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The Origin of Satan
Elaine Pagels
$23.00
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Read Reviews & Comments:
Review this book:
"Who is Satan in the New
Testament, and what is the evil that he represents? In this groundbreaking
book, Elaine Pagels, Princeton's distinguished historian of religion, traces the
evolution of Satan from its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan is at first
merely obstructive, to the New Testament where Satan becomes the Prince of
Darkness, the bitter enemy of God and man, evil incarnate.
In The Origin of Satan, Pagels shows that
the four Christian
gospels tell two very different stories. The
first is the story of
Jesus' moral
genius: his lessons of love, forgiveness and redemption. The second tells of
the bitter conflict between the followers of Jesus and their fellow Jews, a
conflict in which the writers of the four gospels condemned as creatures of
Satan those Jews who refused to worship Jesus as the Messiah. Writing during
and just after the Jewish war against Rome, the evangelists invoked Satan to
portray their Jewish enemies as God's enemies too."
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