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WRESTLING WITH SATAN
Elaine Pagels Sheds Light on a Dark Tradition in Christianity
BY KATHRYN F. GREENWOOD

Few people may give much thought to Lucifer, the supreme evil one who tempts and seduces his victims. I know I hadn't since childhood, when I knew him as a fiery man-creature with horns, carrying a pitchfork, who tempted me to lie, steal, and fight with my siblings. I gradually let go of that idea. Today, evil surfaces in my mind only occasionally as a way to make some sense of people like Adolf Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer. I certainly hadn't noticed Satan in the Scriptures, which I listen to in church every Sunday.
Professor of Religion Elaine Pagels hadn't noticed the devil's presence in the Scriptures, either. Then, several years ago, she reread the New Testament Gospels looking for such images, and what she found surprised her: Satan, she realized, was not "an archaic relic, a rather silly superstitious throw-away metaphor." Instead, she found that the conflict between God and evil frames the New Testament stories. Satan is a central character in the life of Jesus and his followers and acts as God's enemy and rival. The Gospel writers, she found, divided the world into warring factions, the forces of good versus the forces of evil, and associated their Jewish enemies with the devil.
In her latest book, The Origin of Satan (Random House, 1995), Pagels brings to light this long-ignored side of Christian Scriptures. The tradition of demonizing enemies, which she has called "a dark side of Christianity," has left its mark for two thousand years. To this day, she argues, many Christians invoke the figure of Satan against pagans, heretics, atheists, and nonbelievers. Satan lives.
A historian of religion, Pagels is known for examining Christian history in a fresh way, bringing a new perspective to old material, and looking at old texts and topics in terms of their significance for the modern world. She produces original work in tightly argued books accessible to general readers. Among them are The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage Books, 1979), a landmark study of the sacred books of one of the earliest Christian sects. The winner of the National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award, it argued that early Christianity was far more complex than most people had thought. The early Christian church was not, as legend had it, unified. It was riddled with dissent. The Gnostics, deemed heretics by the early church fathers, offered an alternative movement to the emerging orthodox church. They emphasized individual divinity and inner well-being. Some of the Gnostic texts questioned the virgin birth and Jesus' bodily resurrection. Others celebrated God as Father and Mother. Among Pagels's other books are Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (Random House, 1988), a study of how early Christian writers interpreted the creation story in Genesis, and two scholarly volumes on Gnosticism.
Her latest book is a "social history of Satan," writes Pagels. It looks at how Satan is used to express human conflict and to characterize human enemies. By identifying the enemies of Jesus with the forces of evil, the followers of Jesus defined their own group identity, she argues. Pagels also found that Satan as portrayed in Jewish and Christian sources may not be an evil force entirely distinct from us. Instead, he may be a colleague, friend, or brother: an "intimate enemy."
A personal tragedy led to Pagels's study of Satan. In 1988, her husband, the physicist Heinz Pagels, died in a hiking accident in Colorado. After this devastating loss, she felt as if she were living in the presence of an invisible being. When a husband of 20 years dies, she says, "it feels as though the person is there and is not there." During the next few years she began reflecting on how various religious traditions perceive invisible presences and give shape to the invisible world. Fifteen months before Heinz's death they had lost their six-year-old son to a rare lung disease.
Pagels says she had no intention of writing a book about Satan. Originally, she wanted to explore the perceptions of invisible beings that pervaded most of the ancient world. She then looked at the Christian and Jewish perceptions of the invisible world and found that Christian sources markedly diverged from Jewish ones on the question of an evil power. She abandoned her original line of inquiry to explore why they differed. It took her six years to research and write The Origin of Satan, which started as a collection of scholarly articles "in various obscure journals."
The figure of Satan as the leader of an evil empire never appears in the Hebrew Bible, argues Pagels. When he first shows up, he isn't opposed to God. In the Book of Job, for example, he is an obedient servant, an angel sent by God to block or obstruct human activity. This angel gradually becomes more malevolent, particularly in the writings of first-century Jewish dissidents, some of whom used Satan to characterize their Jewish opponents. Among these sects were the group often called the Essenes, who "saw forces of evil in the world," she says, "and also a battle that goes on in the human heart." The followers of Jesus adopted this view in describing the bitter conflict between them and their fellow Jews.
Pagels focuses her argument on the New Testament Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. To fully understand these texts, she writes, we must see them as "wartime literature," whose authors lived through the Jewish War of 66-70, when the Romans invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. The Romans thought the followers of Jesus were subversive, and their fellow Jews regarded them as a suspect minority.
Mark, the first Gospel written, introduces the devil into its opening scenario and characterizes Jesus' ministry as involving a struggle between God's spirit and the demons who belong to Satan's kingdom. Pagels describes the division in Mark as an "intra-Jewish quarrel within the family," between those whom Mark sees as recognizing the Messiah and those Mark sees as not. Jesus' intimate enemies are Jewish leaders and other Jews.
The later Gospels, particularly Luke and John, go further in identifying the Jews who reject their claims about Jesus with the forces of evil. Luke and John "express a more open and explicit animosity between the followers of Jesus and the majority of the Jewish community," says Pagels. The followers of Jesus reacted in this way, she explains, because they felt threatened by the other Jewish communities, which "largely repudiated them." Early Christians used the notion of the forces of evil fighting the forces of good to explain why God would allow Jesus to be crucified and his followers to suffer and be killed, she says. They depicted Jesus' death as the culmination of a cosmic struggle between good and evil that began at his baptism. "So it's a religious interpretation of their situation, a very practical one," she adds.

Pagels approached the gospels assuming they would portray the Romans who crucified Jesus as the chief villains. Instead, she was "astonished and dismayed to see the extent to which the Romans were not implicated with the forces of evil," while the Jewish enemies of Jesus were cast as villians. Although the Roman authorities condemned Jesus to death, she writes, all four Gospels shift the blame from the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to the Jews. Moreover, they invent a new Pilate who bears little resemblance to the real one, whom history records as a brutal tyrant. Scholars believe the four Gospels were written between the years 60 and 110; each shows Pilate in an increasingly favorable light, while Jesus' Jewish enemies become more malevolent. The Origin of Satan attempts to show how Jesus' followers came to demonize enemies who seemed to threaten their very existence. This blaming of other Jews for the death of Jesus, she concludes, marked the beginning of animosities that have persisted in Christian cultures for two millennia. Pagels is quick to state that Christians didn't invent anti-Semitism-she notes that first- and second-century Christian writers also linked Satan with pagans and heretics-and her book doesn't indict Christianity. But "some of these antagonisms are built into the history of Christianity, unfortunately."
At the end of The Origin of Satan, she turns to the Gospel of Philip, one of the Gnostic Gospels, which offers an alternative to the Christian perception of good and evil as cosmic opposites. Here, Satan never appears; the power of evil is not an external, alien force that invades the soul but instead is something inherent in each person. "It's the spiritual and moral responsibility of each individual to be aware of his or her capacity to harm," she explains. Adopting the traditional pattern of demonizing one's enemies can blind people to their own capacity to do evil, she observes.
Pagels chooses her words carefully, speaking deliberately in articulating her thoughts. In our interview, she wore a tattered grayish jacket, black top and pants, and Nike sneakers. She looked slightly disheveled, as did her office. Papers and books were strewn on the desk and floor. She has endless demands on her time: lecturing around the country, teaching, researching, raising two small children. She sandwiched our interview between meetings with students, and her phone rang so often that she wound up unplugging it. Afterward, she rushed off to make dinner for her family.
Despite such distractions, she is focused when discussing her work. Pagels talks about religious history the way she writes about it-lucidly and free of jargon. She gets excited when pondering the Gospels and the messages embedded in them.
Religions, in particular Christianity, have fascinated Pagels since she was a teenager, even though she didn't have much parental encouragement in spiritual matters while growing up in Palo Alto, California. Her father, a professor of biology at Stanford University, believed science had replaced religion and taught his daughter that religion was for insufficiently educated people, she says. So she struck out on her own quest.
"I found religion colorful and emotional and compelling," says Pagels, who at age 13 started attending an evangelical church. But she became disaffected and stopped going after it started telling her what to think and do. (Today, Pagels demurs when asked about her own religious beliefs, calling herself a "semi-Protestant secular" person.) But the experience ignited her curiosity about Christian tradition, particularly the Gospels, so as a freshman at Stanford she began studying Greek in order to read them in their earliest existing versions. Because Stanford didn't have a religion department, she majored in history and earned a master's in classics. She read Homer, Plato, and Sophocles and came to love Greek religion as it is articulated in some of those works. She then became curious about how Christian movements came out of that world and "went off to graduate school to find out." She found all religious traditions interesting. "I became convinced that religion was not simply a relic of a dead part of our history. . . . But in fact it is an interesting and important part of human life."
After earning her Ph.D. in religion at Harvard in 1970, Pagels taught at Barnard College and Columbia University. She came to Princeton in 1982.

Critics have called Pagels's analysis of Satan thought-provoking and original. S. David Sperling, a professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College in New York City, says Pagels is the first liberal New Testament scholar to confront the extent to which the gospel writers demonized the Jews. Pagels, he adds, is a first-rate scholar who "gets to the heart of the matter" and states her conclusions emphatically.
Others have taken issue with some of her arguments. A reviewer for The New York Review of Books, Norman Cohn, believed her attempt to trace the origin of Satan back to the Hebrew Bible to be unconvincing and thought her supporting documentation insufficient. He also called into doubt her concept of Satan as the "intimate enemy." Helmut Koester, Pagels's thesis adviser at Harvard and a professor of New Testament studies and ecclesiastical history at its School of Divinity, believes she has read Satan into several gospel passages, including those about Jesus' trail and crucifixion, when he isn't there. "She stretches her point beyond what the test bears out," he said. That reservation aside, Koester called The Origin of Satan characteristically imaginative and creative.
In response to Koester's critique, Pagels says that the connections between Satan and the enemies of Jesus are implicit, particularly in Mark.
Her former mentor Krister Stendahl, a professor emeritus at Harvard's School of Divinity, told The New Yorker that "people will say she is overdoing it. But I don't think so. Demonization is one of the plagues of religious tradition because you are dealing with an intense rhetoric intensified to the voltage of the divine."
The most accurate criticism of her book, says Pagels, is that it's one-sided in discussing the tradition of Satan and the cosmic struggle between good and evil, while hardly mentioning the other tradition in the Gospels: the Jesus of love, forgiveness, and redemption, which is their dominant theme.
Her purpose in writing the book was not to attack the notions of evil, Satan, and demonizing. "I just thought it was important once I became aware of it to say, Look-this is an important part of our heritage."
At the same time, she doesn't mean to suggest "that we should or could simply throw away this huge cultural legacy. I don't think we could do that for one thing. It's not a one-sided phenomenon," she says. "There have been many people who have been inspired by the idea that they stood on God's side against the forces of evil." At the end of her book, Pagels points out that Martin Luther King, Jr., saw himself on God's side, without demonizing his opponents. He opposed policies and powers he regarded as evil, even putting himself at risk, while praying for the reconciliation, not the damnation, of those who opposed him.
Pagels says that some conservative Christian readers have misunderstood her intentions. She has received letters from evangelical Christians who "thought this book was some kind of liberal attack on the reality of Satan. That's a question that no self-conscious historian would touch because it's a theological question." She has also heard from Jewish readers and scholars who are excited about the book "because Christians have often maintained that anti-Jewish elements are misinterpretations of the Christian tradition, wrongly introduced into it." Pagels herself once believed this, but "I saw with considerable dismay that this is not the case."
The strangest letter she received, she says, came from an inmate in an Iowa maximum-security prison who thought he was Satan. He thanked Pagels for mentioning him on a radio program during an interview about her book.
She was working on The Origin of Satan during the Gulf War. And although she chose not to write about the 20th-century implications of the early Christians' demonization of their enemies, she couldn't help but notice that the notion of Satan and evil forces is embedded in our political language. "The rhetoric is rather deep. It isn't just a throw-away metaphor to talk about the evil empire as Ronald Reagan did or to talk about Saddam Hussein as the devil," she says. "What struck me was how President Bush and Saddam Hussein, one speaking to Christians, the other speaking to Muslims . . . were both using that language."

Pagels has confronted life's demons in the deaths of her son and husband, but she has found the strength to go on. On her ring finger she now wears a band of small sapphires and diamonds-a gift from Kent Greenawalt, a professor of law at Columbia whom she married in 1995. "It's a wonderful good fortune to love someone," she says of Greenawalt, who was also widowed. As a result of the marriage her adopted children, Sarah, 10, and David, eight-to whom The Origin of Satan is dedicated-now have three new brothers, one of whom, Andrei Greenawalt, is a Princeton sophomore.
Greenawalt, Pagels, and some of their children spent most of the summer outside Aspen, Colorado. She worked on journal articles and prepared for lectures this fall. This semester she is teaching courses on spiritual autobiography and the early history of Christianity.
She's not sure what the subject of her next book will be. Since The Origin of Satan was about a negative side of Christianity, Pagels would like to look at some positive aspects of the faith's tradition. In the meantime, she plans to reevaluate some of the Gnostic texts in terms of the last 15 years of research. This may or may not lead to another book, but whatever the subject on which she eventually focuses, her analysis is likely to be fresh-and to play the devil with conventional views.

Kathryn F. Greenwood is PAW's staff writer.

HERETICS: INTIMATE ENEMIES
Tertullian, a convert in the North African city of Carthage, and a contemporary of Irenaeus (c. 180 C.E.), agreed with Irenaeus in denouncing all who deviated from the majority consensus as "heretics." Both fathers of the church insist that what characterizes the true church is unanimity-agreement in doctrine, morals, and leadership. Christians, Tertullian says, quoting Paul, should "all speak and think the very same things." Whoever deviates from the consensus is, by definition, a heretic; for, as Tertullian points out, the Greek word translated "heresy" (hairesis) literally means "choice." . . .
But Tertullian insists that making choices is evil, since choice destroys group unity. To stamp out heresy, Tertullian says, church leaders must not allow people to ask questions, for it is "questions that make people heretics." . . .
Instead of admitting heretics into debates over the Scriptures, Tertullian says, "straight thinking" (the literal translation of "orthodox") Christians must simply claim the Scriptures as their own exclusive property: "Heretics ought not to be allowed to challenge an appeal to the Scriptures, since we . . . prove that they have nothing to do with the Scriptures. For since they are heretics, they cannot be true Christians."
But how do heretics come up with such ingenious and persuasive arguments from Scripture? Their inspiration comes, Tertullian says, from "the devil, of course, to whom belong the wiles that distort the truth." Satan, after all, invented all the arts of spiritual warfare, including false exegesis.