The character of Satan is elusively familiar. You have of course heard of him, but do you know who he is? Where did he come from? Is he an angel? A spirit? A metaphor? Why is he so absent from the Old Testament, and what is his role in the New?
Does he rule over hell? Or is he being punished in hell? If God is all-powerful, why is Satan given license to bully Job, to tempt Jesus, and (as he is mysteriously said to do in Luke’s and John’s Gospels) to “enter into” Judas?
There are also the sociological and literary questions of Satan’s development as a character in human culture. Beginning as a title — “accuser” — applied to human beings, satan becomes the Satan at some point around the Jewish exile in Babylon, setting the stage for a prominent feature in the New Testament as a fully-developed supervillain.
I invited Elaine Pagels, author of The Origin of Satan, to help me unpack this mystifying character. I also learned of the character’s connection to the (literal) demonisation of communities opposed to Christianity, and we discussed the genesis of Christian antisemitism.
