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Where did Satan come from? How has the Judaeo-Christian concept of evil in the universe affected the way we treat each other, as individuals, as groups, and as nations? In both the Western World and the Middle East, we have demonstrated an extraordinary talent for demonizing our enemies, both real and imagined. A recent movie starred Al Pacino as senior lawyer who literally came from Hell. Iran and Iraq frequently characterize the United States as the "Great Satan." Ronald Reagan righteously labeled the former Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire." In demonizing our personal and national enemies, we often find it nearly impossible to communicate with them. Without communication, the road to understanding and reconciliation quickly reaches a dead end.

In a recent best-seller, The Origin of Satan, Princeton Professor Elaine Pagels offered an intriguing and compelling history of the gestation of the Satan concept. Our final session draws much of its content and insight from Pagel's impressive work. Our focus will be slightly different, in that we'll make a journey that takes us from Iranian Zoroastrianism to a Jewish sectarian conception of Satan in the Dead Sea Scrolls that later Rabbinic Judaism would largely reject. We will close with a brief epilogue about one Jewish offshoot group which brought the fully evolved Satan from the ancient world into the twentieth century, with profound consequences for us all.

Evil Before Satan in the Ancient Near East
For most of ancient Near Eastern history before the First Millennium BCE, it is practically impossible to find a deity who embodies only evil thoughts and deeds. The Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat, representing the chaotic forces of the sea, battled the heroic Marduk in the Creation Epic (Enuma Elish), an epic myth that probably dates back to the early Third Millennium BCE. Yet Tiamat could also present positive thoughts and emotions. She was pictured as the 'bad guy' primarily because Marduk was the intelligent hero on the side of mankind, while Tiamat embodied the violent chaos of the seas.

In ancient Egypt, the notion of undiluted evil in a divine character just doesn't exist, although a couple of "close calls" may suffice to prove the point. The sun god Re, in his daily journey through the night, would have to confront the serpent of the night, Apopi, who would attempt to thwart Re's journey. Needless to say, Apopi never succeeded, and Re was always right on time for his daily morning debut. A more disturbing story has the fertility goddess Hathor (alt.: Sekhmet) taking on the task of destroying mankind. Having made a good start of the job, Re decides to stop the annihilation by making the goddess drunk with a blood-red beer that filled the fields of the planned slaughter. The goddess ended up too intoxicated to notice her intended victims.

The "bad" gods of the ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in the Second Millennium BCE were neither the eternal enemies of the "good" gods, nor of mankind. There was no stereotypical evil deity with his own cohort of demons sworn to the destruction of all that was good.

If we look farther east and a bit closer to our own time, a mythology of absolute good and evil begins to emerge, in Iran. Zoroastrianism ultimately became the official state religion of the kings of Achaemenid Persia over 2,500 years ago. But its genesis may well date back to the period between 2000 and 1000 BCE. By the middle of the First Millennium BCE, an Iranian priest known as Zarathustra was chosen by the "Wise Lord" Ahura Mazda to proclaim not only the message of universal conflict between Good and Evil but the ultimate triumph of the Good. In a later text, the original conflict between the Lord of Good (Ahura Mazda) and the Lord of Evil (Angra Mainyu, or Ahriman) is expressed as follows:

Thus spake Ahura Mazda to the holy Zarathustra:

"I have created a universe where none existed. . . . In opposition to this world, which is all life, Angra Mainyu created another which is all death, where there are only two months of summer and where winter is ten months long, months which so chill the earth that even the summer months are icy; and cold is the root of all evil. Then I created Ghaon, the abode of Sughdra, the most delightful place on earth. It is sown with roses; there birds with ruby plumage are born. Angra Mainyu then created the insects which are noxious to plants and animals. Then I founded the holy and sublime city of Muru, and into it Angra Mainyu introduced lies and evil counsel. Then I created Bashdi the enchanting, where surrounded by lush pastures a hundred thousand banners fly. Angra Mainyu sent wild beasts there and animals to devour the cattle that serve for man's use. . . . Thus each of the marvels I have given to men for their welfare has been counteracted by a baneful gift from Angra Mainyu. It is to him that the earth owes the evil instincts which infest it."

(Graves, Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (New York, Prometheus Press, 1960), 328.)

It is with Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu that we encounter the Near Eastern embryo which will ultimately mature into the apocalyptic conflict of Light and Darkness. This end-time mythology of cataclysm will ultimately filter into many faiths, among them, early Judaism and Christianity.

Enter Satan: Early References in the Hebrew Bible
We first discover Satan in perfectly innocent circumstances, so to speak. In the story of Balaam, the wandering prophet is called upon by King Balak of Moab to lay a curse on those swarming Israelites who are threatening to take over everything in sight. As Balaam makes his way to Moab, God tries to slow his progress by placing an invisible angel in his donkey's path:

He was riding on his she-ass, with his two servants alongside, when the ass caught sight of the angel of the Lord standing in the way, with his drawn sword in his hand. The ass swerved from the road and went into the fields; and Balaam beat the ass to turn her back onto the road. The angel of the Lord then stationed himself in a lane between the vineyards, with a fence on either side. The ass, seeing the angel of the Lord, pressed herself against the wall and squeezed Balaam's foot against the wall; so he beat her again. Once more the angel of the Lord moved forward and stationed himself on a spot so narrow that there was no room to swerve right or left. When the ass now saw the angel of the Lord, she lay down under Balaam; and Balaam was furious and beat the ass with his stick.

Then the Lord opened the ass's mouth and she said to Balaam, 'What have I done to you that you have beaten me these three times?' Balaam said to the ass, 'You have made a mockery of me! If I had a sword with me, I'd kill you.' The ass said to Balaam, 'Look, I am the ass that you have been riding all along until this day! Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?' And he answered, 'No.'

Then the Lord uncovered Balaam's eyes, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the way, his drawn sword in his hand. . . .

Numbers 22:22-31

In the end, Balaam blessed Israel and cursed Moab, but that's not the issue here. The invisible angel placed in the way of Balaam's she-ass was described in the Hebrew as lesatan lo, "as an adversary to him,"or using more familiar phrasing, "standing in his way.'"he first use of the word "satan" refers to its core meaning of "adversary" or "opponent," not to an individual named Satan. Nevertheless, we have in the story of Balaam an angel who acts as an adversary, in this case, against Balaam. The story of Balaam is quite old by Biblical standards, and even its final edited version probably belongs to the Seventh Century BCE, or earlier. In this story, we have a very early conception of what Satan was in Israelite theology: he simply worked as an angel in God's service assigned the task of adversary to a human being under special circumstances.

It doesn't take long for Satan to develop an attitude. Our next passage comes from the Book of Job:

The day arrived when the gods come and present themselves before the Lord, and the Satan also came with them. The Lord said to the Satan, 'Where did you come from?' The Satan answered the Lord, 'From roaming the earth and strolling about in it.' The Lord said to the Satan, 'Have you marked my servant Job? There is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil.' The Satan answered the Lord, 'Does Job fear God for nought? Have you not hedged him round, him and all his household and everything he has? His efforts you have blessed, and his property has increased in the land. Just reach out and strike what he has, and he will curse you to your face.' The Lord said to the Satan, 'Here, all he has is in your power, But do not lay a hand on him.'

Job 1:6-12

Ironically, Satan soon disappears from the narrative after playing the brief, but pivotal role of "devil's advocate." And in this story, that's all he is: "the adversary." He has a personality which challenges God to consider the depth of Job's devotion. But God accepts the challenge as an interesting exercise, and gives "the Satan" responsibility for carrying it out with only one condition: he must not lay a hand on Job himself. Since the term "satan" carries the Hebrew definite article in the Book of Job, it is clear that the word has not yet taken on the meaning of a personal name. This divine being in God's retinue is simply playing a role: 'the adversary.' The date of the final composition of Job probably belongs in the later 7th Century BCE, or the 6th. It is almost certainly later than the Balaam narrative in Numbers.

Over the course of a century or more, a meaning and a personality have evolved in Biblical thought for hasatan, "the adversary." Yet we have not arrived at a truly demonic god of evil. In the story of Job, the most we can say we have in "the Satan" is an angelic servant of God with an attitude.

Moving from the specific personality of Satan to the more general image of Israel's neighbors, we can also detect a sharpening and more negative rendering of those nations. Although the Biblical text soars to greatness in praising Abraham and his children, "in [whom] all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (Gen. 12:3), the accumulating weight of national experience convinced Israel that its neighbors were either humorous at best, or deadly at worst. When Lot conceives children by his own daughters, those children become the progenitors of Israel's hostile eastern neighbors, Moab and Ammon. This dirty joke of an origin story was a comparatively mild way of dehumanizing Israel's neighbors. The Moabites, Edomites, Philistines and others would evolve from being the dehumanized butt of Israel's humor to the demonized enemy which, if possible, must be annihilated, as mandated by divine command. As we'll see, this process of demonization will ultimately extend from foreign nations to "heretical" groups within Israel, groups which Elaine Pagels brilliantly labels as the "enemy within."

The Emerging Image of Satan
From the later Sixth Century BCE on, Satan emerges from his role as devil's advocate to become an evil angel who deliberately opposes God's will and plans for humankind. At the same time, events in the land of Israel take some fascinating turns where the imperial enemies of the tiny states of Israel and Judah become "instruments of God's will," and the true enemies can be found among the Jewish people themselves.

Two sets of events catalyze this process. First, overwhelming imperial enemies, such as Assyria and later, Babylon, sweep down and destroy the northern Jewish kingdom of Israel (721 BCE), and later, the southern kingdom of Judah (586 BCE). Since these empires cannot be stopped, the Israelite prophets of the age transform these enemies into God's own servants given the task, a bit like the Satan in the story of Job, of chastising God's backsliding people. In 701 BCE, when the Assyrian commander yells across the Kidron Valley to the defenders of the besieged city of Jerusalem the reason why the Assyrians are there, his answer is simple: "The Lord Himself said to me, 'March against this country and lay it waste'" (Isaiah 36:10). Jeremiah later casts Babylon in a similar role when it destroys Judah and Jerusalem in 586 BCE.

The first set of events logically leads to an assumption: if the Prophets see the Assyrians and Babylonians as God's purifying instruments, then what is the corruption within the Jewish people? Are all the people guilty of transgression, or are there those who are the true agents of evil, bringing to ruin the rest of the people in the process?

With many dead, the Judean leadership exiled to Babylon, and the Temple of Solomon destroyed, Judaism might conceivably have faded away were it not for one more empire "in God's service." This time it was the Achaemenid Persians under Cyrus the Great who transformed the fortunes of the Jewish People. Like God's restoration of Job, Cyrus and his successors took a comparatively benevolent view of the Jewish People, allowing them to return to Jerusalem and rebuild both the city and the Temple (ca. 515 BCE).

The Persian sponsored restoration of the Temple should have been cause for rejoicing, but according to the prophet Zechariah in the late Sixth Century BCE, the new Temple brought out "the enemy within." When a certain Joshua was selected as the High Priest of the restored Second Temple, he met with some very high ranking opposition:

He showed me Joshua the High Priest, standing before the angel of the Lord, with (the) Satan standing on his right to accuse him. The angel of the Lord said to the Satan, "May the Lord rebuke you, the Satan, may the Lord rebuke you, He who has made Jerusalem His very own. Is not this man a brand snatched from the fire? Now Joshua was dressed in dirty clothes as he stood before the angel of the Lord. The angel said these words to those who stood before him, "Take off his dirty clothes and clothe him in splendid robes of state. . . ."

Zechariah 3:1-5

Anyone who opposed Joshua the High Priest was in league with hasatan, the Satan. Satan was now more than a mere devil's advocate, and he was directing those who opposed the leadership's restoration of the Temple under Joshua's leadership.

Within another century, the writer of Isaiah 65 would speak specifically about a faithful remnant and those who would earn the full force of God's wrath:

But you who have abandoned the Lord, and forgotten My holy mountain,. . . I commit you to the sword, all of you to fall in the slaughter. For I called and you would not answer, I spoke and you would not listen. You did what I consider evil, you chose to do what displeases me. Therefore, thus speaks the Lord God: you shall see my servants eat while you go hungry. You shall see my servants drink, while you go thirsty. You shall see my servants rejoice while you are put to shame.

Isaiah 65:11-13

No longer do we see God punishing all of Israel collectively for the sins of some or all. Now God selects the backsliders, the betrayers within the community as the 'enemy within' whom He will doom to shame and destruction. By the Fifth Century BCE, the dogma of early Judaism was beginning to formulate an angelic opponent to God who had among his followers both foreign nations and Jews who would neither hear nor obey God's call.

As we enter two centuries of Persian control beginning in 538 BCE, a second set of events begins to play its part in shaping the character and the power of Satan. Persian Zoroastrianism, with it foundation theology of final conflict between absolute good and evil, begins to permeate the religious thought of the Mediterranean world, including the emerging faith of Judaism.

The Evil Empire and Its Emperor
Powerful ideas percolated in the minds of Jewish thinkers during the Persian centuries. Increasingly, evil actions found their source in Satan. Here's an example: in the story of David's decision to take a census of the people found in II Samuel 24, the writer says that God "set up" David by telling him to take the census, an act which God had previously opposed. The story, dating to the 7th-early 6th Century BCE in its final form, seems a little forced, let alone illogical. By the time the writer of the Chronicles version of the same story put pen to parchment in the 5th-4th Century BCE, the plot had changed: "Satan rose against Israel and incited David to take a census of the Israelites" (I Chronicles 21:1). In short, the Devil made him do it. One more point: in the Chronicles text, the definite article no longer appears with the word satan. Satan is now the adversary's name: he is God's opponent personified.

The rise of Hellenism and the campaigns of Alexander the Great made the Holy Land physically and culturally part of the Hellenistic world. By the time of Alexander's death in 323 BCE, new concepts were permeating the evolving theology of Judaism: immortality of the soul, secret divine knowledge or "gnosis" known only to initiates of certain cults, fantastic monsters symbolizing great empires. Add all this to the early Judaism we discussed in the previous segment, and you have the world of the prophet Daniel:

Then I asked to know the truth about the fourth beast, different from all the rest, very terrifying, with iron teeth and bronze claws, eating, crushing and trampling underfoot what remained; and the truth about the ten horns on its head and why the other horn sprouted, and the three original horns fell. . . .

Daniel 7:19-20

At that time Michael will stand up, the great prince who mounts guard over your people. There is going to be a time of great distress, unparalleled since nations first came into existence. When that time comes, your own people will be spared, all those whose names are written in the Book. Of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth many will awake, some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace. . . . But you, Daniel, must keep these words secret and the book sealed until the time of the End.

Daniel 12:1-4

Welcome to the early Second Century BCE, the age of Daniel, and just one generation before the birth of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. While the writer of Daniel avoided the vitriolics of a final confrontation between demonic Satan and his minions against the God of Light and his archangel Michael, the spirit of the age still shone through. The various mythic beasts who paraded through Daniel's dreams were truly terrifying: they represented the destructive empires come and gone, and yet to come. But there would be an "end time" in which the rampaging evil of this world and that beyond this world would be subdued. The dead would be resurrected to judgment, and a final victory of Good would be assured. Among the evil doers of Daniel's world were the mysterious Kittim, a code name for the rising empire of Rome, a term that would also be used repeatedly in Dead Sea scrolls texts.

The leader of these beastly empires and the inspiration for their evil deeds was implicit in Daniel. The writers of Qumran a generation later would give him his name.

The Devil and the Dead Sea Scrolls
By the First Century BCE, the writers of the Dead Sea scrolls have made it official: Satan is the demonic angel leader of an awesome force in heaven and on earth that openly defies God. In a sense, the whole exercise is a wasted effort: Daniel made it clear that God's victory is a foregone conclusion, and the Qumran sect wholly agreed with this divine predestination:

To the God of Israel belongs all that is and shall be; [He knows] all the happenings of eternity. This is the day appointed by Him for the defeat and overthrow of the Prince of the kingdom of wickedness, and He will send eternal succour to the company of His redeemed by the might of the princely Angel of the kingdom of Michael.

War Rule XVII; translation: Geza Vermes

That didn't change the fact that there was evil to be confronted and obliterated, and that the Dead Sea scrolls community must be at the forefront of the conflict, both spiritually and physically. Hatred of Satan at Qumran almost took on a cheerleading kind of quality. Here's just a sample of some curse texts addressed to his evil majesty:

. . . council of the Community shall all say together, Amen, amen. Afterwards [they] shall damn Satan and all his guilty lot. They shall answer and say, Cursed be [S]atan in his hostile design, and damned in his guilty dominion. Cursed be all the spirits of his [lo]t in their wicked design, and damned in their thoughts of unclean impurity. For they are the lot of darkness and their visitation is for eternal destruction. Amen, amen.

Cursed be the Wicke[d One in all. . .] his dominions, and may all the sons of Satan be damned in all the works of their service until their annihilation [for ever, Amen, amen].

Translation: Geza Vermes

The War Rule, discussed in the preceding session of this course, makes it clear that the Dead Sea scroll community envisioned a final battle in which the hated Satan and his hordes would be exterminated with a raging fire: it shall burn the sinners in the perdition of hell, in an eternal blaze.

The War Rule battle incorporates several components and characters that resonate through the history of the Hebrew Bible and will ultimately find their way into the Christian Bible. The archangel Michael is the leader of the "sons of light," who will battle the forces of Satan, a role which he already plays in the earlier Book of Daniel. The hordes of Satan are also called the "seven nations of vanity." In Daniel and Jewish apocryphal literature, the "evil" nations of the earth are sometimes represented as individual beasts or single beasts with multiple heads. Another way of identifying the evil leader and his forces is "Gog and all his assembly gathered about him." Gog may originally have been the Lydian king Gyges of the Seventh Century BCE. Ezekiel (chaps. 38-39) transforms him into an apocalyptic leader who ravages Israel but is later destroyed by God.

By the First Century BCE, the Jewish conception of the Apocalypse, steeped in preceding centuries of evolving tradition, is complete. Let's move ahead to roughly 100 CE (or slightly later) and see what has happened to these concepts:

And there appeared another wonder in heaven; behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. . . . And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought against the angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found anymore in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan. . . .

Revelation 12:3, 7-9

And [Satan] shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle. . . .

. . . and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

Revelation 20: 7-10

The imagery of the End Time and Final Battle, conceived in the early Second Century BCE (or earlier) as shown in Daniel, refined by the Dead Sea scroll community and other Jewish sectarian groups in the First Century BCE, receives its finishing touches in the Christian book of Revelation around 100 CE. The War Rule and other Jewish sectarian documents confirm that Christianity's Apocalypse was largely a Jewish creation, modified to accommodate Jesus as the ultimate divine force.

The last statement may come as a "revelation" to some, but frankly should not. Most modern commentaries on the book of Revelation acknowledge the text's deep dependence on preceding Jewish sources, including the Dead Sea scrolls (see J.M. Ford, Revelation, Anchor Bible 38, 1975, 187-208, especially 204-5).

Christianity would borrow one more concept from Judaism: the "enemy within." Just as the War Rule, Community Rule, and other Dead Sea scroll texts identified a group of servants of Satan within the Jewish community that must be obliterated, the emerging Christian community would also find an opponent to vilify.

Epilogue: The Synagogue of Satan
The aggressive sectarian strains of Judaism that thrived through the first half of the First Century CE were essentially eliminated in the course of two Jewish rebellions against Roman rule: the Zealots' Revolt of 66-74 CE and the Bar Kokhba Revolt of 132-135 CE. The Romans destroyed Qumran and obliterated the Zealots and other Jewish groups. More devastating than that, the Romans leveled the Temple. Jews would never again restore it. Violent opposition to Rome cost Judaism its most sacred shrine, tens of thousands of Jewish casualties, and the loss of nearly all sectarian groups preaching a final conflict between the forces of good and evil. Judaism had to find a modus vivendi with Rome. The path to renewal came through rabbinic Judaism, which emerged over the next few centuries and ultimately evolved into the Orthodoxy we know today. The challenge was no longer to expel the Romans and clear out backsliding Jews. The challenge was merely to survive.

Christianity faced a similar problem. The Romans were already wary of the itinerant leader of a band of revolutionary Jews named Jesus of Nazareth, suspecting him of being just another one of the many Jewish troublemakers who wanted to boot the Romans out of Judea. The Christians knew all too well that they would suffer the same fate as other Jewish sectarians if Rome perceived them as a threat. Yet early Christianity was already imbued with the Jewish sectarian dogma of fighting a final conflict between absolute evil and absolute good. While some early Christians may well have seen Rome as little more than a servant of Satan, they had to find another enemy against which to focus their energies if they wanted to survive. The enemy would be the Jews.

The evolution of anti-Jewish sentiment in the Christian Bible, from the Gospels to Revelation, has been documented by a number of Christian scholars, including Elaine Pagels, George Nickelsburg, and John Dominick Crossan. In the concluding segment of this session, we'll follow that evolution, noticing the irony so brilliantly expressed by George Nickelsburg:

A young, upstart group, whose membership had rapidly and radically changed, was asserting that it was more authentic than its parent group; and this attitude of superiority and exclusion was derived, in part, from ideas and attitudes already present in the parent body. 

[See J. Neusner and E. S. Frerichs (eds), To See Ourselves as Others See Us: Christians, Jews, 'Others' in Late Antiquity (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985), 73]

The Jews in the Gospel of Mark: Biblical scholars generally agree that Mark is the earliest of the Christian gospels, dating perhaps to 65-70 CE. In Mark's narrative, Jesus' first encounter with Satan is closely linked to his baptism:

It was at this time that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized in the Jordan by John [the Baptist]. No sooner had he come up out of the water than he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him. And a voice came from heaven, 'You are my Son, the Beloved, my favor rests on you.'

Immediately afterward the Spirit drove him out into the wilderness and he remained there for forty days, and was tempted by Satan.

Mark 1:9-13

The passage tells us very little about Satan, but says a great deal about where Jesus was. He was with John the Baptist in the Wilderness. Taking the text as it stands, Jesus experienced ritual immersion in the Jordan north of Qumran. John the Baptist is the one man many scholars suggest was the link between the Dead Sea scrolls community and early Christianity. What, if anything did Jesus learn from John? For this question, there are, as yet, no answers.

The remainder of Mark makes occasional use of Satan, clearly understanding him to be the universal king of evil as described in the earlier Dead Sea scrolls. In Mark 3:23-30, the Jewish scholarly group known as the scribes accuses Jesus of being possessed by Satan's demons, such as Beelzebul. Jesus turns the accusation around, and claims that the scribes are possessed. These vitriolic broadsides were typical of the rivalry of different Jewish sects and communities: the standard approach was to demonize your enemy, and say he was worthy of destruction. And this Jesus did, just as the Dead Sea scroll community had done in the Community Rule, the War Rule, and the various Satan curse texts reviewed above.

The Jews in Matthew, Luke and John (written 70-100 CE): As we pass from Mark to the later gospels, the demonization of the Jews becomes more pronounced. A telling example of this change can be found in Matthew's version of Jesus baptism and sojourn in the Wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). Here we read the blow-by-blow conflict, with Satan offering specific temptations and scriptural legal traps in much the same spirit as contending sectarian Jewish groups of the times. In Matthew, Satan assumes the character of Jesus' Jewish opponents.

Both Matthew and Luke display an increasing interest in spreading the gospel message to the gentiles rather than the often hostile Jews. Matthew ends his narrative with Jesus commanding his followers: "Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations. . . ." (Matthew 28:19). Luke has Jesus preaching in a synagogue about how the prophets Elijah and Elisha, centuries before, had helped gentiles in need, while ignoring unworthy Jews. The synagogue members got the message, and in a community-wide fit of anger, drove Jesus out of town.

John's is the last of the gospels to be written, and it shows the Christian attitude toward Jews making a dramatic transition. Drawing on the light-darkness motif introduced by Zoroastrianism and more fully developed by the Dead Sea scroll community, John sees Jesus as the divine light fighting a cosmic conflict with the forces of evil. Satan is mentioned only once: he enters Judas Iscariot at the Last Supper as he is about to betray Jesus. In the gospel of John, this is the pattern: Satan's will is reflected in the actions of individuals and groups. Judas (whose very name shares the same etymology as the ancient term for "Jew") is the stereotypical Jewish betrayer, while hostile or sometimes teasing crowds represent the Jewish community opposed to Jesus. Reflecting the Christian outreach to gentiles, John's gospel makes more frequent use of a term for Satan that they can understand: the Greek word diabolos, or "devil." John also uses the term "Jews" more frequently than the other gospels to describe Jesus' enemies. With the gospel of John, the division of Judaism and Christianity is final: Jews are the enemies of Jesus, and therefore the servants of Satan.

The Jews in Revelation: Tradition has it that the Apostle John also wrote this book, although modern scholars argue that a separate writer, well-versed in John's theological view, wrote the text around 100 CE. As noted above, the book of Revelation is heavily dependent on the book of Daniel, and shares many elements in common with the Dead Sea scrolls' War Rule.

As the last book of the Christian Bible, and perhaps the last to be written, it offers us a glimpse of the Christian view of Jews at the beginning of the Second Century CE. In speaking to the Christian community of Smyrna on the west coast of what is now Turkey, John offers the following comfort:

I know the trials you have had, and how poor you are--though you are rich--and the slanderous accusations that have been made by the people who profess to be Jews but are really members of the synagogue of Satan. . . .

Revelation 2: 9

In the following chapter, he speaks to the community of Philadelphia:

Now I am going to make the synagogue of Satan--those who profess to be Jews, but are liars, because they are no such thing--I will make them come and fall at your feet and admit that you are the people that I love.

Revelation 3:9-10

The process was now complete. From the ancient Christian perspective, the only true Jews were those who accepted Jesus. All other Jews were therefore members of the synagogue of Satan. At this moment Christian anti-Semitism was born. To the credit of Christianity, this anti-Semitic streak did not always manifest itself in persecution of the Jews. For example, late Classical cities like Sardis had Christians and Jews living side by side in cordial harmony. Nevertheless, anti-Jewish sentiment in Christianity would pervade most of the next 19 centuries.

Rabbinic Judaism, the parent of all current streams of Judaism today, largely abandoned the dogma of a final God-Satan conflict. But as the only surviving Jewish offshoot sect to fully embrace the dogma of this final struggle between absolute good and evil, Christianity truly carries in its "genes" the heritage of the Dead Sea scroll community. We live with that heritage to this day.

Comments? Questions? Write to your instructor, Jehon Grist, at jgrist@lehrhaus.org.

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