You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
-John 8:44
In the midst of all my work distractions I've found a few minutes every day to wade back into Christian history, and a fascinating book entitled The Evil Creator.
The author is a well-respected scholar of early Christian history, and he unearths a rather provocative idea that once held sway among a large sect of early Christians, the Marcionites.
Their eponymous founder, Marcion, carried a curious notion about the Hebrew god, Yahweh. Apparently this one had been around for centuries, and the only reason we know about it now, given that pretty much all Marcionite writings are gone, is through the criticisms of his opponents, most famously Tertullian.
Marcion struggled with how the benevolent god of the Gospels could be reconciled with the jealous, vengeful, murderous deity in the Hebrew scriptures. And yes, I know some will point out that Yahweh can say some pretty kind things at times, but it feels sort of like Drunk Dad regretfully cooking you breakfast the morning after beating your behind in a drunken rage. Yahweh is a decidedly flawed supreme being.
As it turns out, the Hebrews might have taken him with them when they left Egypt. Litwa walks us through some careful analysis of the name for Yahweh and that of the Egyptian god Seth, Typhon in Hellenistic times. Seth was the creator god, and a god of chaos and sometimes inchoate wrath. He had the head of a donkey, and long before Marcion the rumor made the rounds that the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem contained a hidden statue of a god with a golden donkey head. Even early Christian graffiti included images of a crucified Christ bearing the head of a donkey.
Marcion also keyed on the above passage from the Gospel of John, in which Jesus confronts a group of Jews who explain their special role as sons of Abraham. His rebuke suggests that they are descendants of something other than the first chosen of the one true god, of a demon in fact. As a Marcionite might have explained to you nearly two thousand years ago, the Hebrew Elohim and God the Father are two different beings, the former below and inferior to the latter, who in turn can only be approached by breaking through the rings of being (represented by the planets), the last of which is guarded by Seth/Yahweh himself, to reach communion with the true god proclaimed by Jesus, and who is Jesus, in John's Gospel.
All fascinating stuff. It certainly makes the problem of theodicy much simpler to wrangle, on the surface at least. God allows evil and suffering in the world because that's sort of his thing, as the chaos god. At the same time, if there's an entirely transcendent, platonic supreme being above old Seth, isn't he still on the hook in the end?
It also gives some explanation for the two Yahwehs we meet at the beginning of Genesis. The divine being at the moment of creation, again reflected in the prologue to John's Gospel, is a far different thing than the fellow walking around in his garden enjoying the breeze and wondering where his mud people have made off to. Seth, it seems, wasn't all knowing, and was bound in space and time with the rest of us.
Litwa also mentions a detail I'd never heard: that the Egyptians had their own version of Exodus in which their gods get sick of the kleptomaniac Hebrews and drive them into the desert as an exilic punishment. It's ironic that as part of the exile, in a long-forgotten view of a long-forgotten sect that once flourished more-or-less next door to the progenitors of the modern church, the Hebrews brought into the desert with them the Egyptian god they'd encountered during their centuries living among the Egyptians. And that god, being something less than complete, ordered the Hebrews to steal bangles from their employers on the way out the door.
All a nice distraction from the news, isn't it?