The Origin of Satan
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From the National Book Award-winning and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Gnostic Gospels comes a dramatic interpretation of Satan and his role on the Christian tradition. "Arresting...brilliant...this book illuminates the angels with which we must wrestle to come to the truth of our bedeviling spritual problems." —The Boston Globe With magisterial learning and the elan of a born storyteller, Pagels turns Satan’s story into an audacious exploration of Christianity’s shadow side, in which the gospel of love gives way to irrational hatreds that continue to haunt Christians and non-Christians alike.
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This was a pretty fascinating, slightly dry book about the motivations of early Christian writers more than anything else. I felt it did not touch on the origins of Satan in Christian mythology that much.
I kept waiting for it to get to a grand conclusion and it was a tenuous thread at best.
That being said, the discussions on the gospels as polemics against Jews are thought provoking and timely. Over the course of bible reading I have come to loathe the epistles and Pagels takes the reader on a contextual journey of motivation for those fateful letter writers.
It's interesting how the lens of the writer can be so influential. I read Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus several years ago and came away from that book thinking Celcus was an utter whack job. In Pagels' book he's somewhat of a hero doing battle against Irenaus.
I'd recommend this if you are interested in the political climate of early Christianity. I'd also recommend it if you are interested in the history of Christian heresy, the discussion of the Nag Hammadi works was super neat.
