Elaine Pagles, welcome back to the show.

Thank you. Good to be here, Alex. Good to see you.

Who is Satan?

What a great question.

Satan is traditionally thought to be an

invisible being responsible for all evil and suffering in the world. Actually a character created, as far as I could tell, in Jewish and Christian tradition,

although he may have had forerunners in sort of bad actors in Egyptian mythology, Babylonian mythology.

There are, you know, gods who do very bad things he's not a God but he is seen as a spiritual

being with a bad reputation and a lot of people will have an image of the red devil with the horns and the pitchfork and the big tail.

What is that and where does that come from?

Well, when I first thought about the topic of Satan, I thought of it as kind of a joke,

you know, a little cartoon figure like the one you mentioned.

But when I started to think, why is that figure really part of the way Christians talk about the story of Jesus, the way Muslims talk, and even now Jews speak about Satan much more than they used to.

Where did that come from? And I realize that it comes from pre-Christian stories about angels and God creates the God of

Israel creates everything good presumably and all of the angels were good so to speak if you ask

Saint Augustine but even in the Hebrew Bible there's a story about how some of the angels who were charged

with protecting the earth failed their duty and they went down and were desired human women.

The angels were all masculine in Greek mythology.

I'm sorry, in well, not only Greek mythology,

but in Jewish mythology. The angels all have male names and the story in

Genesis 6 says that there were some of these sons of God as they're called Benito

who sons of God can they're called, Benito. Sons of God can either refer to

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