How You Have Fallen: Exploring the Benevolence of an Early Christian God as Seen Through a Progressively Embodied Satan

This paper attempts to explore the creation of Satan as an embodiment of evil in Early Christian theodicy. I use Greco-Roman myth and the Old Testament Book of Job to explore duality, a system in which good and evil are encapsulated in gods or God. I attempt to trace the trajectory of a shift from this duality to a system of Christian cosmic dualism, in which good and evil are separated as opposing forces. This shift is explored through the intertestamental Pseudepigrapha of 1 Enoch and Jubilees, towards the New Testament story of the Temptation of Christ in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Finally, exploring post-New Testament Christian ideas with Origen\u27s seminal work On First Principles and the martyr text of Perpetua to investigate the Early Christian community\u27s ideas of good, God, evil, and Satan