The second tells of the bitter conflict between the followers of Jesus and their fellow Jews, a conflict in which the writers of the four gospels condemned as creatures of Satan those Jews who refused to worship Jesus as the Messiah. The first is the story of Jesus' moral genius: his lessons of love, forgiveness, and redemption. In The Origin of Satan, Pagels shows that the four Christian gospels tell two very different stories. So, Matthew says, Jesus’ mother “was discovered to have a child in her womb through the holy spirit” (1:18) and God’s angel explains to Joseph that the child “was conceived through the holy spirit.” Jesus’ birth was no scandal, Matthew says, but a miracle-one that precisely fulfills Isaiah’s ancient prophecy.Who is Satan in the New Testament, and what is the evil that he represents? In this groundbreaking book, Elaine Pagels, Princeton's distinguished historian of religion, traces the evolution of Satan from its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan is at first merely obstructive, to the New Testament, where Satan becomes the Prince of Darkness, the bitter enemy of God and man, evil incarnate. But the translation of almah into the Greek parthenos (“virgin”), as many of Jesus’ followers read the passage, confirmed their conviction that Jesus’ birth, which unbelievers derided as sordid, actually was a miraculous “sign.”21 Thus Matthew revises Mark’s story by saying that the spirit descended upon Jesus not at his baptism but at the moment of his conception. In the original Hebrew, the passage had read “young woman” (almah), apparently describing an ordinary birth. Apparently Matthew knew the Hebrew Bible in its Greek translation, where he would have read the following: “The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel-God with us” (Isaiah 7:14). There the Lord promises to give Israel a “sign” of the coming of God’s salvation. “For example, in opposition to the rumor that Jesus was born illegitimate, Matthew and his predecessors found vindication for their faith in Jesus in Isaiah 7:14.
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