The Origin of Satan Read Online Free PDF

soldiers captured him like a common criminal? Why did
    virtually all his own people reject the claims about him—not
    only the townspeople in Galilee but also the crowds he attracted
    on his travels throughout Judea and in Jerusalem? And wasn’t
    Jesus, after all, a seditionist himself, tainted in retrospect by
    association with the failed war, having been arrested and
    crucified as a rebel? Attempting to answer these questions, Mark
    places the events surrounding Jesus within the context not
    simply of the struggle against Rome but of the struggle between
    good and evil in the universe. The stark events of Jesus’ life and
    death cannot be understood, he suggests, apart from the clash of
    supernatural forces that Mark sees being played out on earth in
    Jesus’ lifetime. Mark intends to tell the story of Jesus in terms of
    its hidden, deeper dynamics—to tell it, so to speak, from God’s
    point of view.
    What happened, Mark says, is this: Jesus of Nazareth, after
    his baptism, was coming out of the water of the Jordan River
    when “he saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending
    like a dove on him” and heard a voice speaking to him from
    heaven (1:10-11). God’s power anointed Jesus to challenge the
    forces of evil that now dominate the world, and drove him into
    direct conflict with those forces.20 Mark frames his narrative at
    its beginning and at its climax with episodes in which Satan and
    his demonic forces retaliate against God by working to destroy
    Jesus. Mark begins by describing how the spirit of God
    descended upon Jesus at his baptism, and “immediately drove
    him into the wilderness,
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    and he was in the wilderness forty days being tempted by Satan,
    and was with the animals, and the angels ministered to him”
    (1:12-13). From that moment on, Mark says, even after Jesus left
    the wilderness and returned to society, the powers of evil
    challenged and attacked him at every turn, and he attacked them
    back, and won. Matthew and Luke, writing some ten to twenty
    years later, adopted and elaborated this opening scenario. Each
    turns it into a drama of three temptations, that is, three
    increasingly intense confrontations between Satan and the spirit
    of God, acting through Jesus. Luke shows that the devil,
    defeated in these first attempts to overpower Jesus, withdraws
    “until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). Luke then says what
    Mark and Matthew imply—that the devil returned in person in
    the form of Judas Iscariot to destroy Jesus, initiating the betrayal
    that led to his arrest and execution (Luke 22:3). All of the New
    Testament gospels, with considerable variation, depict Jesus’
    execution as the culmination of the struggle between good and
    evil—between God and Satan—that began at his baptism.
    Satan, although he seldom appears onstage in these gospel
    accounts, nevertheless plays a central role in the divine drama,
    for the gospel writers realize that the story they have to tell
    would make little sense without Satan. How, after all, could
    anyone claim that a man betrayed by one of his own followers,
    and brutally executed on charges of treason against Rome, not
    only was but still is God's appointed Messiah, unless his capture and death were, as the gospels insist, not a final defeat but only a
    preliminary skirmish in a vast cosmic conflict now enveloping
    the universe? The final battle has not yet been fought, much less
    won, but it is imminent. As Jesus warns his interrogator at his
    trial, soon he will be vindicated when the “Son of man” returns
    in the clouds of heaven (Mark 14:62); here Mark has Jesus recall
    one of the prophet Daniel’s visions, in which “one like a son of
    man” (that is, a human being), comes “with the clouds of
    heaven” and is made ruler of God’s Kingdom (Dan. 7:13-14).
    Many of Mark’s contemporaries would have read Daniel’s
    prophecy as predicting the coming of a conqueror who would
    defeat Israel’s foreign