Damian Caruana's blog, Castle of Nutshells, comments on my essay on Satan in his June 21 post. He asks:
Quote:
[H]ow do we reconcile the Old Testament picture of evil being God’s responsibility (and all that entails), and modern concepts of the struggle between good and evil? Does the New Testament paint that picture, or is it something later Christianity projected onto the text? Was this projection something that started before or after solidification of the canon?
An interesting set of questions. I don't know Damian, so I'm probably not being fair to him here, but he seems to be asking, "Is the development of the character of Satan something that is in the NT [and therefore something important], or something that happened after the NT was written [and therefore something to be ignored]." That seems to me to be a chicken-and-egg question: one that probably doesn't have an answer. Rather, there must have been an interplay between canon development - as certain texts that mention Satan became more widespread in the Christian communities - and the development of ideas about Satan. Neither one came first: both developments happened at more or less the same time.
