The Origin of Satan
Romans were
    invincible, or because they hoped for financial or political
    advantage. Jesus’ followers believed that there was no point in
    fighting the Romans because the catastrophic events that
    followed his crucifixion were signs of the end—signs that the
    whole world was to be shattered and transformed (Mark 13:4-
    29). Some insisted that what they had seen—the horrors of the
    war—actually vindicated his call “Repent, for the Kingdom of
    God is near” (Mark 1:15). Mark shares the conviction,
    widespread among Jesus’ followers, that Jesus himself had
    predicted these world-shattering events— the destruction of the
    Temple and its desecration:

    And as he came out of the Temple, one of his disciples said to
    him, “Look, rabbi, what wonderful stones, and what won-
    derful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these
    great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon
    another, that will not be thrown down. . . . But when you see
    the abominable sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the
    10 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

    reader understand!), then let those who are in Judea flee to the
    mountains (Mark 13:1-14).”

    This was exactly what had now happened. Others believed—
    and some dared to say—that these very catastrophes occurred as
    an angry God’s punishment upon his own people for the crime of
    rejecting their divinely sent Messiah.
    In any case, Mark insists that Jesus’ followers had no quarrel
    with the Romans but with the Jewish leaders—the council of
    elders, the Sanhedrin, along with the Jerusalem scribes and
    priests—who had rejected God's Messiah. Mark says that these
    leaders now have rejected Mark and his fellow believers, calling
    them either insane or possessed by demons, the same charges
    that they directed against Jesus himself.
    Mark takes a conciliatory attitude toward the Romans,
    although it was known that the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate,
    had sentenced Jesus to death. Nevertheless, the two trial scenes
    included in this gospel effectively indict the Jewish leaders for
    Jesus’ death, while somewhat exonerating the Romans. Mark
    virtually invents a new Pilate—a well-meaning weakling
    solicitous of justice but, as Mark depicts him, intimidated by the
    chief priests within his own council chamber and by crowds
    shouting outside, so that he executes a man he suspects may be
    innocent.
    Other first-century writers, Jewish and Roman, describe a
    very different man. Even Josephus, despite his Roman
    sympathies, says that the governor displayed contempt for his
    Jewish subjects, illegally appropriated funds from the Temple
    treasury, and brutally suppressed unruly crowds.18 Another
    contemporary observer, Philo, a respected and influential
    member of the Alexandrian Jewish community, describes Pilate
    as a man of “ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition,” famous
    for, among other things, ordering “frequent executions without
    trial.”19
    Mark’s motives with regard to Pilate are not simple. Insofar as
    he addresses his narrative to outsiders, Mark is eager to allay
    Roman suspicions by showing that Jesus’ followers are no threat
    to Roman order, any more than Jesus himself had been. Mark
    may also have wanted to convert Gentile readers. Yet Mark is pri-
    THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 11

    marily interested in conflicts within the Jewish community—
    especially conflicts between his own group and those who reject
    its claims about Jesus.
    Despite the hostility and suspicion he and his movement
    aroused among both Jews and Gentiles, including, of course, the
    Romans, Mark wrote to proclaim the “good news of Jesus of
    Nazareth, Messiah of Israel” (1:1). Yet Mark knows that to
    justify such claims about Jesus, he has to answer obvious
    objections. If Jesus had been sent as God’s anointed king, how
    could the movement he initiated have failed so miserably? How
    could his followers have abandoned him and gone into hiding,
    while
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