When I was a teenager, I went to church, and almost every ‘Christian’ there was a complete asshole. What makes it worse is that they try to justify it. This honestly made me think that if God and Satan were real, I’d want to know Lucifer’s story. Maybe he’s not actually ‘evil.’
Popular Christianity is heavily based on paganism, which is incredibly ironic considering that paganism is generally posed as the antithesis of Christianity. The story of Lucifer is syncretized with the story of Prometheus, although Lucifer doesn’t really benefit humanity at all. According to the popular interpretation, Lucifer is the origin of all evil, became a snake in the garden of Eden, and then tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, the snake isn’t actually connected to Lucifer in the text—that interpretation was added later to explain the problem of evil (why it exists if God is supposedly good)
The idea that Lucifer is insubordinate and violated the natural hierarchy is very old, but the idea that Lucifer is the origin of evil is relatively new.
Christian theology contains many holes like this because there’s a tendency towards treating every word in the Bible as literal, where it may have been written allegorically or as a parable, as Jesus often did. (Just to be clear, Jesus did NOT write the Bible, I’m just pointing out that the writers of the Bible may have tried to replicate his style.) This issue is compounded when you include the Old testament, as it contains portions which are clearly mythological, but are nonetheless treated as fact by certain modern Christians.
I know next to nothing about christinanity and this little taste had a nice archeological vibe to it. Can I ask you a followup question? What do we know about Jesus’ style? Are the different accounts of his life consistent enough that we can infer a style of expression?
edit I am reading this now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible?wprov=sfla1
One thing we know about Jesus is that he was very good at using rhetorics. Other than the accounts in several books about him using rhetorical techniques very advanced for the day, there’s also evidence that he was skilled enough to start a religion. But any information finer than that is hard to prove. The books are over a thousand years old, written at different times by different people, followed by several translations, so we can’t know his exact word choice or style of speech with certainty. The closest to the ‘source’ are ancient Greek texts which were likely translated from some other language.
Alright, pretty cool ! thanks !
I’d be curious to know more about his rhetorics, I’ll look this up but if you happen to remember specifically where I can find these accounts, don’t hesitate to let me know. Cheers !
Wasn’t “Lucifer” as a concept post-biblical? Obviously in the Torah you have The Satan, the judge on God’s divine council. Lucifer is a post-biblical interpretation of various prophetic scripts to make Satan out to be the overarching “evil” of the bible. Which is funny because that interpretation of Satan (and God) comes from Zoroastrianism, which holds that there is a great good spirit and great evil spirit.
Lucifer existed before but didn’t become entangled with Satan until after christianity had roots. So it is a post biblical merge, but pre-biblical. The concept is older, the merge changed the focus of the concept.(69 is just number, until it becomes a joke as well.)
Satan and more properly the ‘Devil’ as is the main concept in modernity. This is due to the romans using this translation preferably from the Greeks. The devil then got most of their iconography from Pan and some roman art traditions. This is far more important than people realize. Anyways, all this was forming in the roman zeitgeist while Christianity was not canonical to the empire yet.
I like the Gnostic explanation that the being who created the material universe was a lesser deity of some sort (I think they call it evil but I’d probably go with chaotic or something). It made people to have intelligent-ish beings to interact with, and it put the Trees of “Knowledge of God & Evil” and “Life” in the Garden (for some reason) but didn’t want Adam & Eve to become knowledgeable & immortal.
In this telling, the “Serpent” is Jesus by which they mean the physical projection of the actual highest actually all powerful, all loving, etc etc god, and it wants to free A&E so it convinced them to eat the fruit.