As you'll recall, last time, we left Jesus hungry in the desert where he had just fasted for forty days and nights. He is in the desert "to be tempted by the devil." Today, before we pick up that narrative, we're going to begin part one of a multi-part study of The Devil, aka Satan. We'll call this short study "Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity."
First, allow me to reiterate what we learned last time, with a caveat: The Devil does not appear at all in The Pentateuch, and is not given a biography anywhere in the canonical Christian Bible. The caveat: though we've not discussed it yet, there is some evidence of the devil in certain intertestamental apocrypha which did pre-date Jesus by at least a century. However, it is not until the writings of the Church Father Origen in the third-century AD that we see the story of Satan as the fallen leader of angels within the Christian cosmology beginning to truly coalesce.
It would be several centuries later that the pitchfork-jabbing, cartoonish Satan, which many Christians fear today, was fully formed.
Today, we will strive to bolster our understanding with some religious and literary context on devils and demons. We have miles of ground to cover, so let's get started.
Understanding the Origin of Modern Common Conceptions of The Devil in Christianity
Part I
Devils before Satan
Today, for millions of Christians, "The Devil" is a supernatural entity that administers a fiery section of the afterlife known as Hell. This being works constantly against God to incite sin and evil in humanity, so that they will ultimately be damned by God in some fantastical final judgment and forced to spend eternity in Hell as The Devil's subjects and eternal torture victims.
During the course of this study-within-a-study, we will cover several topics. First, we will look at demons and devils in religion and literature pre-dating Judaism, for historical and literary context. Second, we will look over the various references to demons, devils and monsters in The Old Testament. Third, we will look at some particular intertestamental apocrypha. Fourth, we will look at the New Testament references to The Devil and Satan. Lastly, we will look at the major leaps that occurred over the centuries since the Apostolic Age to bring us to the modern, cartoonish conception of Satan, and of The Problem of Evil itself.
Today, we'll start basically as far back as we possibly can in history. We will start in Mesopotamia around 2150 BC, when a story called "Ninurta's Exploits" was written by an author whose name is long since lost to time.
Ninurta's Exploits follows the Sumerian God-King Ninurta on an adventure, the main feature of which is the vanquishing of an epic demon-monster called Asag. Asag, for the purpose of this study, is analogous to the Christian Satan. This demon, at the beginning of the epic of Ninurta, is said to be leading successful armies against the cities of Sumeria. His armies are unstoppable, as they are comprised of creatures made of stone - the result of the sexual union of Asag and the mountains themselves. Asag, as the story goes, runs amok across the Sumerian countryside. Ninurta, the God-King, is warned that:
[Asag] is confident that it can lay hands on the powers received by you in the abzu. Its face is deformed, its location is continually changing; day by day, the Asag adds territories to its domain.Ninurta, full of all things good, determines to go to the mountains to fight Asag. As Ninurta approaches the mountains, Asag jumps out to meet him in battle. Immediately subsequent to this comes the following epic description of Asag's might and wickedness:
For a club it uprooted the sky, took it in its hand; like a snake it slid its head along the ground. It was a mad dog attacking to kill the helpless, dripping with sweat on its flanks. Like a wall collapsing, the Asag fell on Ninurta the son of Enlil. Like an accursed storm, it howled in a raucous voice; like a gigantic snake, it roared at the Land. It dried up the waters of the Mountains, dragged away the tamarisks, tore the flesh of the Earth and covered her with painful wounds. It set fire to the reed-beds, bathed the sky in blood, turned it inside out; it dispersed the people there.The vivid descriptions that we get in this ancient text are just phenomenal. I particularly love "like a wall collapsing, the Asag fell on Ninurta," as well as "bathed the sky in blood, turned it inside out." The entire text is relatively awesome like this, although patches of the text are entirely lost to history, making some sections difficult to comprehend at all.
The story of Ninurta vs Asag, which ends with Ninurta's smiting Asag with his talking mace, highlights a good-evil dualism that existed far in advance of the dualism of Greco-Roman Christianity. Although the original purpose of this text is lost to us, it gives us a good idea of just how old the concept of a powerful supernatural evil force is. This goes to show that there would have been a plurality of demons and devils in the summation of the middle-eastern pantheon throughout not only the Apostolic era, but the entire Biblical Era, too.
For our second demon of context, let's look at the Gorgons. Grecophiles will recognize Gorgon as the name of the three creature-sisters from Greek mythology. The Gorgons were (usually) hideous and (usually) threatening entities that, in the ancient cosmology, sat somewhere beneath the Greek pantheon of gods, but somewhere above humanity. The most well known of the Gorgons was Medusa, because she was famed as having been killed by Perseus, a demigod, in a particularly memorable story. The less frequently mentioned two Gorgons were Stheno and Euryale*.
Medusa is a well known figure, even in modern times. Like her two sisters, Medusa was said to have hair made of snakes or interwoven with snakes, and her visage could turn a person to stone with just a glance. The Gorgons appear in the work of the ancient poet Homer, as well as in The Aeneid of Virgil. The word Gorgon is rooted in "gorgos," Greek for "grim or dreadful," and may be related to the Sanksrit "garjana," which meant "growling" and was probably onomatopoeic.
Images of Gorgons were used in ancient Greece to protect buildings and objects, which demonstrates that they were not understood as "purely evil," the way Satan is. Like Satan, however, Gorgons were understood to be mortally fearsome and dangerous. We might see Satan's later association with all things lizard-like or serpentine as related to the snakiness of the Gorgon sisters, which may relate to the slithery, snakey description of Asag all the way back in Sumeria.
For our third example of pre-Judaic devils, we will turn to the ancient faith of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism, an ancient monotheistic religion, was founded by a philosopher name Zoroaster as early as the middle of the second millenium BC.** Zoroastrianism's one God was known as Ahura Mazda, and, like the Judeo-Christian God, Ahura Mazda was understood to be omnibenevolent. Ahura Mazda had a rival called Angra Mainyu. Like Satan, Angra Mainyu serves as the counterpoint to Mazda's omnibenevolence, and is represented as omnimalevolent.
It is thought that Ahura Mazda was one of a pantheon of gods that existed in the ancient middle-east prior to Zoroaster, and that Zoroaster simply elevated Ahura Mazda to a position of "not having been created," or singular Godhood above all others.
Angra Mainyu may be entirely Zoroaster's creation, as we first know of this creature of pure evil from Zoroaster's own writing. In Zoroaster's Gathas, the foundational religious texts of Zoroastrianism, Angra Mainyu is shown as being the originator of lies and of sin, and as being bent on damaging the spiritual well-being of humanity.
Of the three pre-Judaic demons we are looking at today, Angra Mainyu might have the most in common with Satan. Angra Mainyu was a kind of universal scapegoat for suffering and misfortune, or a stand in for any kind of evil, just like Satan is for his believers today. Rather than pray specifically for the end to all the various ailments they faced, Zoroastrians could just pray "for the displacement of Angra Mainyu with his creatures which are likewise evil as he is, for he is filled with death," as the Gathas say. It is in this same fashion that modern Christians might pray generally for protection against Satan and his minions, rather than praying for a long list of specific reliefs or safe-guards.
This whirl-wind tour of three pre-Judaic concepts of demons or devils has, as I mentioned before, all been to expose the historical context of the concept of Satan. Before we approach The Devil in The Bible, it is important to know that devils existed before The Devil. It is important to know that the idea of demons pre-dated Satan, and that the concept of supernatural evil sprang up in multiple thought systems and in multiple locations throughout ancient history. It stands to reason that these demonic concepts pre-date history.
Next time, we'll take a look at some of the references to devils and monsters that exist in The Old Testament, and I'll show you exactly what I mean when I say that Satan does not have a biography in the canonical Jewish scripture.
Now, let's get back to The Gospel.
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Matthew 4:3 through Matthew 4:4
3 The tempter approached and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.”
4 He said in reply, “It is written:
‘One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”
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Here we have Jesus Saying Number 2. The "tempter" in verse three is obviously Satan. He approaches Jesus, who we are to understand is near death with hunger from not eating for forty days, and challenges him: "if you are the Son of God, eat some bread that you magically make out of these rocks here!"
In verse four, Shoehorn Matthew*** can be heard echoing in Jesus' reply. As we have seen over and over again, the text relates directly and constantly back to isolated, out-of-context anecdotes from The Old Testament.
Since Jesus will say this same thing again in the Luke version of the narrative, it looks like this is also a case of Shoehorn Luke, the less prominent cousin of Shoehorn Matthew. And, since it's Shoehorns Matthew and Luke, then it very well could have been Shoehorn Q, too.
Oh well. Shoehorn Everybody, I guess. Except John.
I digress.
This second saying of Jesus begins what will be a long pattern of him narrowly dodging an awkward accusation or inquiry by quoting something from The Old Testament. It begins a long pattern of other characters saying that he is, or might be, the Son of God, and him not quite agreeing with them, but not quite disagreeing either. Jesus offers less moralistic prescription here, and more focused retort.
The saying in verse four relates to Deuteronomy 8:3. In Deuteronomy 8:3, Moses is conveying God's law to the Jews and expounding upon it. He tells the reader to remember when they had been hungry and God had nourished them with manna in the desert, "...so you might know that it is not by bread alone that people live, but by all that comes forth from the mouth of the Lord."
If we look for a moral take-away, here, we have to take it from the original Deuteronomical meaning of the saying, which seems to be that possession of material things, even those that are normally considered to be of life-or-death value, is subordinate in importance to matters of spiritual fitness. This message certainly fits with the Jesus I know.
Join us next time, as the work continues. Thank you for reading. Please share.
Love.
* Euryale. Cool name!
** The span of time in which various modern historians contend Zoroaster may have lived is unusually large, with serious parties contending dates from 1500 to 500 BC!
*** I call him Shoehorn Matthew because he's always trying to shoehorn the Jesus story into a Jewish context.
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