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particular
    minority, they might have told his story very differently—and
    with considerably more historical plausibility. They might have
    told it, for example, in traditional patriotic style, as the story of
    an inspired Jewish holy man martyred by Israel’s traditional
    enemies, foreign oppressors of one sort or another. The biblical
    book of Daniel, for example, which tells the story of the prophet
    Daniel, who, although threatened with a horrible death—being
    torn apart by lions—nevertheless defies the king of Babylon in
    the name of God and of the people of Israel (Dan. 6:1-28). The
    first book of Maccabees tells the story of the priest Mattathias,
    who defies Syrian soldiers when they order him to worship
    idols. Mattathias chooses to die rather than betray his devotion
    to God.23
    THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 15

    But unlike the authors of Daniel or 1 Maccabees, the gospel
    writers chose to dissociate themselves from the Jewish majority
    and to focus instead upon intra-Jewish conflict—specifically
    upon their own quarrel with those who resisted their claims that
    Jesus was the Messiah. Within the gospels, as we shall see, the
    figure of Satan tends to express this dramatic shift of blame from
    “the nations”— bagoyim , in Hebrew—onto members of Jesus’
    own people. The variation in each gospel as it depicts the activity
    of the demonic opposition—that is, those perceived as enemies—
    expresses, I believe, a variety of relationships, often deeply
    ambivalent, between various groups of Jesus’ followers and the
    specific Jewish groups each writer regards as his primary
    opponents. I want to avoid oversimplification. Nonetheless it is
    probably fair to say that in every case the decision to place the
    story of Jesus within the context of God's struggle against Satan
    tends to minimize the role of the Romans, and to place
    increasing blame instead upon Jesus’ Jewish enemies.
    This is not to say that the gospel writers simply intended to
    exonerate the Romans. Mark surely was aware that during his
    time, and for some thirty years after the war, the Romans
    remained wary of renewed sedition. Members of a group loyal to
    a condemned seditionist were at risk, and Mark probably hoped
    to persuade those outsiders who might read his account that
    neither Jesus nor his followers offered any threat to Roman
    order. But within Mark’s account, the Romans, even the few
    portrayed with some sympathy, remain essentially outsiders.
    Mark tells the story of Jesus in the context that matters to him
    most—within the Jewish community. And here, as in most
    human situations, the more intimate the conflict, the more
    intense and bitter it becomes.
    Mark opens his narrative with the account of John's baptizing
    Jesus and relates that at the moment of baptism the power of
    God descended upon Jesus, and “a voice spoke from heaven,
    saying ‘This is my beloved son’ ” (1:11). At that moment, all
    human beings disappear from Mark’s narrative and, as we have
    seen, the spirit of God drives Jesus into the wilderness to
    encounter Satan, wild animals, and angels. Recounting this
    episode, as James Robinson notes, Mark does not depart from
    events in the human,
    16 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

    historical world but signals that he wants to relate these events
    to the struggle between good and evil in the universe.24 Mark’s
    account, then, moves direcdy from Jesus’ solitary struggle with
    Satan in the desert to his first public appearance in the synagogue
    at Capernaum, where immediately on the Sabbath he entered the
    synagogue and taught.

    And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught as one
    who had authority, and not as the scribes (1:22).

    There Jesus encounters a man possessed by an evil spirit who,
    sensing Jesus’ divine power, challenges him: “What have you to
    do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?”
    (1:24). According to Mark, Jesus has come to heal the world