We've seen that the New Testament exhibits contradictory versions of Satan. By the time of the Church Fathers, though, this indeterminate species of Satan will become extinct, and the Devil will become evil incarnate—Tempter but never Tester. A work that cannot be ignored in this development is The Life of Adam and Eve. According to Forsyth, the original book, now lost, was Continue Reading …
Lucifer: How a Decent Deity Got a Bad Rap (Part 3)
We've seen that there are few traces of the Lucifer we’ve all come to know and loathe in the Old Testament. We will have to dig through the somewhat obscure books of intertestamental literature to find the sketchy outlines of a familiar likeness. The intertestamental period covers the 400 or so years that span the writing of the last book of the Old Testament and the Continue Reading …
Lucifer: How a Decent Deity Got a Bad Rap (Part 2)
In our previous installment, we saw that there never was any Lucifer in the Old Testament. So who, then, was Satan? The word debuts in the Book of Numbers. I say “word” rather than “name” because satan originally was not a name but an office. As Elaine Pagels explains in The Origin of Satan: …the Hebrew term the satan describes an adversarial role. It is not the name of a Continue Reading …
Lucifer: How a Decent Deity Got a Bad Rap (Part 1)
But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most? —Mark Twain Whole episodes of history may very well hinge on a letter—a capital letter that completely altered the understanding of the word it began and signaled a theological shift and an attendant cosmological revision. Before we can appreciate Continue Reading …