Barthélemy named the whole fragment:

This is the Rule of all the Congregation of Israel in the Last Days, when they are called to join the Community to live by the law of the Sons of Zadok, the priests and the men of their Covenant who turned aside from the way of the people, the men of His Council who kept His Covenant amidst iniquity, offering atonement for the land.
When they come, they shall assemble them all, women and children also, and read into their ears all the precepts of the Covenant and shall instil in them all their statutes that they may no longer sin in error.

There is no doubt that the Essenes expected the Jews to flock to the righteous party at the End Time. It is mentioned again in the Nahum Pesher, and this “Rule of the Congregation” implies that the community had to call them, or “mobilise” them to use the word of Wise, Abegg and Cook ( Dead Sea Scrolls ). It describes what had to be done to the penitents. They had to have the rules read out loud to them. The Messianic Scroll is describing nothing other than the Sermon on the Mount! The Messianic Rule is the scroll fragment that tells us clearly that the first Christians were the repentant Jews called by the Essenes in the End Time.

The archangel Michael is the Prince of Light for the Essenes, and prominent scholars like Yigal Yadin and John Collins say so:

In 1QM, Michael is no longer simply the Prince of Israel but leader of the Sons of Light.

John Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination

Column 17 of the War Scroll is plain enough that Michael is the Prince of Light battling against the Prince of Wickedness. The Essenes considered themselves as “Israel”—the pure remnant! God’s angel stood for them, but any one of All Israel, the whole body of apostate and hypocritical Jews, could sincerely repent, be baptised and be received into the community (yahad). They would have the rules read to them, sufficing for the normal three years’ novitiate. The calling of All Israel implies then that there is no longer time for a novitiate to be completed. The End must have been expected within three years. It is not curious then that Jesus is said to have conducted a three years ministry. It will be because the Men of Renown who led the Essenes had decided that the End was due within three years that John the Baptist and then Jesus had been sent out. Note that the Rule cited includes women and children, a point constantly ignored by Christians who want to find a significant difference between the all male society of the Essenes and the first Christians. Elaine Pagels for example repeats this male myth several times in her book, The Origin of Satan.

Gentiles

Gentiles were not included. The confusion arises from the status of Hellenised Jews of which there were a lot. The most Hellenised of them will have led lives that were gentile in culture. Yet they were Jews, and given the financial clout most will have wanted to sacrifice at the Jerusalem temple at Passover as a sort of minimum level of commitment. It seems certain that many of the tourists or pilgrims visiting Jerusalem at Passover—and Josephus makes it several million, doubtless exaggerating but showing it was a lot—were anything but devout Jews. They were the ones mentioned in the Rule of the Congregation in the Last Days, and so were entitled to salvation through repentance should they choose it. These were the “Greeks” of the Acts of the Apostles, the apostate and Hellenised Jews, in fact, who were counterpoised against the “Hebrews”, the Jews who were still practising correctly.

The New Testament strongly suggests that the new Judaism was carried beyond Judaea by these tourist Jews who had been converted and baptised by the Nazarenes, and probably were involved in the overthrow of Jerusalem described in the gospels as “the sedition” and “the insurrection”. It was led by one Jesus Barabbas, a man that the crowds were calling for when Jesus the Nazarene was under arrest!

Thoroughly assimilated Jews could not have been distinguished from gentiles, and they will have had many gentile friends, some of whom would have been “Godfearers”, gentiles who practised Judaism in every possible respect other than to convert formally. Here was an overlap of gentiles who behaved as pious Jews but did not have the courage to convert, mainly because men had to be circumcised, and apostate Jews who returned from their pilgrimage with news of the coming End, and the teaching of its prophet, who had been cruelly crucified by the authorities. These impious Jews had repented and been baptised, becoming Nazarenes and being prepared for the Parousia, the final return of Michael the archangel in the guise of the prophet Jesus—now honoured with the title, Christ—and the armies of heaven, ready to overcome all wickeness and corruption in the world. Godfearing gentiles wanted to be saved too, and this is where opportunists like Paul stepped in. Seeing a demand, the wiley merchant satisfied it. He admitted them without circumcision, receiving a lot of money—for the Jerusalem Church, of course!—in gratitude.

All of this is rational, explicable in terms of the history of the times as it is known, requires no supernatural explanations, shows how Christianity spread into the empire independently of Paul, and shows how his decision to admit gentiles was quite understandable. Christians, Jews or Greeks, were thus admitted into the ranks of those who were to be saved a few years hence when Jesus arrived with the hosts of heaven dressed as Michael the archangel to sweep away his brother, Satan. Those who had lived righteously, and those who had repented and been baptised in time, were saved. They were Israel. No one else was. That is why gentile Christians could justifiably call themselves Israel, and orthodox Jews could not, in Essene terms. It shows the origins of Christianity in Essenism.

John’s fiece polemic against those he sometimes calls simply “the Jews” at times matches in bitterness that of the Essenes.

E Pagels

Christian commentators often seem reluctant to see that Christianity was barely ever Jewish. Of course, its roots were in Essenism, but the failure of Jesus as Messiah left the main Essene organisation as it was, poring over the Jewish scriptures in their idiosyncratic way to find out what had gone wrong with their prophecies of when the End would be. The followers of Jesus, who was an Essene, were that mixture of collaborating Palestinian Jews and Hellenised Jews that had believed the Nazarene’s message of the imminent End. They explained the disappearance of the corpse as the fulfilment of Jesus’s prophecy that they would rise in three days, the prophecy of a general resurrection in Hosea, and suddenly thought it signified the coming End, Jesus being the first to rise.

The leading Essenes of the community will have been the ones who removed the corpse, for a proper burial, and would have known it was not a resurrection. The main Essene leaders seem unlikely to have wanted to abandon those who had flocked to join Jesus and had perhaps helped in the insurrection. It might have been a mistake that had happened before without such dire consequences, in that the signs had not remained so auspicious until the very night of the miracle expected at the Mount of Olives, and the plan had been abandoned in time to avoid embarrassment. The people who had repented would then have been given the chance to join the Essenes as an associate of the kind the village Essenes seemed to be. Their repentance was valid so long as they remained righteous, and they had an incentive to lead generally righteous lives. They were the reason for the Damascus Document, a rule showing how an ordinary Essene should live uncorrupted in the wicked world. Conceivably, these Essenes already of the villages and urban camps, who married, might also not have been in the know, and continued in hope. It will have been the raison d’être of the Jerusalem Church, run by the Essenes for those who continued to believe in Jesus.

What seems different in this case is the fact that the signs led Jesus so far into the prophecy, causing his converting large numbers of foreign Hellenised Jews, plus the unexpected fact that they thought he had been resurrected when the main body of Essenes removed his body. These generally apostate Jews saw it as their last chance to stay within the bounds of Judaism, with the End due soon. They had heard and believed all the explanations given by Jesus of the coming End, and nothing seemed much different to them still, save that the crucifixion and resurrection must have been the initiation of the forty years of cosmic struggle not the culmination of it. Jesus had been a persuasive man, and no journeyman Essene could persuade them he had been wrong. They just had to provide for this unexpected multitude of unorthodox believers, while those who returned to their foreign homes had an amazing story to tell!

These Jews—anonymous ones—took the gospel into the Roman empire initially, and Christian missionaries like Paul followed, although it is plain from Acts and the Epistles that the Jerusalem Church had no enthusiasm for Paul’s self-appointed task. Churches were already established when Paul arrived in the Greek lands, and even in Rome, but there was dissension between devout traditional Jews who rejected Jesus as Messiah, and the apostate Jews who had returned with this message that a Messiah had come, had forgiven their sins, and would return soon. They had been guaranteed entry into God’s kingdom, through repentance and baptism, and so long as they did not sin until the return they would be saved. That is why, even though Jesus’s initial following must have been Jewish, they were not recognized by the synagogues. Even if the synagogue Jews were Essenes themselves, as many might have been since they had the Damascus Rule to keep them safe in the wicked world, they could not have accepted those who rejected even the relaxed rules of the Damascus Document, and Hellenised Jews would hardly have considered these rules relaxed. Why should they follow these tough rules when they had repented and baptised and guaranteed entry into heaven. All they had to do was to be good.

They saw their repentance and baptism as absolving them from the need to follow the law. Since they had not been following it anyway, it was good for their consciences. Jesus, in cases like that of plucking on the sabbath, was telling his insurgents that they need not follow the law when active service prevented it. Devout Jews had been massacred through refusing to fight on the sabbath, and Jesus did not see that as a sensible use of devotion. He was not, however, saying the law was abrogated as Christians have argued since. Jesus thought that brief suspensions of strict legality were admissible as long as there was a good reason and sincere intentions were held in the heart. In Mark 7:15, Jesus says nothing entering a man can defile him, it is what is within him that does that. He is not saying all food is clean, but simply saying that the food taboos can be suspended when it is not possible to follow them for good reason. That is the reason held within—in the heart, not in the belly.

The trouble was that these practical and temporary matters were gladly accepted as permanent by the lawless Hellenised Jews that heard them. The praxis of them was in an actual insurrection, but the converts were persuaded that they were participating in a forty year cosmic battle with the forces of Satan, and, as Christian soldiers they were justified in setting aside the details of the law during tha war. By the time the forty years had passed, and the bishops had to find a longer excuse—the millennium—the abrogation of the law had become the norm for Christianised Jews, and the gentile “Godfearers” who had also joined had never known any reason to follow the law. They too will have found it convenient, despite their previous “Jewish” piety, and many will have joined, by then, on the understanding that the law had been abrogated.

The bishops agreed. Their gentile flocks were growing much quicker, they realised, without a need to impose anything as tasking as God’s law, so they were happy to accept that the crucified Galilaean had abrogated it. At about this time, Mark wrote his gospel and included Mark 7:19b, in which all food was declared clean. A practical code for men on active service had been invoked as applying to Christian soldiers engaged in the forty years’ cosmic battle and after forty years became the norm, justified now by faith being the important quality for a Christian. The faith was now necessary. The end of the forty years of cosmic battle seemed to be realised in the Jewish War of 66-70 AD, but despite the catastrophic war, the hosts of heaven did not arrive, and nor did Jesus. The promise of the Parousia disappeared. Some leader of the Christian Church wrote an epistle, supposed to have been penned much earlier by S Peter, to revive their faith. People this author called scoffers, another popular Essene word, were mocking the Christians who had been expecting the return:

Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.

2 Peter 3:4

His excuses were that God had delayed the return to give sinners more time to repent, and time was different for God! A day for Him is like a thousand years, so Christians might have to wait a very long time for the kingdom to come—till kingdom come, in fact! The result was the faithless lapsed or returned to Judaism, and the bishops had to claim that God was just testing the faith of the Christians who remained. The simple Christian had to believe the kingdom would come unexpectedly—so much for the signs and prophecies—and, meanwhile, the bishops sensibly also prepared for a longer period before the same could happen again, and invented the thousand years of the millennium inserted into Revelation. Even so, this eventually ran out and became another severe test of Christian faith in the eleventh century—Christians passed the test! Heretics, however were more suspicious.

The belief in the imminent approach of the day of judgment waned during the third century, but was temporarily revived in the years 1000 then 1033, believed to be the end of the millennium. Anticipatiing the day of judgment, Christians everywhere decided further effort in this life was pointless. A thousand years before, Paul had had to contend with the same beliefs. Christians sold their property, aiming to live on the proceeds until the day arrived. Some hoped to ensure a place in the coming kingdom by giving everything they had to the poor, and opting to be “the Poor” themselves when the day came. Others gave all their possessions to the Church. The Church was naturally cynical enough to accept these gifts. The donors brought the end of the world on to themselves, dying in poverty, while the Church found itself with the endowments to build cathedrals.

The outcome of Jewish war allowed the gentile Christians of the empire to take a pro-Roman stance and prove that generally they were not a Jewish sect, and by 100 AD at the latest, the Christians were no longer considered Jewish by the Roman authorities. Not that they had ceased, with the passing of the forty years, to believe in the return of Jesus, soon. They still read their gospels with the mind set of the Essenes—checking out the signs. Nothing has changed today. They are still looking for prophecies to be fulfilled, and so they were then. Every time some castastrophe happened, they looked at the little apocalypse in Mark, and foresaw the end of the Roman empire. Needless to say, patriotic Romans got annoyed.

Titles and Code

The Essenes were in part a secret society. Believing they were fighters of a holy war, they were fond of communicating in code. It is the origin of the healing miracles in the gospels where sickness is the metaphor of degrees of sinfulness and apostasy. Jesus is curing these people, described as lepers, paralytics, blind and deaf, of moral sickness not physical sickness. It is also why Jesus spoke in parables. When apocryphal but unquestionably Christian gospels like the Gospel of Thomas are examined, many of the sayings of Jesus seem cryptic, and the gospel begins saying it records the “secret words” of Jesus written down by Judas Thomas, the Twin. The parables of the canonical gospels have been “explained” by the authors. They put explanations of them in the mouth of Jesus, but the explanations seem absurd because they hardly differ from the obvious interpretation of the parable. It is because the parabolic nature of the original has already been mainly opened up, making the explanations virtually redundant. It has not happened in Thomas.

Similarly, the Essenes seem to have had coded titles. Thomas is traditionally the twin of Jesus, and in pictures like the Last Supper, he is an identical twin, though the birth narratives make no mention of Mary giving birth to twins. Perhaps “the twin” was the coded title of some official position in the hierarchy. That it was a tradition from the outset could have been why a rumour arose that Jesus did not himself die on the cross. “The twin” could have stood in for him, or could have pretended he was Jesus after his death, accounting for the post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus. The allegation was made, because even the bible has scenes transparently invented to refute it. Thomas and the resurrected Jesus are conspicuously arranged to be together in the same room, with “doubting” Thomas testing Jesus for veracity. It was to prove that one was not standing in for the other.

New Testament scholar, Helmut Koester, thinks the sayings of Thomas pre-date the canonical gospels, and many possibly pre-date the gospel events, being Essene sayings used by a succession of Righteous Teachers before being finally attached to the most famous of them, Jesus. The sayings in Thomas often appear in the canonical gospels in essentially the same form, suggesting this might be the missing sayings source, “Q ”, long supposed by textual analysts of the bible. In 370 AD, the archbishop of Alexandria ordered all Christians in Egypt to destroy the “heretical” books in their possession. The monks of an, even then, ancient monastery took the precaution of burying the heretical books of their library safely in the sand hoping to retrieve them in less illiberal times, but they never came! The books remained hidden for 1600 years until they were discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi. The Gospel of Thomas was among them.

Thomas also explains what seems to have been another title, Barabbas, Son of the Father. The Barabbas of the gospels was a rebel who had led an insurrection and was being held in jail, and chosen by the perfidious Jews in exchange for the life of the innocent Jesus! Jesus was Barabbas! He it was who always referred to his father in heaven, and Christians are certain he was the Son of God. Since Barabbas, in Aramaic, means “Son of the Father” it is a coincidence of vanishingly small likelihood that a revolutionary should have been held in jail with a surname that was uniquely applicable to another Jesus, Jesus the Nazarene. For both were also called Jesus! A different sort of twin of Jesus has appeared, a man with the same name! The author of Thomas writes:

When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realise that it is you who are the sons of the living father.

Not only is this manifestly gnostic, it explains that the Essenes were a brotherhood—all initiates were sons of the Father, sons of God! All in this state of self-awareness had the title Barabbas. The word Barabbas appears several times in Acts of the Apostles in a bastardized form—Barnabas, Barsabbas—an attempt by the author to hide an embarrassing truth. The Essenes thought of themselves as the bridgehead of heaven on earth, and Jesus told the Nazarenes it:

What you look forward to has already come, but you do not recognize it.

The Gospel of Thomas

They were angels in waiting, just as the old priests of the traditional Persian temple had been. They also gave themselves the titles “The Just” or “The Righteous”. Pagels notes that the Gospel of Philip takes the title “Son of the Father” even further. The angelic state of the Essene initiate is not merely a Christian “but a Christ”. This astonishingly blasphemous sounding belief to modern ears is the very belief of the Cathars. So all Essene initiates seem to have been Sons of the Father, or Christs, all were brothers, and one seems to have been designated the twin brother of the leader or Nasi. He has no particular role in the gospels except as a doubter, and a doubter is a kind of adversary, a satan. He challenges an averred truth. Elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus addresses Peter as Satan, and Judas, in Luke, is entered by Satan. The Essenes might have had a ritual role of Satan, and this is being recognized in these passages, but, bearing in mind that Satan and Michael were mythical sons of God, effectively twins though of opposite persuasions, the title of ritual Satan might have really belonged to Thomas. A ninth century ivory book cover in the library of Frankfurt university, depicting the temptation of Christ by the Devil in the wilderness, shows the Devil as Christ’s twin!

Moreover, Seth or Set might be the origin of the Hebrew word “Satan”. Whether the Israelites were believed to have left Egypt with the Hyksos around 1600 BC or in the time of the nineteenth dynasty Pharaohs, the popular Egyptian god in each case was Set. So, the Israelites, assuming they must inevitably been influenced by the prevailing beliefs of the Egyptians before the exodus, will have modelled their God, Yehouah, on Set. However, the exodus myth is unhistorical, so this identification of Yehouah with Set does not arise.

Set is the wicked brother of Osiris in Egyptian myth, but was not always a wicked god. On inscriptions, Set was “a strong god, “the powerful one of Thebes” and “Ruler of the South”, whose anger was to be feared” and whom the Greeks called Typhon. He is a sun god who fires arrows of heat, the god of the desert, of drought and thirst, and of the sterile ocean. Set was identified with all destruction and the receding of the waters of the Nile.

Set is the opposite of his brother, Osiris, who is fertilising moisture, the rising Nile—life. Osiris was thought of as moral goodness, but succumbed in the struggle with evil. Set slayed Osiris, as night overcomes the light of the sun. He was revivified as a god but, through his experience, took charge of dead kings, but appeared also to the living as his son Hor, who forces Set to submit and to make the old serpent, Apophis, surrender its spoil. So the sun sets then rises again, just as men die but are reborn. In Christianity, Set became Satan, and Hor became Jesus. Set was inimical to life, and had been castrated by Hor, just as Jesus was supposed to have rendered Satan impotent, but still thrashing about unbound:

The power of Typhon, although dimmed and crushed, is still in its last agonies and convulsions.

Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris

Set was the sun god of the summer heat, whereas Hor, the son of Osiris—Osiris reborn—was the god of the winter sun and the inundation. Hor had lost an eye to Set—the hot summer sun had been put out, leaving Hor only with the fertilising winter sun. Plutarch identifies Typhon with relentless heat of the sun, and Osiris with the moon. Osiris is associated with the night, the moon and the night time sun, perilously travelling in the realm of the serpent, Apophis, back to the dawn. Set was associated with the serpent, Apophis, which threatened to swallow up the sun each night. Set is a storm god, and storms swallowed up the sun. Storms were not necessary for fertility in Egypt as they were in the Levant, but an identification of Seth with Baal Hadad might have motivated the Asiatic conquerors called the Hyksos to worship him. Even so, he remained a popular Egyptian god until the twenty second dynasty or later when he became associated with wickedness. Plutarch wrote:

The Egyptians occasionally humiliate and insult him at certain festivals. They nevertheless propitiate and soothe him by means of certain sacrifices.

The Egyptians are said to have sacrificed a donkey to him by driving it over a cliff. It sounds similar to the ritual of the scapegoat. In some stories the donkey were ridden by a red-headed man. Seth was red, and the donkey was his beast. Jesus is popularly red-headed and red-bearded, and rode a donkey, sounding like a manifestation of Seth, or his twin, the divine king. Seth worship was associated with the annual death of a divine king! It draws to mind the famous graffito of the Palatine barracks dated to 240 AD of a crucified donkey inscribed, “Alexamenos worships his god”. It is easy to see the suspicions of the gnostics that the Christians had been fooled by Satan into falsely worshipping him.

Thomas has this strong warning against lying:

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate—for these things are manifest in the sight of heaven.

With the suppression of the Gospel of Thomas, Christianity conveniently got rid of its most explicit command not to lie or do hateful things. Having got rid of it, the churches could get as corrupt as they liked as long as the corruption could be justified in some theocratic sense. They finished up burning people with no fear of God’s vengeance. Liars for God were not liars at all, and burning human beings was what God wanted, however hateful it might seem.

John’s Gospel

Satan and hell are essential to early Christianity. The temptation of Christ by Satan in the wilderness in Matthew is much more detailed than in Mark. Satan invites Jesus to prove he is a Son of God, and then offers him “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory”. The world, in this understanding, is in the gift of the Devil! It is the Devil’s own kingdom and is wicked, contrasting with the pure and incorruptible kingdom of God, a static and timeless place where nothing can corrupt because there is no time for corruption to happen in. Time is Satan, and heaven is free of the Corrupter. Again these are notions later attributed to the gnostic heretics, yet are plainly implied in the bible itself.

The ancient hierogamos occurs again in the gospels as the parable of the king’s wedding (Mt 22, cf Jer 2:1-3:20; Isa 50:1; Hos 1:2-3:5) where the great king (God) invited his people (the Jews) to a wedding (his own with Israel, but Christianised into his son’s). His ungracious people refuse to attend, and so others (Christians) were invited instead. The king, finally, destroyed the ingrates and their city, a reference to the Roman destruction of the Jews and Jerusalem after the Jewish War. God did it by using Satan, the Romans, holding to the view that God was responsible for all good and wickedness in the world.

John’s gospel is the most Essene, the most Persian and the most dualistic of the gospels:

Within the ancient world, it is only Essenes and Christians who escalate conflict with their opponents to the level of cosmic war.

E Pagels, The Origin of Satan

John immediately stamps the distinction of light and darkness as fundamental, with his phrase, “in the beginning”, taking the reader back to Genesis when light and dark were separated out. The coming Eschaton would cause the separation of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, and Jesus urges his followers to become Sons of Light.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

John 1:5

Light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

John 3:19-20

This is Persian dualism filtered through the Jewish dualism that is demonstrated in Essenism. He is very Persian in his emphasis on truth and lies, the Liar and the Father of Lies. Satan does not appear at all in John, but the theme and setting are clear. Satan has no need to appear because, just as Zoroaster made clear, albeit not clear enough for his followers, the principles of Good and Evil manifest themselves, not supernaturally, but through human thoughts, words and deeds. Human beings can only be aware of the cosmic drama and participate in it in the human realm. So, in John, Satan “appears” as those who did his bidding.

In John, the human drama of Jesus is given a cosmic setting—the crucifixion is an event in the cosmic battle, the climax of a divine conflict. This same evangelist is traditionally the author of Revelation in which the cosmic battle is described. Satan is a huge red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. It sweeps a third of the stars to earth. It attacks a woman giving birth to a child, attempting to eat the child. Then the archangel Michael leads the battle against the wicked angels. The dragon ends up attacking the Christians. It was originally an allegory of the Roman enemy, the Jewish collaborators and the fallen angels of the Jewish priesthood.

At the version of the Last Supper in John, we read:

Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the prince of this world be cast out.

John 12:31

Jesus describes one of the twelve disciples as a devil, but it is the author who specifies Judas:

Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?

John 6:20

The ruler of this world is coming…

John 14:30

This is the gnostic devil, the ruler of the material world, and he was coming along with the arresting party as Judas.

Satan as the Jewish God

The gnostic identification is strengthened when Jesus says to “the Jews”:

You are of your father the Devil, and you want to accomplish your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning.

John 8:44

Though never appearing in person, not only is the Devil revealed as the antagonist in this drama, but the Jews are his sons or slaves. It can only be satisfactorily read as meaning that the God of the Jews was Satan, the gnostic demiurgos, and the true God was elsewhere, in a pure and spiritual realm. Modern Christians can only wriggle on this hook, or depend as usual on the ignorance of their flocks. If necessary, they excuse the evangelist, saying he did not mean Jewish people. He simply used the word “Jew” to “symbolise” theologically the forces of darkness as a people of the Devil. It was an unfortunate choice of word, you understand, but not sinister! Jews were the creatures of the Devil and the forces of Darkness, but these Jews were not Jews. It is an admission that the Holy Ghost, supposed to be the guardian of the integrity of God’s inspired Word, had again fallen asleep on duty.

More honest Christians have given up the denial. Samuel Sandmel says the gospels cannot be exonerated of what came to be called anti-Semitism, meaning anti-Jew, as though every other Semite in the world did not count. A particular group of people, those at first chosen by God were singled out by the Christian evangelists as the epitome of human evil. Both the Jews and their God were identified as Satanic, but some Christians pretended their God had not been so identified, becoming the modern ones, while others counted their God as being Satanic, becoming gnostic Christians. After all, Yehouah boasted that he was the creator of evil:

I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create evil. I, Yehouah, do all these things.

Isaiah 45:7

This one God accepted responsibility for all good and evil in the world. Do Christians realise this? If they do, why do they perpetuate the destructive view that evil is caused separately by a different supernatural monster? The Gnostics thought there was only one monster, Satan, a son of God, and, in his own right god of the material world and, specifically, the Jews. They could point to the awful atrocities this god committed and forced His own people to commit, and remain recorded in the Jewish scriptures as evidence that people had to be deluded ever to imagine that this was a Good God! He began with His greatest crime, killing off the whole human race bar a few favoured individuals through a flood of the whole world as deep as mount Ararat. Then he burnt up the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, practising, at an early stage, the method of killing their fellow human beings preferred throughout history by Christians. This God killed unknown numbers of Egyptians through plagues, famine and tidal waves, not to mention His angels specially sent to kill first-born children and even animals:

And it came to pass, that at midnight Yehouah smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of cattle.

Exodus 12:29

Another murderous angel, unless it was one of the others, on the instructions of this Yehouah, killed 185,000 Assyrian soldiers merely doing their duty. Yehouah beset the people of Gath with disgusting cancers (1 Sam 5:9-10). Under the instructions of Yehouah, Joshua massacred the citizens of Jericho, Ai, Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Gezer, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, murdered the king of Hazor, killed five captured kings in cold blood, hanging them on five trees, and destroyed many more Canaanite towns and their people. In many cases, proudly listed individually, he…

…smote it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all the souls that were therein, he let none remain…

…smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings. He left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as Yehouah God of Israel commanded. And Joshua smote them from Kadeshbarnea even unto Gaza, and all the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon. And all these kings and their land did Joshua take at one time, because Yehouah God of Israel fought for Israel. And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, unto the camp to Gilgal.

Joshua 10:40-43

Joshua also placed a curse on the broken walls of Jericho in the name of Yehouah that was fulfilled by the God when Jericho’s walls were rebuilt by Hiel:

And Joshua adjured them at that time, saying, Cursed be the man before Yehouah that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho, he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.

Joshua 6:26

In his days Hiel the man of Bethel built Jericho; he laid its foundation in his first-born Abiram, and he set up its doors in Segub his youngest, according to the Word of Jehovah that He spoke by the hand of Joshua the son of Nun.

1 Kings 16:34

So two boys had to be built into the walls and gate to satisfy Yehouah’s curse. Whatever morality there is in this is easily lost in its sheer primitive blood lust, and Gnostics would have thought so. Yehouah earlier told Moses to take vengeance on the Midianites (Num 31:1-2). The fate of the Midianite girls, commanded by Yehouah, was the proverbial fate worse than death:

And they warred against the Midianites, as Yehouah commanded Moses, and they slew all the males… And Moses said unto them… Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Numbers 31:9, 15, 17-18

This is a monstrous war crime. Do Christian mothers know what their own bible says, what they expect their sons and daughters to read and fashion their moral behaviour by? And this God is just as bad to His own people. David had numbered the people and was asked to chose one of three options offered him by Yehouah. They were three days’ pestilence, a seven year famine, or for David to flee for three months before his enemies. David picked the pestilence when the flight before his enemies looks the just choice. Yehouah killed 70,000 innocent Israelites at the wheat harvest for David’s failing:

So Yehouah sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to the time appointed, and there died of the people from Dan even to Beersheba seventy thousand men.

2 Sam 24:16

There does not seem to be much justice here, but plainly Yehouah considers humanity no better than wheat chaff. Even when the punishment is for their sins, you have to think what then is the meaning of the free will He had already given them. Is free will divisible? They have free will only as long as they do what God tells them. It does not seem free by any normal meaning of the word! Gnostics noticed this, and thought it devilish.

Deuteronomy 8:6-10 tells us that we should stone to death anyone who contradicts our faith in Yehouah. That is a monstrous commandment, and is itself satanic. It avers that truth is defined by one group of people merely on their say so, and no valid evidence. Not to accept their “truth”, which they call God’s Truth is reason enough to kill anyone. Every inquisitor, witchfinder and crusader thought the same, killing and torturing mercilessly those who contradicted them, and often just those they did not like. It is inevitable for Christians. Each one of them is certain because they believe they are certain, and for no good reason otherwise, that they, and no one else, guard the divine truth. It is an encouragement to megalomania. They all think they are God. Only God guards divine truth—only God knows what it is! Christians believe they know God’s truth dogmatically. Yet the only truth we have must be judged empirically. It is judged to be true from its agreement with reality. Christians just cannot understand that.

God begins to look like the monster, finding any excuse to kill people in large numbers and in barbaric ways, as well as doing unspeakable things to young boys and girls while they are still living. He is so arbitrary and treacherous that he even tried to kill his chief prophet, Moses, in what seems a fit of pique or divine madness (Ex 4:24-26). All of this, and more, told the Gnostics that the Jewish God was Himself wicked, and had set up the material world with its people without the knowledge or permission of the true God.

Paul

No one is more revered, other than Jesus, among New Testament characters than Paul. Paul is thought by many to have been the real founder of Christianity. Without his evangelism, Christianity would never have got beyond Judaea. Paul too saw the coming kingdom of God as the outcome of a cosmic war, but he wanted no implication of a Christian role as insurrectionist againt Rome. Thus, Paul commands his followers:

Obey the higher powers, for there is no authority except from God, and the powers that exist are instituted by God.

Romans 13:1

He unwittingly criticises Christ Jesus in saying this. If Jesus had followed this command by Paul, he would have remained a carpenter. Jesus was not obeying the authorities when he overthrew the tables in the temple. Money changing went on there perfectly legally in the eyes of the authorities, and encouraged by them, but Jesus disagreed, whether the priests were powers instituted by God or not. He obviously disagreed with his evangelist as well as the priests. Jesus jeered at the scribes and the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites, yet they, along with the priests and Sadducees were among the higher powers in Jerusalem, instituted there by God, Paul said. Now, we have to agree with Paul, if we understand God as being almighty. If the priests were doing something God was strongly against, then God has the wherewithal to settle the matter without having to get a man to do it for Him.

The fact is that the gospels were written to favour mainly the Romans and denigrate the Jews, but the author of Revelation was a Jewish Christian, who told the seven churches of Asia Minor that God hated the Nicolaitans (Rev 1:6,15), a Christian sect which declared the Mosaic law (nomos) not necessary for salvation (antinomistic), Irenaeus said. The warning against “those who say that they are apostles and are not” means Paul, who was also antinomistic, like the Nicolaitans, finding no sin in eating with Pagans, even though the meat might have been offered as a sacrifice to idols (Rom 14, 1 Cor 8). A follower of antinomistic or Pauline Christianity, probably Lydia, a seller of purple baptised by Paul (Acts 16:14-15), in the city of Thyatira is denounced in Revelation 2:20-29. Revelation 2:25 limits salvation to Jewish Christians, those who keeps the law and hold to it till Christ’s second advent:

But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as have not this [Pauline, antinomistic] doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan, as they speak, I will put upon you none other burden. But that which ye have already hold fast till I come. And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations, And he shall rule them with a rod of iron, as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers, even as I received of my Father.

This is plainly anti-gentile, but Paul was a Roman citizen. The earliest Christians ignored him, and followed the Essene teaching that Rome was the enemy. They spoke of the “archons ” of the world meaning the rulers of it, whether demonic ones or human ones in the imperial court. The Essene cosmic war was transferred to a Christian cosmic war with Rome still the main antagonist, and it is hardly surprising that Romans did not trust them. The Roman treatment of Christians as terrorists fed back in the Christian conviction that the state was Satanic. Moslems are feeling the same today because of their treatment by the US—led by an incomprehending Christian caucus.

Christ had to be king to subdue all his earthly enemies so that they could be passed on to God for judgement. So Paul says people should prepare themselves for the end of the night by arming themselves ready to appear in the light. He had a grand idea of his own role in the cosmic battle, and often seems to deify himself, citing Satan as his personal opponent. Thus, Satan prevented him from returning to see the Thessalonians (1 Thess 2:17-19). The ultimate enemy was death (1 Cor 15:24-26)!

Death being the consequence of time, the real defeat here is of time. Chaos or disorder is a function of time. Today we call it entropy, and it is known to get bigger as time passes. Time therefore makes things decay, and makes living things die and putrefy. Entropy is corruption. With no passage of time, nothing can corrupt, nothing can decay or die. The victory of Christ over Satan is the victory of the static over the dynamic, of fixity over motion, and permanence over change. It is why Christians are overwhelmingly conservative. Heaven is motionless forever—only the cessation of time can stop entropy from maximising. In Persian religion, Ahriman is time, as his representations, which are like those of Zurvan, show. Ahuramazda’s Good Creation was a motionless perfect tableau. What is perfect can only change for the worse. It was the act of Ahriman in introducing imperfection that introduced change and set the world in motion.

Besides Satan, Beelzebub, and the Devil (appearing first in Jesus Sirach), other names used in the New Testament are the Prince of this World, the great dragon, the old serpent, the prince of the devils, and the Antichrist. This Christian Satan is a reversion to the Ahriman of the Persian religion. He has his own realm that struggles with and counters the kingdom of God. The Christian claim was that this Satan had already been defeated by the redeeming death of Christ. He has been conquered, but is still unfettered, and able to cause damage until the Second Coming, an event that forever recedes into the distant future.

Right from the beginning of Christian evangelizing, Paul’s lead on the Devil was taken up. Anyone who criticized Paul’s version of Christianity was satanic. Satan was responsible for every contrary act that happened to Christians. This satanic monster united Christians above all. Ultimately it made monsters out of them! Eventually, the center of the Church accused Christians within its own ranks of being Satanic.

The struggle between competing versions of Christianity lent some of its characteristics and a vital theological function to Satan as the Prince of Error and the Father of Lies, he became the arch-heretic, the name under which rival teachers were denounced.

Neil Forsyth, cited in P Stanford, The Devil

The haloed Christians closed ranks against the cloven-hooved Christians. Clement, about the third pope, in his epistle to the Corinthians (96 AD), told them its elders had the apostolic authority bestowed on them by Christ, but the dissenters were acting on “the promptings of the adversary”. Soon, all unpopular decisions by the elders of churches were being imposed by neutralising the opposition as satanic. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, martyred in 107 AD, wanted all authority to be in the hands of the bishops. He believed the fall of Adam had introduced evil into the world, but the resurrection of Christ had dealt it its death blow, though, until the Parousia, Satan writhed in his death throws causing untold damage. Writing to the Ephesians, Ignatius said:

Do not let yourselves be anointed with the foul smell of the teaching of the prince of this world lest he capture you and rob you of life to come.

The threat of this evil prince and the promise of eternal life were persuasive indeed to simple people, and still are! It is the gnostic idea, and especially under threat from gnosticism which was more firmly rooted in Persian dualism, and had Satan actually dominant in the material realm, the mainstream Church eventually had to prescribe Satan carefully:

He could not be an equal and opposite force to God, the master of this world against the master of the next. The framework they developed as a response—a half-way house between a theological monism and a practical dualism—has remained the bedrock of Christian belief ever since.

Peter Stanford, The Devil

Stanford describes gnosticism as “an amalgam of ideas borrowed from the Greek philosophers, from Judaism and from Zoroastrianism”. Christianity was an amalgam of the same elements! So, this analysis puts the roots of both movements in the same soil, and it is Zoroastrianism that is itself at the root of Greek philosophy and Judaism. “Amalgam” is, however, the right word in Stanford’s metaphor, for the Persian religion melted imperceptably with the local traditions precisely because the Persians were shrewd enough, in the provinces of the Persian empire, in taking care not to make their policies obvious. When the Persians were replaced by the Greeks as world rulers, these fusions themselves were melded together again. Christianity and gnosticism were two outcomes. The gnostic ideal was pleroma or fulfilment. Gnosticism came more directly from dualistic Persian religion, spread by the Magi, a caste of holy men left unemployed in the west when Persia fell so quickly before Alexander’s Macedonians, and Persepolis and the vast library of Zoroaster’s works were destroyed. These Magi became peripatetic healers, exorcists and magicians, fusing a variety of amalgamations of the Zoroastrianism and Mithraism they knew with the Greek and Jewish traditions they came across in the 500 years after Alexander. The Macedonian conquerors created the tribes of magicians, and they in turn had an enormous influence on the Hellenized culture of the next 500 years, until they eventually conjured Christianity as the new culture.

The Magi had the Zoroastrian knowledge of a coming Eschaton, and a saviour called by them the Saoshyant. Once the Zoroastrian books had been burnt, they alone held this knowledge, and when the Parthians split off Persia once again from the west, this knowledge began to look more eastern and esoteric. It was mainly memorized knowledge and so was mutable, being written down, when it was, in different forms. The essential point for the Magi was that secret knowledge of salvation—gnosis—gave them a living. These Magi were mainly individual teachers, at least initially, but over hundreds of years the secret knowledge of pleroma varied among them. Various religious societies were set up to examine the theology of it. Bands of students, mathetes, learners or disciples, in most larger cities investigated the doctrines of salvation and immortality, and enthusiasts, hagioi, holy ones, or therapeutai, healers, applied the new principles in life. By the time the Essenes lost a notable leader expected to have been a Jewish saviour, or messiah, there were many gnostic teachers whose students formed into these schools and societies. They then took on board the new revelation of Christ, symbolised in the gospels by the three Magi, and transformed into many schools of gnostic Christianity by the second century AD. No one knows which of them was closest in beliefs to the earliest Christians, except that it is unlikely to have been like modern Protestantism and Catholicism. It is much more likely to have had a more clearly gnostic basis, and Paul’s letters and John’s writings show it.

Zoroaster was cleverer than his followers in knowing that Good and Evil were entirely human choices. The battle between them was within the human personality, though the outcome of this mental battle would generate thoughts, and they in turn would bring about words and deeds. The Iranians had inherited a polytheistic religion and to symbolise the ethical duality he had conceived, Zoroaster wanted to get rid of all except a good God. This he did by reducing all the others to evil spirits, a magian trick later repeated by the Christians. Their leader was Ahriman the Persian Satan. The good God, Ahuramazda also retained a few aspects or yazatas (angels) that had been old gods and goddesses, presumably popular ones that could not easily be demonised, or were personifications of good qualities. People could appeal to these yazatas for help in their weakness, but, for Zoroaster, it was psychological assistance to bring them to the right decisions.

Evil manifested itself in human nature as “The Lie”. Telling lies was submitting to the evil within us, and counted against people at Judgement Day, for everyone had a balance of their good and wicked thoughts, words and deeds in the Book of Life. The dead soul was judged on this basis. The souls were sent over the Cinvat Bridge which magically implemented the judgement, it being broad and wide for the righteous souls seeking salvation but narrow and wobbly for the wicked ones, who therefore fell off into the Abyss below. Salvation was to return to the state of Ahuramazda’s perfect creation, a timeless and static wotld that would be eternal because the dominion of time was over! All the main elements of Christianity, Judaism and even Greek philosophy exist in Zoroaster’s system, even as we know it, and most of it was incinerated by the most famous pupil of Aristotle.

In this system, the present world is under the dominion of time. Time permits change, and change from the originally perfect creation can only be for the worse. The material world we live in is therefore corrupt and corruptible. Within it Good and Evil are at war, but Good will ultimately win given the decision of humanity to take its side. This is Zoroasters’s whole point. We people decide to chose Good or Evil, and that decision, each time it is taken, is a tiny battle in the cosmic war. Later and lesser men, as they do, emphasize the wrong things and make religions—the motivation to live morally—into absurd supernatural fancies that end up as excuses for taking evil decisions. Killing and lying for the supernatural God is justified in modern religions like Christianity. These religions in practice are victories for the evil that men do, the evil within them—Satan—whether done gratuitously or in the name of God.

What is horrible, indeed fascistic, about the teaching of Paul is the way that, from the beginning, there was no defence against the Christian accusation of being an agent of the Devil.

Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So, it is not strange if his servants disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.

2 Cor 11:13-15

With this belief, right is wrong, and it soon follows that wrong is right. No matter how just someone might try to be, a fanatical Christian with this in mind would be unable to see it. That is why initially sympathetic Roman magistrates became frustrated. Only by professing Christianity could anyone escape the accusation of being Satanic. It was a much stronger recruiting factor than any other, especially when the Church began to feel its power challenged by the heretics. Yet, Christians cannot seem to see that Paul’s dictum is self-condemning. The angel of light of Christianity was Christ, but Paul says Satan could disguise himself as Christ. How do Christians know he did not? Was Paul trying to tell them something? Again, gnostics got this far and deduced that the Christ on the cross was indeed a Satanic trick, to set up a false religion with false sacraments and rituals. Satan’s servants could disguise themselves as righteous men—Christians presumably. Did anyone volunteer to remind the Dominican, the Franciscan, the Jesuit and the Catholic and Protestant clergymen, who competed to be the best roasters of human flesh among God’s flocks, that Paul had said this? No doubt the ones who tried were quickly accused under this very teaching, and cooked to death themselves.

Christian Martyrdom

Early Christians regarded Satan as the Prince of this World, and this belief dominated in the Church as long as Pagan authorities remained in power. As soon as they were replaced by Christian rulers, and Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, the Church gradually dethroned Satan and reinstated God as governor of the world. 1 Peter, not a letter of the apostle himself, but a later pseudepigraph (a forgery), echoed Paul in urging Christians to obey Roman law:

For the sake of the Lord, accept the authority of every human institution.

1 Peter 2:13

Explicit instruction like this explode the myth of Christian martyrdom. If Christians obeyed the laws of Rome, then there is no reason under the sun why the Romans would have martyred them. All they had to do was accept the authority of the Roman magistrates. Many did. The ones who are remembered are those who did not.

Christians and gnostics alike saw the world itself as evil, and some of the early Christians could not wait to get out of it. As soon as they had been washed free of sin by baptism, as they were led to believe, they killed themselves, convinced that the purity of their newly washed soul took them straight to heaven. This could have been a severe disadvantage to the procreativety of the Christians, and so S Augustine discouraged it by declaring suicide a mortal sin.

As the bible repeatedly says, the world is ruled by a Prince of Darkness. Why should Christians therefore think otherwise? Modern apologists say gnosticism was pessimistic and at odds with its environment, but it is hard to see why it is more so than Christianity itself. Christians, they tell us in their myths, hated the Roman rulers and gods, refused to obey their magistrates and gladly were eaten by lions for their faith. It sounds much at odds with its environment to me, and pessimistic too. But special pleading is the particular type of lie that Christians like to use. The truth is that the first Christians were gnostics.

Revelation harks back to earlier apocalyptic visions but applies them to around 100 AD, to the Rome of that day. Rome is Satan (Rev 20:2). As Pagels notes:

The Christian movement encouraged people to abandon ancestral customs and break the sacred bonds of family, society and nation.

E Pagels, The Origin of Satan

These were the very ties that Pagan culture honoured above all, and that gave such offence to them when people they knew, especially their daughters, rejected them for Christianity. Yet, for all that, Christians were rarely in danger of their lives, as Christian mythology pretends. They were disliked and harassed by the police up to a point, but the periods of open persecution were few and short, not many were killed, and, in the early years, most of those who were were Jews not Christians. Serious Jewish wars in 66-70 and 132-135, with outbreaks of rioting and dissension between, led to massacres of Jews, many of them messianic because the dissension in Palestine always had a strong messianic element. The Jews in the wider empire and Rome, in particular, who rose in support of the revolutionaries, were called messianic Jews or messianists—in Greek, “Christiani ”. They were not Christians. If any were, it was because the Romans still thought of Christians as being a Jewish sect. The martyrdom of Christians was thus exaggerated hugely by the messianic Jews who were really dying at the time. Christian shepherds know it, and, by perpetuating it, they are lying. The later maltreatment of so called heretics and witches by Christians was a far bigger crime, and ought to be put in the balance with the supposed Christian martyrs. It is usually ignored or excused.

Examination of the earlier cases show that the Christians were not “persecuted”, if that means unjust harassment. They were pursued for legal reasons. It is not enough to say that Roman laws were wrong. They were laws and applied to all. When Christians refused to obey the law in its requirement to show loyalty to the emperor and the state by sacrificing to the state’s gods, they were punished. The law was applied, as it is in our civilisations, by magistrates or judges, whom the records show were often extraordinarily patient. Christians were given several opportunities and several options but some were suicidally stubborn. Pliny, when governor of Bythinia in Asia Minor, found some so stubborn he thought it would have been a good lesson to execute them for sheer obstinacy. It was not within his power to do it.

Christians had convinced themselves that the Roman rulers were Satanic, but few would have been so stubborn they preferred to be eaten by lions than to sacrifice a piece of incense to a Pagan god, with no more religious meaning to it than saluting the Stars and Stripes has. Indeed, doing that, for an early Christian, would have been idolatrous. Refusing to make a minimal offering, would have been just the same as anyone in the US refusing to honour the flag. It was an insult to the state.

The steady growth of Christianity is proof that Christians did not, in the main, offer themselves for martyrdom, and that Romans did not harass them so savagely that conversions ceased. Romans wiped out whole nations, if it was necessary to keep good order. They wiped out the Druids whom they thought were too influential, excusing it on the grounds of their own human sacrifices. They massacred Jews, Dacians, and those generally who they considered lawless. They never tried to wipe out Christians. They could have done it, especially when the movement was relatively weak, but they did not. The persecutions were indeed periodic attempts to discourage them but never amounted to massacres.

The fact is that the hierarchy of Christianity moved towards Roman Paganism despite the stories of martyrdom, indeed sheltered by them. The martyrs at the grass roots were gnostics. The change was already happening when Marcion was expelled from the Church as a heretic in 144 AD. Marcion saw the Jews as a liability to the Christian Church. Bar Kosiba had revolted in 132 and needed twelve legions and world wide massacres of Jews to be put back in order. Inevitably, it affected Christianity. Marcion followed Paul, wanted shot of the gospels except that of Paul’s pal, Luke, and otherwise wanted only Paul’s epistles kept in the canon.

The Jewish scriptures were to be rejected as the chronicle of the wickedness of Yehouah, merely a “demiurgos”, an artificer that had made the material world and toyed with it for his amusement. The murder rape, wanton destruction and human sacrifices of the Jewish scriptures were obviously not describing the same god as that described by Paul! Similarly, the Ophites worshipped a snake said to have been symbolic of the real God, as Moses knew when he set up a golden image of it for Israelites to revere. In gnostic fashion, they saw the Jewish God, the demiurge or author of this visible and material world, as Satan who had usurped the position of the remote spiritual God. Yehouah was an evil god, while the serpent with his promise of giving knowledge or gnosis to man was a messenger of the good God, unlike Yehouah, free of violent passions but full of love and mercy. This true God was, as Irenæus informs us, triune, being Father, Son, and Spirit all at the same time. Having become aware of the predicament of humanity, he had sent his son, Christ, to save us. That was the only time He wiggled a finger in history, unlike the Demiurge.

The Church had no more feeling than Marcion for the Jews, but they liked to have their relgion deeply rooted in an ancient history that purported to show God revealing a long plan of salvation rather than a one off act. They also liked the idea of God wiggling His finger in history all the time and every moment. They rejected Marcion and sent him home to Pontus in Asia Minor. He was, of course, branded an agent of Satan.

How Church Fathers Saw Satan

Bishop Irenæus of Lyon (140-202 AD) did not think the world was created evil, but did agree that Satan was a fallen angel somehow infected with the sin of envy. But he put the blame for sin, in the real world, squarely on the shoulders of human beings not on supernatural angelic machinations. He also formulated the notion of the original sin of Adam and Eve, and its neutralisation by the crucifixion of Christ in atonement, thus obliging the Church to insist on the literal truth of an impossible myth. Still, it had led the God, whom we all thought was almighty, to having to offer His own son as a ransome for the souls of sinners. Satan killed the son in malice, but he revived and chased the Devil down to hell where he dealt him the death blow. And that is why the Devil is lashing and writhing around in frustration and anger before he heads for the Abyss. When this actually happens is a part of the theory not yet developed, but Christians have always been optimistic enough to believe it will be soon—about a hundred generations of them!

Inevitably, the worst attacks made by the old dying Devil are against the Church, these pages among them some Christian correspondents seem to think, but according to the New Testament, anyone not for the Church is against it. Christians always liked the simple choice of black or white, for or against. It suits the dualism they deny but which really constitutes Christianity, and it ignores the colour and shades of grey in real life that make it interesting, if more difficult to understand. This willful idiocy makes Christians dangerous people. Their simple-mindedness often reverses their professed intentions. That makes them Devilish.

Bishop Tertullian of Carthage (155-220 AD) thought that being good in life led to salvation. So, it was our own choice, but being good is to be judged on works—what we do in the time allocated to us—not faith. His idea is close to Zoroaster’s, with the Devil acting as a spoiler of the Good Creation, and humans free to support him or oppose him in his evil plans. Sounding Zoroastrian, Tertullian also has Satan as the Prince of Lies. Even wearing cosmetics is lying. Doubtless washing too! He eventually abandoned his bishopric and Christianity to become a Montanist.

Origen of Alexandria (185-254 AD) was the first intellectual Christianity had. He rejected Satan as an equal of God, but thought that evil had to be part of creation if people were to have free will. Immediately, the picture is again black and white. There is no attempt to consider whether God has to admit all degrees of evil to give humanity a choice. We have no choice about flying like a bird, or walking on water. God managed to arrange it to be impossible for us—except when He bent His own rules. Why then does He have to give us torture as an evil to use against others, or murder? Other species do not do such things, so why should we? Mind you, Origen was also bold enough to reject parts of the bible as literal truth, such as Adam and Eve. The fault in the Devil was pride not lust, as he had set himself up with his fellow rebel angels to tempt God’s final work, humanity, away from Him. Here again was the cosmic battle. The death and resurrection of Christ tipped it against Satan. Christ lured him beyond his power then nipped into hell to break him for ever. He could still be dangerous but was easily scared off by any Christian yelling “Jesus” at him!

Origen sounded like the later Cathars in believing that everyone would be saved on the final day. Apocatastasis meant an ultimate restoration or redemption in which even Satan would repent. Cathars had the idea that all humanity would be saved given enough chances—rebirths. Seven were supposed needed. A few hundred years later, the Church hierarchy decided the ideas of Origen had been inspired by Old Nick himself, and he was posthumously declared a heretic in 543 AD.

Stanford thinks the Roman emperors adopted Christianity to harness “the dynamism and exuberance of the Christian community to the state”. He concludes, “It proved a forlorn hope”. Quite so. It was Christianity that was causing the rents in the fabric of Hellenistic society. By the fourth century, Christians were not persecuted outcasts, if they ever had been, but were deeply part of the fabric of the Roman state. They cannot have been as anti-Roman as they had been, but they were no less sure that the End would be coming soon. They saw no sense in serving in the legions, and gloried in every barbarian incursion as a further sign of the coming End, as was every plague, drought and natural disaster. The gospels had listed the signs of the End, and Roman Christians were no less assiduous than modern Christian prophets, 1500 years on, in reading the signs to prophesy it.

Emperors had periodically tried to do something about it with brief punitive measures, but the expectation of disaster spread by the Christians penetrated everywhere, mainly as an excuse to avoid state duties. Inevitably, it happened. Rome was sacked in 410 AD, and the western empire disappeared in 470. Naturally, these disasters were signs of the return of Christ to deliver the coup de grace to the Devil threshing about in his final delirium. Trouble was that still the kingdom did not come. It is quite impossible for Christians to ever be disappointed by the failure of their Christ to turn up—it is the eternal test of their boundless faith—so, S Augustine set himself up as God’s architect of the kingdom. He would design the New Jerusalem as the City of God. The kingdom of God was no longer to be a supernatural state of earth and heaven conjoined, but was to be built here on earth by worthy Christians as the Catholic state of God.

S Augustine believed in the power of the Devil but thought he was somehow under God’s control. Humans had to put up with individual demons snatching at their souls. Devils and humans had sin in common, and “the wages of sin is death”. Even Satan therefore has to die as a recompense for his sins. In Zoroastrianism, the Time of Long Dominion, the historical phase of the cosmos, eventually came to an end, and the original perfection was restored. In the sense that Satan is time, he necessarily dies at this point. History stops. Motion and change cease. The world remains a static tableau for ever and ever thereafter.

Christians once knew this. The second century Christian but noncanonical work, the Protevangelium, gives a hint of the everlasting kingdom of God at the moment of the birth of Christ, a way of saying that the kingdom of God was beginning. It relates that Joseph was out walking at the moment Mary was giving birth. Looking up from his reverie, he suddenly sees time stop. Everything, for an instance, stopped in mid action. He is himself frozen in mid-stride. Birds in the air stop motionless in flight, and water stops flowing. Here is the concept of the perfect everlasting heaven they looked forward to—a timeless heaven. It is the Zoroastrian idea of it.

Satan had been created by God as a punishment, but S Augustine wondered how a perfectly good God could make wickedness. He concluded that God made the wicked angels by accident. They were meant to be normal perfect angels but somehow they turned out flawed. How it solved the problem is hard to see. God cannot be perfect Himself if He makes flawed angels by mistake. S Augustine agreed that the Devil was already defeated but was lashing about in pique before his demise. Origen’s idea that Satan too could repent was, however, wrong. He is “darkened by folly”. God, though, had foresight, just as the Zoroastrian God Ahuramazda had. He knew the final outcome but Satan did not. Out of this, Augustine developed the notion of predestination.

The Devil in the Dark Ages

The rise of the Arab empire and the Moslem religion gave a new home to the Christian Devil. The Arabs invaded Spain and made inroads into France before they were stopped at Poitiers (732 AD). The failure of the millennium to offer any sign of the kingdom of God to Europe’s patient Christians left many of them seething in rage and frustration, realising at last the Church had duped them. Support for the Cathar heretics surged, and the Church got worried. The defence was the usual one. It was under attack by Satan, and it was not faring well. Christ could not come while Satan held the Holy Land! For the popes, the crusades were a fight against Satan and his hosts of Saracens—a distraction from the troubles at home—and soon heretics. Both were demonic.

Pope Urban II, at the Council of Clermont (1095), called for Jerusalem to be captured for Christ. Instant salvation, Moslem fashion, was promised to those dying for in the process, and those who survived were promised new lands in the east. Sound familiar? Today, the US neo-con “war against terror” is an attempt to revive the spirit of the crusades. It is given a self-justifying gloss while allowing Moslem property to be stolen. Terrorism is mainly a desperate response to injustice. Crusades compound injustice. Jerusalem was recaptured in 1099. The Saracens won it back in 1187, and the fourth crusade in 1202-4 degenerated into the savage looting of Constantinople. The crusaders projected their own barbarity on to the Saracens to excuse it. After this, the popes decided that robbing Christians was easier than robbing Saracens, so the Church next directed its robber barons against the Cathars, more sons of Satan, and much more accessible.

The repelling of the Moslem invasion of France gave rise to the genre of heroic poems called the chanson de geste, beginning with the wars between Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew, and Marsile, the Saracen king of Spain. The Song of Roland appeared about 1100, but evidently was older. It became popular when it did because of the first crusade. The characters are pretty clearly delineated into good and bad, though they are not entirely two dimensional. Later stories of the same kind began to introduce stock characters, typically demonic. The Devil’s description makes him into a Moslem, and that is why the Moslems were devils. The art of the time show armies of angelic-looking Christian knights facing up to black skinned, fanged and horned monsters with hooky noses and red eyes. It is how Christians see things still! Mohammed, in forms like Mahound, became the latest of the names of the Prince of Darkness.

One of the best educated and worldly of the Catholic Dark Age popes was Sylvester II, the first French pope (999-1003). He had been to Saracen Spain as a young man, attending the universities there to learn mathematics and astronomy. They might as well have been black magic to the typical ignorant Christian bishop and pope. Later, he was accused of being a precursor of Dr Faustus, supposedly making a pact with the Devil and obtaining a prophetic talking head in return. William of Malmesbury, a strong supporter of the crusades, used the accusation to tar both Sylvester and the Saracens with each other. Book learning and scientific skills were demonic. That is why only Saracens were good at them. Paul had urged Christians to be ignorant, so scholarship could only be demonic. Christian scholars think the same still!

The Saracens were keen on certain matters of personal cleanliness such as bathing. Christians considered such things as vanity—another Satanic habit. Yet, the crusading knights came to agree that washing and bathing were comfortable habits, and took to them. When they returned to their own countries, they arranged for bath houses to be opened in their local towns and cities. The bishops called them temples of the Devil, and places of Satanic rites. They were places also of unnatural sex, and the scenes of orgies.

Since the Saracens had been painted as Devils by the popes, and the crusades were to be great battles against the hosts of Satan, the Christian knights decided first to settle with the agents of Satan they already knew nearer to home. Jews had been fairly consistently treated as Devilish by the Christians. Satan was their father, after all! Christianity for purely dogmatic reasons sank into ignorance, filth and squalor in the Dark Ages, but Jews, forced into a few narrow fields of employment, remained literate and self-supportive, and, despite persecution, were often the only people able to do certain jobs. They were lawyers and doctors, and notably usurers, mainly for the artisans and small farmers, the princes and prelates borrowing with no compunction directly from the great cathedrals, functioning, like ancient temples, as banks. Through isolation and prudence, they often finshed up well off by comparison with the poverty of the average smallholder, and periodically subject to greedy Christian mobs seeking self-gratification and loot. Clerics encouraged it, often as a safety valve, so long as the targetted Jews were not “theirs”—not retained by them for their services.

So it was that the crusaders, assembling in the large towns ready to move east, attacked the Jews. The practical reason was that the soldiers and pikemen had borrowed money from Jewish usurers to equip themselves for the divine war to come, pledging property in exchange. Now for their great sacrifice in saving the world from the Devil, they demanded that their debts be written off. Jews who refused were murdered. Cities like Metz, Prague and Mainz saw savage Christian mobs killing off Jews and looting their houses. A thousand Jews were killed in Mainz alone. Another reason was that the Moslems were tolerant towards people of the book, including Christians. The Jews were people of the book and also sons of Abraham and, through their scholarship, earned good positions in the courts of Saracen princes. Christians united in opposition to the two races of sons of the Devil.

The south of France had been subject to Saracen influence from the Emirate of Cordoba in Spain. Its main towns, like Toulouse, Carcasonne and Beziers had resisted the Moslem invaders, and Toulouse had never yielded. Carcasonne and Beziers did, but only briefly and had freed themselves. So there seems to be no basis for an implication of Cathar pro-Moslem treachery in their resistance to Catholic Christianity. But Saracen influence in the sciences was strong at the university of Montpelier, and the Cathar Christians were so tolerant of Jews, quite unlike the Catholics, that Provence was called Judea Secunda.

The dissension at the beginning of the second millennium caused by the feeling of Church fraudulence surrounding the failure of Christ to come on cue, impelled a succession of popes to strengthen Church organizarion and its influence over the secular states. Urban II developed the Curia as a proper professional Catholic civil service. Other popes, like Leo IX (1049-1054) spent their time in office on long tours of the regions to command priests to obey Church discipline and not to ignore or challenge papal directives. They saw that discipline had to be tight to face up to the growing unrest. They turned to the usual bogeyman—Satan. The immense new churches being built to intimidate the people were covered in carvings of fearful gargoyles, and lost souls discomfited by demons. Anyone who stood out against Rome was one of these, a dupe of the Devil, and would be branded a heretic and burnt to death to initiate their everlasting torture.

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 commanded that communion wafers and holy oil must be locked away for fear they might get into the wrong hands. Fear of the Devil pervades its decisions but nothing new was added in respect of definition of the Devil. It reaffirmed the Council of Braga of 563 when the doctrine of Satan was last discussed. Dualism was therefore again rejected, in that the Devil was subject to God, quite contrary to everyday belief and practice in the Church. The power of the devil continued to intensify until the height of the witch madness 400 years later!

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), whose schoolman ramblings are the official philosophy of Catholicism, explained that Satan had only a limited range of options for causing trouble, sounding quite assuring, but then he expanded the range until it covered everything practicable. Christians became so knowledgeable about devils that they knew exactly how many of them there were, and how many evil princes led them. Johann Weir (1515-1588) calculated there were 7,409,127 devils precisely, and they were led by 79 princes.

The Church maintained its dual aspect in the Easter and Christmas mystery plays where the stories of the bible were enacted with Satan or Lucifer as the main antagonist of God, after his successful revolution against Him. The Church, however, gradually lost direct control of the mystery plays, and they were varied greatly, especially in the introduction of humour. The Devil was made to look a fool, suggesting that heretics might have been writing the lines, not Catholics. Catholics wanted a fearful Devil, but the Devil of the mystery plays was a mockery of the Catholic Church itself. Thereafter, the Devil had the part of intriguer, harlequin, and fool. The mystery plays became part of the rebellion against the Church.

Eventually the evolution of the Renaissance got rid of the Devil on the grounds that what was an incorporeal spirit could not affect matter. By the same token, nor can God. All gods, devils, demons, ghosts, fairies and angels, are “phantasms of the brain” as Hobbes (1588-1679) called them.

The Demiurgos Today

Hubris makes one blind to morality, then what is evil seems to be good. So said Sophocles in Antigone. The Greeks saw evil not as a supernatural ogre but as a human failing. Pride and lack of regard for other people caused it, themselves the result of an excessive drive for power or anger. The Greeks thought hubris carried with it its own punishment or, at least, had consequences that should be considered before every act. It was called nemesis. Christians could learn from this, but are too stiff-necked. As professor L Kolakowski said, by being responsible for evil, the Devil lets human beings—and God—off the hook.

If there is a god responsible for this world, he is a monster or a fool. Gnostics said that the Christian God was indeed a fraudulent god, and an incompetent creator. This world is his creation, and it is a shocking imitation of the spiritual reality behind or above it. The god of this perfection is the real God. We know little of this reality beyond except for occult hints in mystical experiences, strange dreams and prophecies. For gnostics, these are the corpus callosum between imperfect existence in the physical world and perfect existence in the spiritual world, between temporal existence and eternal, which means timeless, existence. Such phenomena remind people that knowledge of the spiritual world can be had and will guide people to seek the knowledge or gnosis that will take them the perfection.

For simple people, the gnostic explanations are crude and literal to suit their mentality. When they are told they will not die, they imagine they will be reborn in a spiritualist world like the one they are used to but with alll their friends and relatives that have already died still alive and waiting for them! Or they believe they lie asleep until such time as the world is purified, then they wake up and meet all their friends. Meanwhile, they are encouraged, contrary to many people’s direct experience in life, by being taught that God above loves them and will keep them safe through His angels until Judgement Day, when they are certain they will pass the tests because they have believed. Meanwhile, they remain confident that the world will be transformed by the second coming of the Christ soon!

For gnostics, little in this is true. It is symbolic at best, and meant just to be reassuring. Gnostics have a spark within them of the spiritual world, that ensures that they are saved anyway. The spirit is immortal. The material is transient. They have to learn to disdain what is physical as much as they can, while concentrating on the spiritual world. Sacraments can help as symbols again but not magic. They are to focus attention, and some gnostics ended up disregarding them too as being part of the wicked deceptions of the material world. Gnostics needed no faith. They knew they would be saved as long as they lived like spiritual people—like Christs.

Zoroaster was convinced that the end of the world was at hand, and so was Jesus seven hundred years later. Half of all Americans still believe it today. It is an especially attractive idea for people who are suffering, whether from oppression or poverty. The reality of their material lives would be inverted in the spiritual world. God would impose justice by punishing the wicked, and saving them because they were the innocent and the good people. Of course, it had to happen soon or it would be pointless. The suffering people would all be dead anyway. But generations passed, all with the messianic expectation and despite many pretenders, nothing changed. Eventually some thoughtful people, bitterly disappointed at yet another false hope, decided that God was kidding them. He was having a laugh at their expense and could not be a good God at all. The promise of apocalypse was a promise that God rejected the world and would eventually destroy it, but not in any physical timescale. Indeed, time was the problem, and that would end too. The apocalypse was an image of this happening but was not a prophecy that it would be soon.

The dream of apocalypse was a reminder that God was ultimately in charge, and that the gnostic needed the knowledge of how to live an uncontaminated life in a wicked world. In this can be seen, the hand of Essenism again. The Damascus Document was the instruction to associate Essenes, the village Essenes, on how to live in the wicked gentile world without breaking God’s law. It is not hard to see this evolving among gentiles into gnosis.

In view of thoughts like these, Harold Bloom was puzzled why modern Americans seemed so keen on the apocalyptic idea, even though it is watered down. Americans are not generally oppressed, and even those in the middle classes, who definitely are not oppressed, hang on to their belief in the second coming being soon. Because these people are plainly not oppressed either politically or economically, the wish for the eschaton suggests a deep malaise in the American psyche. Worst still is that it it might impel some, with this malaise particularly strong, with insane religious convictions, to bring it about. In that, they are blood brothers of the Moslem fundamentalists who seem to have the same aim. Isn’t the Demiurgos—Satan—clever?

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