The Origin of Satan
Author: Elaine Pagels
Amazon: The Origin of Satan
Description
From Westar Institute’s Spring 1995 Meeting
Who is Satan? How did he become the embodiment of evil in the New Testament? Bestselling author and scholar Elaine Pagels shows how a struggle between followers of Jesus and the Jewish majority turned into a demonization of the “intimate enemies”—and how pagans and dissenting Christians also came to be branded agents of Satan.
Elaine Pagels is Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University. A recipient of the MacArthur Prize, she has been recognized by the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. In 2012, she received Princeton University’s Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. As one nominator wrote, Pagels has the ability “to show readers that the ancient texts she studies are concerned with the great questions of human existence though they may discuss them in … language very different from our own.”
Pagels’ 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels, won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award and the National Book Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th century. Her other titles include the bestselling Origin of Satan (1995), Beyond Belief (2003), and most recently, Revelations (2012).
