There is some overlap from my previous post ⦠Christianity's Messages: Skewed / Lost by Rome and The King James Bible ⦠where I point out the influence of the Roman Empire and the translation of the King James Bible had on Jesus' and Christianity's core messages. I thought the Devil deserved his own post. My starting point is a cradle Catholic seeing different things in readings and double checking things that didn't make sense.Ā I'm just sharing the history I've found that probably should be in the foreword if the bible had one.Ā
Hell and The Devil aren't fully assigned their identity until 1611 when the King James Bible is completed, but let's start with their prequel produced by the Roman Empire.
Roman Empire Creates The Plot, Setting and Conflict
Roman Catholicism was born 317ad after Roman Emperor Constantine had a premonition with God before winning a war.Ā Rome had the hardware already, but used RC to update it's operating system to monotheism and force conversion as the formal church-state religion.Ā Note, most the other religions in the empire were dualistic with two equal opposing forces of good / bad.Ā
Original Sin
In 417ad Augustine invented original sin - that humans are fundamentally flawed based only on Adam's fall in Genesis. Augustine was not inspired by anything Jesus said or anything else written in the bible because Original Sin was never mentioned by anyone in the bible ever. Yes, that also means Jesus dying for our sins is never mentioned in the bible ever either. Instead of Augustine being inspired by Jesus' words or scripture, Augustine was inspired by his birth religion (before he converted) of Manichaeism, a dualistic religion that had the realm of light (spirit) and the realm of darkness (physical); because humans are in the physical world, every human was viewed as containing a "divine spark" of light imprisoned inside a corrupt shell of dark physical flesh.Ā While the bible was not altered or embellished at that time, in his masterwork, The City of God, Augustine divides all of existence into two opposing kingdoms: The City of God ruled by Christ and The City of the World/Earth ruled literally by Satan.Ā Satan in this context seems consistent with what you have probably been taught, but Hell being an underground torture chamber and Satan being a proper entity were not ideas from Jesus or any writings in the Bible.Ā At least they weren't yet.
Eternal Soul Revoked
In 553ad, the Second Council of Constantinople was an imperial intervention driven by Emperor Justinian (yes Emperor). At the time, the predominant teachings of the soul were that of 3rd-century theologian Origen of Alexandria who taught the pre-existence of souls and the idea that souls existed in the spiritual field before birth and undergo an ongoing, cosmic journey of restoration back to God. Having an eternal soul and made people more difficult to control.Ā Emperor Justinian forced the Church to ban Origenās teachings on the pre-existence and infinite journey of the soul. Deleting the soul's eternal progression locked in a high-stakes, "one-shot" lifetime model, born in debt with one chance to fix it, establishing a complete spiritual monopoly for the state Church.Ā Pope Vigilius initially refused to attend or endorse, then was put in house arrest by imperial guards for 7 years until he acquiesced.
Notes of Political vs Religious Influence: removal of eternal soul was simply an intervention from the emperor or the political arm.Ā Original Sin was rejected by Pope Zosimus where it should have ended then Augustine bypassed the Pope using his connections to Emperor Honoriu to force his ideas into dogma.Ā
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1611: The King James Bible - Homogenizing Hell and creating The Devil as a proper noun vs an abstract idea
So the Roman Empire gave a gigantic network, the raw materials and main ingredients that were just waiting for the King James Bible to come around and finish the job; to redefine both Hell and The Devil / Satan / Lucifer.Ā From 1604ā1611, a team of 54 scholars (organized into six committees across Oxford, Cambridge, and Westminster) worked on translating and refining the text.Ā
Until KJV, The Devil or Satan weren't proper nouns, they were abstract ideas.Ā The widespread pop-cultural belief that Satan is the ruler, king, or primary inhabitant of Hellāsitting on a throne tormenting soulsāis almost entirely a later literary construct (heavily shaped by Danteās Inferno and Miltonās Paradise Lost) rather than a biblical one. When you examine the original Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, the connection between Satan/The Devil and "Hell" (Gehenna, Sheol, Hades, Tartarus) occurs in only a tiny handful of passages, and almost always in a radically different context than what standard tradition teaches.
Satan, The Devil, Lucifer ~ their origin stories
There are 3 different origins that mapped to brand new concepts of our Devil or Satan that we typically think of:
1. The Hebrew Ha-Satan Was an Office, Not a Cosmic Anti-GodĀ
In the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the word satan is a common noun meaning "adversary," "accuser," or "obstacle". It is almost always preceded by the definite article (ha), making it "the satan" (ha-Satan). In texts like the Book of Job, the Satan is not an independent evil monster ruling an underworld. He acts as a heavenly prosecutor or tester in Godās court whose function is to challenge human integrity and expose egoic self-deception. KJV rendered ha-satan as a proper noun capitalized as "Satan," they stripped away the definite article ("the"). This transformed an abstract functional job description into the proper name of an external, malicious entity opposing God.
2. Diabolos and the Externalization of Human Ego
In the original Greek New Testament, the word translated as "devil" is Ī“Ī¹Ī¬Ī²ĪæĪ»ĪæĻ (diabolos), meaning "slanderer," "accuser," or "one who casts obstacles". It was frequently used as an adjective or description for human vicesāsuch as slander, fear, or egoic resistance.Ā KJV took diabolos and systematically capitalized into "The Devil," externalizing human ego and internal spiritual misalignment into a standalone, subterranean Boogeyman.
3. The "Lucifer" Mistranslation (Isaiah 14:12)
The popular origin story of a fallen angel named "Lucifer" comes from a translational choice in Isaiah 14:12. The original Hebrew phrase is ×Öµ××Öµ× ×Ö¶Ö¼×־שָ××ַר (Heylel ben-Shachar), meaning "Day Star, son of the dawn" (referring to the planet Venus). In context, Isaiah was writing a poetic taunt against a human tyrantāthe King of Babylon. The Latin Legacy: When Jerome translated the Hebrew scriptures into the Latin Vulgate, he rendered "Day Star" as the Latin word lucifer "light-bringer" as an adjective not a proper noun. Centuries later, translators kept "Lucifer" as a proper name, creating a narrative about a rogue, fallen angel that the original Hebrew text never contained.
Here are some examples
"Get Behind Me, Satan!" (Matthew 16:21ā23)
This passage provides the clearest direct definition of "Satan" :
- The Context: Jesus tells Peter that he must suffer and die in Jerusalem. Peter, acting out of human fear and self-preservation, rebukes him: "Never, Lord! This shall never happen to you!"
- Jesus's Response: "Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns." (Matthew 16:23)
- Note: Jesus refers to him as Satan because he is an obstacle, then equates that behavior as being human
Timothy 3:11: Paul gives qualifications for church leaders' wives, writing in Greek that they must not be Γιάβολοι (diaboloi).
- Literal Translation: They must not be "slanderers" or "gossips."
- The Translation Choice: Translators rendered it as "slanderers" here because applying "devils" to women made no sense in English. Yet it is the exact same word used for "the Devil".
Ephesians 4:26ā27: "In your anger do not sin: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give room to the devil (diabolos)."
- Through the Ego Lens: Resenting someone or holding onto anger creates an open doorway ("room") for the accuser/slandererāthe lower egoāto take over your mind and fracture your peace.
John 6:70: "Did I not choose you, the twelve? And one of you is a devil (diabolos)?"
- Literal Meaning: Diabolos is a common Greek adjective meaning "a slanderer" or "a divider". Jesus addresses Judas directly, identifying his internal state of greed, egoic self-interest, and intent to betray as the literal operation of a slanderer/divider.
- The Shift: Modern readers interpret "is a devil" as demonic possession by a horned monster, hiding the fact that Jesus was calling out human betrayal and egoic slander.
Jesus in the Wilderness for 40 days (Matthew 4:1ā11 / Luke 4:1ā13)
- The Setting: Deprived of physical food for 40 days, Jesus isolates himself in the wildernessāa setting that forces baseline survival instincts and the lower egoic mind directly to the surface.
- The Tester (Diabolos): The narrative uses Ī“Ī¹Ī¬Ī²ĪæĪ»ĪæĻ (diabolos), meaning "slanderer," "accuser," or "divider"āthe voice that creates doubt, separation, and egoic self-deception.
- The Dismissal (Satanas): Jesus closes the encounter by commanding: "Get away from me, ΣαĻανᾶ (Satanas)!" He addresses the voice as the "adversary / stumbling block," using the exact same term he uses in Matthew 16:23 when defining Satanas as "merely human concerns"āthe physical fear, pride, and survival software of the human ego.
Hell As An Underground Torture Chamber
Prior to KJV, the word hell translated to "to cover," "to hide," or "to conceal" ⦠you would "hell" a roof and then there is the word helmet. It could also mean a covering or a hidden place.
The KJV took four completely distinct Hebrew and Greek words and translated all of them as "Hell":
- Sheol (Hebrew): The neutral grave or underworld where all souls went (translated as "hell" 31 times).
- Hades (Greek): The Greek equivalent of Sheol (translated as "hell" 10 times).
- Tartarus (Greek): A specific holding pit for fallen angels mentioned once in 2 Peter 2:4 (translated as "cast down to hell").
- Gehenna (Greek/Aramaic): The Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem, historically linked to child sacrifice and used by Jesus as a metaphor for spiritual destruction (translated as "hell" 12 times).
Instead of preserving four distinct ancient terms with vastly different meanings the translators systematically collapsed all of them into the single English umbrella word "Hell" construed as an underground torture chamber.Ā KJV translators were borrowing the idea from Dante's Inferno written in 1308-1321.Ā Dante was Italian, but hell is an English / German word so it did not exist in Italian.Ā When the Inferno was translated to English Hell was used.Ā The KJV translators followed the same translation borrowed fire and grimstone imagery from the Inferno.Ā 4 different definitions were homogenized into an underground torture chamber that didn't resemble their initial meanings.