Satan: The Early Christian Tradition

Rating:
Summary: Avoiding the issue
Review: This book is written by Jeffrey Burton Russell professor of History at the University of California. It is his second volume about the history of concept of the Devil, first published 1981. Satan: The early christian tradition tracks the first five centuries of the christian church. There are lot of questions in these book concerning the origin of evil in this world and the existence of the Devil. What was the nature of his fall? Where is he now? Can he be saved? Going through history with the guidance of J.F.Russell we see in what way the early church fathers tried to answer questions like these. It is also interesting to see why some early christians preferred martyrdom while others become monks. And here you find the basis for persecutions of heretics and witches for centuries! To my mind this is a good literature about the first five centuries of Christian history.

Rating:
Summary: Satan: The Early Christian Tradition.
Review: This book is written by Jeffrey Burton Russell professor of History at the University of California. It is his second volume about the history of concept of the Devil, first published 1981. Satan: The early christian tradition tracks the first five centuries of the christian church. There are lot of questions in these book concerning the origin of evil in this world and the existence of the Devil. What was the nature of his fall? Where is he now? Can he be saved? Going through history with the guidance of J.F.Russell we see in what way the early church fathers tried to answer questions like these. It is also interesting to see why some early christians preferred martyrdom while others become monks. And here you find the basis for persecutions of heretics and witches for centuries! To my mind this is a good literature about the first five centuries of Christian history.

Rating:
Summary: Avoiding the issue
Review: This I think is without question the weakest of all four volumes of this series, in that it doesn't address the real question surrounding the devil in early Christianity which is "where did the Christian devil come from?". It will be obvious to most readers familiar with Jewish background to the New Testament that the NT devil comes virtually out of the blue. One can point to only two significant Satans in the whole OT (Job's and Zechariah's - one poetic, one prophetic) and then suddenly in the NT there is an explosion in diabolic activity from page 1 (35 mentions of "devil", 35 of "Satan", plus various synonyms such as "prince of this world"). Yet one searches in vain for anything in the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha and Dead Sea Scrolls that prefigures the NT devil.

Why? This is the $64,000 question. But Russell doesn't address it - he allows his own personal faith in an everpresent fallen angel (from Eden?) to buck the issue that puzzles everyone confronted with the sudden upgrade of the devil in early Christianity, and what we get is a pedestrian walk through of early Christian devil belief without even attempting to explain this radical departure both from the Old Testament and also contemporary Judaism. Nor does Russell explore Paul's equally radical concept of the Old Man versus the New Man as a spiritual battle. If this isn't relevant to the NT devil, what is?