(640)   Tue 1 Aug 95 10:41
By: Doug Lee
To: All
Re: Time artical
St:
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@EID:06b5 1f015520
@MSGID: 1:134/67.0 301e76a1
I just received the latest issue of Time (Aug 7). There is an article in
there that I think should be repeated (P54). So here goes...

I've attempted to re-type this as accurately as possible. Any spelling
mistakes or grammatical errors are my own and not part of the article.

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                          THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

A new study by Elaine Pagels posits that the early Christians taught us to
call enemies Satan-and to give them hell.

By Richard Lacayo

If we grant that humans can be tools of the devil, let's remember he's our
tool as well. As the majestic adversary in Paradise Lost or the heavy-metal
party animal, Satan may be a capable tempter. But not until he falls into
human hands is the Old Enemy put to his most sinister uses.

     Ask Elaine Pagels. Her much honored 1979 work, 'The Gnostic Gospels',
was one of the rare volumes of religious scholarship to find a general
readership. In her new book, "The Origin of Satan"(Random House; 256 pages),
Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, examines how the
earliest Christians made their opponents out to be the devil. First the jews
who spurned Christ, then the Romans who persecuted his followers, then other
Christians who departed from the orthodoxies of the newly consolidation
church-each group in turn, she days, appears in early Christian texts not
just as a philosophical contender but as Satan's instrument.

     In those writings Pagels finds the sources of the durable Western
practice of demonizing one's opponent, whether they be Reformation
Protestants or gay activists or the Evil Empire, "It's important for those
of us who grew up with the Jewish and Christian traditions to know how they
structure the way we think," she says. "Especially when we are thinking
politically and socially."

     This is the third provocative reconsideration of early Christian
belief by Pagels, 52, an Episcopal churchgoer, though not one who counts
herself a conventional believer. In 'The Gnostic Gospels', about the early
Christian sect whose members aimed at mystical communion of the individual
with God, Pagels set out a scriptural alternative that was shunned from the
outset by the institutional church. In 1988 she published "Adam, Eve and the
serpent", a study of the influential way St. Augustine read the Garden of
Eden story as a symbol of man's fall, though some earlier Christians had
seen it as a parable of human freedom.

     It was personal tragedy that brought Pagels to reflect on Satan. In
1987 her six-year-old son Mark died of a respiratory illness. Fifteen months
later, her husband Heinz, a physicist, fell to his death while hiking in
Colorado. Eventually, Pagels found herself reflecting on the ways in which
an invisible presence, like her missing loved ones, holds power over the
living. In that frame of mind she turned to the early church and its
invisible enemy.

     Satan makes few appearances in the Old Testament and never ass a figure
of consequence. In the "Book of Job" he's an imp in God's retinue, a
challenger tolerated by a confident Creator. The New Testament enlarges him.
Like most religious scholars, Pagels believes the Gospels were set down in
the latter half of the first century, after the defeat of the Jewish
rebellion against Rome. "Wartime literature," she calls them, reflecting the
devesions among Jews traumatized by the sack of Jerusalem and the
destruction of their temple.

     In those years Christians were also a breakaway Jewish faction, still
hoping to persuade other Jews that Jesus was the Messiah, through he
appeared to have died in defeat. It was to account for Christ's arrest and
execution, Pagels believes, that the Gospel writers framed the life of Jesus
as an episode in the conflict between God and Satan. Their explanation for
his death, Pagels says, is that "his divine mission met with supernatural
opposition".

     Seen in that light, the Jews who rejected Jesus were instruments of
Satan. The evangelist Mark treats them as chiefly responsible for the
Crucifixion, while softening the role of the Roman authorities. In 'Mark' the
Roman governor Pilate, whom other sources of the period describe ass a
provincial tyrant, becomes a man helpless to oppose the Jewish elders
demanding Christ's death. The later Evangelists expanded 'Mark's' themes,
paving the way for early Christian fathers who glimpsed the devil in their
own adversaries.

     Harvard professor Harvey Cox, a prominent theologian, credits Pagels
with "a sixth sense" for finding unrecognized patterns in familiar material.
Her critics ask whether she blames Christian sources too much for an all too
human tendency to demonize. "Mao did it without any reference to
Christianity," observes Jeffrey Burton Russell, a specialist on Satan at the
University of California at Santa Barbara. Others  say Pagels finds the devil
in passages where he is never explicitly mentioned or overlays marginal
texts. Pagels is merely "scavenging at the edges of tradition," says Father
Richard Neuhaus, editor of the religious monthly 'First Things'. But he
adds, "That is fine. The Christian tradition is almost infinitely
resilient."

     Pagels thinks her concerns are central. "Associating heretics, pagans
and Jews with the powers of evil has been a massive theme in Western
history. If this is minor, I wonder what moral struggle is all about." Her
own struggle is to persuade us that Satan is often just a container that we
fashion to hold our own poisons. We have met the Old Enemy. He is us.

                                 -Reported by William Dowell/New York


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