Christianity
Satan in the Evolution of Christianity 2
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 20 February 2004
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?
