The Origin of Satan (5 page)

supernatural forces that Mark sees being played out on earth in

Jesus’ lifetime. Mark intends to tell the story of Jesus in terms of

its hidden, deeper dynamics—to tell it, so to speak, from
God’s

point of view.

What happened, Mark says, is this: Jesus of Nazareth, after

his baptism, was coming out of the water of the Jordan River

when “he saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending

like a dove on him” and heard a voice speaking to him from

heaven (1:10-11). God’s power anointed Jesus to challenge the

forces of evil that now dominate the world, and drove him into

direct conflict with those forces.20 Mark frames his narrative at

its beginning and at its climax with episodes in which Satan and

his demonic forces retaliate against God by working to destroy

Jesus. Mark begins by describing how the spirit of God

descended upon Jesus at his baptism, and “immediately drove

him into the wilderness,

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and he was in the wilderness forty days being tempted by Satan,

and was with the animals, and the angels ministered to him”

(1:12-13). From that moment on, Mark says, even after Jesus left

the wilderness and returned to society, the powers of evil

challenged and attacked him at every turn, and he attacked them

back, and won. Matthew and Luke, writing some ten to twenty

years later, adopted and elaborated this opening scenario. Each

turns it into a drama of three temptations, that is, three

increasingly intense confrontations between Satan and the spirit

of God, acting through Jesus. Luke shows that the devil,

defeated in these first attempts to overpower Jesus, withdraws

“until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). Luke then says what

Mark and Matthew imply—that the devil returned in person in

the form of Judas Iscariot to destroy Jesus, initiating the betrayal

that led to his arrest and execution (Luke 22:3). All of the New

Testament gospels, with considerable variation, depict Jesus’

execution as the culmination of the struggle between good and

evil—between God and Satan—that began at his baptism.

Satan, although he seldom appears onstage in these gospel

accounts, nevertheless plays a central role in the divine drama,

for the gospel writers realize that the story they have to tell

would make little sense
without
Satan. How, after all, could

anyone claim that a man betrayed by one of his own followers,

and brutally executed on charges of treason against Rome, not

only
was
but still
is
God's appointed Messiah,
unless
his capture and death were, as the gospels insist, not a final defeat but only a

preliminary skirmish in a vast cosmic conflict now enveloping

the universe? The final battle has not yet been fought, much less

won, but it is imminent. As Jesus warns his interrogator at his

trial, soon he will be vindicated when the “Son of man” returns

in the clouds of heaven (Mark 14:62); here Mark has Jesus recall

one of the prophet Daniel’s visions, in which “one like a son of

man” (that is, a human being), comes “with the clouds of

heaven” and is made ruler of God’s Kingdom (Dan. 7:13-14).

Many of Mark’s contemporaries would have read Daniel’s

prophecy as predicting the coming of a conqueror who would

defeat Israel’s foreign rulers.

While at first glance the gospel of Mark may look like histori-

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 13

cal biography, it is not so simple as this, for Mark does not intend

to write history, as Josephus had, primarily to persuade people of

the accuracy of his account of recent events and make them

comprehensible on a human level. Instead Mark wants to show

what these events mean for the future of the world, or, in the

scholarly jargon, eschatologically. Mark and his colleagues

combine a biographical form with themes of supernatural

conflict borrowed from Jewish apocalyptic literature to create a

new kind of narrative. These gospels carry their writers’

powerful conviction that Jesus’ execution, which had seemed to

signal the victory of the forces of evil, actually heralds their

ultimate annihilation and ensures God’s final victory.21

Many liberal-minded Christians have preferred to ignore the

presence of angels and demons in the gospels. Yet Mark intends

their presence to address the anguished question that the events

of the previous decades had aroused: How could God allow such

death and destruction? For Mark and his fellows, the issue of

divine justice involves, above all, the issue of human violence.

The gospel writers want to locate and identify the specific ways

in which the forces of evil act
through certain people
to effect

violent destruction, above all, in Matthew’s words, “the

righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel

to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah” (23:35)—

violence epitomized in the execution of Jesus, which Matthew

sees as the culmination of all evils. The subject of cosmic war

serves primarily to interpret human relationships—especially

all-too-human conflict—in supernatural form. The figure of

Satan becomes, among other things, a way of characterizing one’s

actual enemies as the embodiment of transcendent forces. For

many readers of the gospels ever since the first century, the

thematic opposition between God’s spirit and Satan has

vindicated Jesus’ followers and demonized their enemies.

But how does the figure of Satan characterize the enemy?

What is Satan, and how does he appear on earth? The New

Testament gospels almost never identify Satan with the Romans,

but they consistently associate him with Jesus’ Jewish enemies,

primarily Judas Iscariot and the chief priests and scribes. By

placing

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the story of Jesus in the context of cosmic war, the gospel writers

expressed, in varying ways, their identification with the

embattled minority of Jews who believed in Jesus, and their

distress at what they saw as the apostasy of the majority of their

fellow Jews in Jesus’ time, as well as in their own. As we shall

see, Jesus’ followers did not
invent
the practice of demonizing

enemies within their own group, although Christians (and

Muslims after them) carried this practice further than their

Jewish predecessors had taken it, and with enormous

consequences.

Yet who actually
were
Jesus’ enemies? What we know

historically suggests that they were the Roman governor and his

soldiers. The charge against Jesus and his execution were

typically-Roman. The Roman authorities, ever watchful for any

hint of sedition, were ruthless in suppressing it. The historian

Mary Smallwood observes that rounding up and killing

troublemakers, especially those who ignited public

demonstrations, was a routine measure for Roman forces

stationed in Judea.22 During the first century the Romans

arrested and crucified thousands of Jews charged with sedition—

often, Philo says, without trial. But as the gospels indicate, Jesus

also had enemies among his fellow Jews, especially the Jerusalem

priests and their influential allies, who were threatened by his

activities.

The crucial point is this:
Had Jesus’ followers identified

themselves with the majority of Jews rather than with a particular

minority, they might have told his story very differently—and

with considerably more historical plausibility.
They might have

told it, for example, in traditional patriotic style, as the story of

an inspired Jewish holy man martyred by Israel’s traditional

enemies, foreign oppressors of one sort or another. The biblical

book of Daniel, for example, which tells the story of the prophet

Daniel, who, although threatened with a horrible death—being

torn apart by lions—nevertheless defies the king of Babylon in

the name of God and of the people of Israel (Dan. 6:1-28). The

first book of Maccabees tells the story of the priest Mattathias,

who defies Syrian soldiers when they order him to worship

idols. Mattathias chooses to die rather than betray his devotion

to God.23

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 15

But unlike the authors of Daniel or 1 Maccabees, the gospel

writers chose to
dissociate
themselves from the Jewish majority

and to focus instead upon intra-Jewish conflict—specifically

upon their own quarrel with those who resisted their claims that

Jesus was the Messiah. Within the gospels, as we shall see, the

figure of Satan tends to express this dramatic shift of blame from

“the nations”—
bagoyim
, in Hebrew—onto members of Jesus’

own people. The variation in each gospel as it depicts the activity

of the demonic opposition—that is, those perceived as enemies—

expresses, I believe, a variety of relationships, often deeply

ambivalent, between various groups of Jesus’ followers and the

specific Jewish groups each writer regards as his primary

opponents. I want to avoid oversimplification. Nonetheless it is

probably fair to say that in every case the decision to place the

story of Jesus within the context of God's struggle against Satan

tends to minimize the role of the Romans, and to place

increasing blame instead upon Jesus’
Jewish
enemies.

This is not to say that the gospel writers simply intended to

exonerate the Romans. Mark surely was aware that during his

time, and for some thirty years after the war, the Romans

remained wary of renewed sedition. Members of a group loyal to

a condemned seditionist were at risk, and Mark probably hoped

to persuade those outsiders who might read his account that

neither Jesus nor his followers offered any threat to Roman

order. But within Mark’s account, the Romans, even the few

portrayed with some sympathy, remain essentially outsiders.

Mark tells the story of Jesus in the context that matters to him

most—within the Jewish community. And here, as in most

human situations, the more intimate the conflict, the more

intense and bitter it becomes.

Mark opens his narrative with the account of John's baptizing

Jesus and relates that at the moment of baptism the power of

God descended upon Jesus, and “a voice spoke from heaven,

saying ‘This is my beloved son’ ” (1:11). At that moment, all

human beings disappear from Mark’s narrative and, as we have

seen, the spirit of God drives Jesus into the wilderness to

encounter Satan, wild animals, and angels. Recounting this

episode, as James Robinson notes, Mark does not depart from

events in the human,

16 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

historical world but signals that he wants to relate these events

to the struggle between good and evil in the universe.24 Mark’s

account, then, moves direcdy from Jesus’ solitary struggle with

Satan in the desert to his first public appearance in the synagogue

at Capernaum, where immediately on the Sabbath he entered the

synagogue and taught.

And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught as one

who had authority, and not as the scribes (1:22).

There Jesus encounters a man possessed by an evil spirit who,

sensing Jesus’ divine power, challenges him: “What have you to

do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”

(1:24). According to Mark, Jesus has come to heal the world and

reclaim it for God; in order to accomplish this, he must overcome

the evil powers who have usurped authority over the world, and

who now oppress human beings. So, Mark says,

Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!”

And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud

voice, came out of him, and they were all amazed, so that they

questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? New

teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean

spirits, and they obey him.” And at once his fame spread

everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee

(1:25-28).

Even in this first episode, the astonished crowds recognize

that Jesus possesses a special authority, direct access to God’s

power. Jesus’ power manifests itself especially in action, since

Mark does not here record what Jesus taught. Even in this first

public challenge to the forces of evil, Mark shows how Jesus’

power sets him in contrast—and soon into direct conflict—with

the scribes commonly revered as religious authorities. Mark's

point is to demonstrate that, as he says, Jesus "taught as one who

had authority, and not as the scribes" (1:22).

Throughout this opening chapter, Mark emphasizes that Jesus

healed “many who were sick with various diseases” and “drove

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 17

out many demons” (1:34). He traveled throughout Galilee

“preaching in the synagogues and casting out demons,” for, as he