New Testament Satanology and Leading Suprahuman Opponents in Second Temple Jewish Literature: A Religio-Historical Analysis

The challenge of reconceptualizing mythological concepts like the Devil in contemporary Christian theology is well known, but some interpreters find a demythologized Devil already within the New Testament. To evaluate this approach exegetically, this study attempts to reconstruct the religio-historical setting of New Testament Satanology by exploring leading suprahuman opponents (LSOs) in pre- and non-Christian Second Temple Jewish literature. In contrast to most earlier reconstructions, the present study is methodologically conservative, admitting into evidence only texts that can be confidently assigned to a pre-70 ce date and non-Christian Jewish provenance. The investigation shows that there was no standard Jewish Satanology during the Second Temple period. Moreover, ‘Satan’ is not clearly attested as a personal name prior to the New Testament and may therefore be a title or Funktionsbezeichnung in most occurrences therein. New Testament Satanology shows significant continuity with earlier and contemporaneous Jewish LSO-concepts but is relatively homogeneous, suggesting that a consolidation of Satanological terminology and concepts occurred very early in church history. This consistency, together with the abundance of concretely mythological religio-historical parallels to the New Testament Devil, suggest that the early church uniformly understood the Satan as a real mythological being—probably an angel.