How long does it take to read The Origin of Satan?
The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels takes about 3 hours 55 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 55 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1995. 214 pages, about 58,850 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 32 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 55 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 27 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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. In The Origin of Satan, Pagels shows that the four Christian gospels tell two very different stories. The first is the story of Jesus' moral genius: his lessons of love, forgiveness, and redemption. 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. Writing during and just after the Jewish war against Rome, the evangelists invoked Satan to portray their Jewish enemies as God's enemies too. As Pagels then shows, the church later turned this satanic indictment against its Roman enemies, declaring that pagans and infidels were also creatures of Satan, and against its own dissenters, calling them heretics and ascribing their heterodox views to satanic influences.
Subjects: Bible, Biblical teaching, Christianity and antisemitism, Criticism, interpretation, Devil, Nieuwe Testament
