Currently Reading: _The Origin of Satan_ by Elaine Pagels

[sidravitale]

Oh, this is a fascinating book, laying out the evolution over time in the course of multiple gospels (each written later and later from the events they described) of the rhetoric used in deflecting blame for the Crucifixion from Rome to Jews in a region suffering from a Jewish rebellion against Rome, where there were political reasons for wanting such deflection, and the concurrent development of the idea of 'satan', of Hebrew origin, from an angel placed by God as an obstacle to someone, to an adversary of God's.

Genuinely fascinating. I really like Elaine Pagels' writing, I felt the same way about her book _The Gnostic Gospels_, which I read a few years ago.

Now, I'm not a scholar of Christianity, so I don't know how much about the timeline of writing the gospels is taught to the typical Christian, but I had always assumed that the gospels were stories of people with first-person experience, so I tend to be astounded over the fact that that isn't true.

I'm not done yet, but I just had to stop and write about it anyway.

Comments

[twistedchick]

As far as I know -- cradle Catholic who migrated through Episcopalianism and other places before becoming Quaker -- most mainstream non-fundamentalist denominations accept that the various gospels were memories and accounts written within communities that were named after/maybe founded by/somehow connected with the people for whom they were named. Only the more fundamentalist Protestants insist that they were each personally written by the direct individuals named and nobody else. It is a long and complex issue, based in about 150 years of textual examination and comparison, but that's the best summary I can give you.

Thanks!

[sidravitale]

Good to know!