I\u2019ve been interested in one line of recurring discussion in all the talk about Mel Gibson\u2019s movie. (Keep in mind I\u2019m focusing on \u201ctalk\u201d about the movie; I haven\u2019t yet seen the movie.) On the one hand, the charge that the movie is anti-Jewish. On the other, the counter that it\u2019s not; that it\u2019s telling the gospel story of crucifixion, the atonement. My point would be that these two views may not be exactly contradictory. I recently reread The Origins of Satan<\/i> (1993) by Elaine Pagels. Her argument has framed my own response to discussions about Gibson\u2019s movie\u2014and to my thinking recently about Joseph Smith\u2019s \u201cprologue\u201d to his New Translation of the Bible (contemporary Mormons know this prologue as Moses 1).
\n
\nHere are some quotations from Pagels\u2019s book that give you the gist of her argument:
\n\u2022\u201cWhile angels often appear in the Hebrew Bible, Satan, along with other fallen angels or demonic beings, is virtually absent.\u201d
\n\u2022\u201cWhat interests me are specifically social implications of the figure of Satan: how he is invoked to express human conflict and to characterize human enemies within our own religious traditions.\u201d
\n\u2022\u201cThus the problem of evil begins in sibling rivalry. . . . Satan is not the distant enemy but the intimate enemy\u2014one\u2019s trusted colleague, close associate, brother.\u201d
\n\u2022\u201cThe gospel of John, like the other gospels, associates the mythological figure of Satan with specific human opposition, first implicating Judas Iscariot, then the Jewish authorities, and finally \u2018the Jews\u2019 collectively.\u201d
\n\u2022\u201cBy presenting Jesus\u2019 life and message in these polemical terms, the evangelists no doubt intended to strengthen group solidarity. In the process, they shaped, in ways that were to become incalculably consequential, the self-understanding of Christians in relations to Jews for two millennia.\u201d<\/p>\n
If Gibson has faithfully captured this gospel story of intimate enemies, he may well have captured the strong and highly polarized story Pagels describes. Christians must make their peace with this part of the Christian story as surely as they do with the gospel of love and forgiveness.<\/p>\n
It is this same New Testament story of Satan, a ground for the story of intimate enemies, that Joseph Smith wraps around the King James Bible in his prologue to the New Translation, dictated to Oliver Cowdery in June 1830. This text comes at a crucial borderland\u2014the Book of Mormon is recently off the press, the church is only just beginning, the community of faith not yet gathered into one place. This prologue brings a strikingly New Testament frame to the Old Testament\u2019s beginning. Satan tempts Moses in the wilderness just as he tempts Jesus in the gospels. He loudly proclaims that he is the Father\u2019s only begotten, evoking his own story as a family story, insisting on his place in the family of heaven. And in the early pages of Genesis, Satan\u2019s fall from heaven (similar to his fall in Revelations) is inserted as the context for his behavior with Adam and Eve in the garden and his relationship with Cain. <\/p>\n
This figure of Satan, the prospect of intimate enemies following in his wake, is used in the early Mormon context very much as it is in the New Testament context, to strengthen the group and to deal with opposition. In the first years of the church, cursing enemies is a parallel ceremony to sealing friends to eternal life. And very early in our history, these were \u201cintimate\u201d enemies\u2014members of the family, former friends and church leaders. Ultimately the parallel ceremonies for enemies and friends are enshrined in the early temples\u2014with lists of both left on the altars of nineteenth-century temples (one of the images that still lingers with me from Wilford Woodruff\u2019s journals).<\/p>\n
I understand the power of this story, it\u2019s protective utility in our history. But it\u2019s effect can be\u2014and has been–disabling as well. In contemporary terms, we might admit to a rather dysfunctional family dynamic. As a model for brothers and sisters, families, intimates struggling to disagree, it has its limits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve been interested in one line of recurring discussion in all the talk about Mel Gibson\u2019s movie. (Keep in mind I\u2019m focusing on \u201ctalk\u201d about the movie; I haven\u2019t yet seen the movie.) On the one hand, the charge that the movie is anti-Jewish. On the other, the counter that it\u2019s not; that it\u2019s telling the gospel story of crucifixion, the atonement. My point would be that these two views may not be exactly contradictory. I recently reread The Origins of Satan (1993) by Elaine Pagels. Her argument has framed my own response to discussions about Gibson\u2019s movie\u2014and to my thinking recently about Joseph Smith\u2019s \u201cprologue\u201d to his New Translation of the Bible (contemporary Mormons know this prologue as Moses 1).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-history"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}