God as the Devil

In Christian heresiology, there have been historical claims that certain Christian sects worshipped the devil. This was especially an issue in the reaction of the early Church to Gnosticism and its dualism, where the creator deity is understood as a demiurge subordinate to the actual, transcendent God.

In the Hebrew Bible God is depicted as the source of both light and darkness, as in Isaiah 45:6-7. This concept of "darkness" or "evil" was not yet personified as "the devil," a later development in Jewish thought.

The author of the Books of Chronicles is thought to have first introduced the notion of "divine intermediaries", which was not found in the earlier parts of the Hebrew Bible. The main evidence adduced by theologians to support this is 1 Chronicles 21, a reworked version of 2 Samuel 24.

This change is made most evident in the Chronicler's treatment of 2 Samuel 24:1:

And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.

which, in 1 Chronicles 21:1, becomes:

And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel.

In the Book of Samuel, YHWH himself is the agent in punishing Israel, while in 1 Chronicles an "adversary" is introduced. This is usually taken to be the result of the influence of Persian dualism on Israelite demonology.

Scholars are divided on whether in Chronicles, "the adversary" had already become a proper name, "the Adversary" (Satan). The traditional opinion has been that this is the case, arguing from the absence of the definite article in שטן "adversary". S. Japhet in her The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles and its Place in Biblical Thought (1989) argued against mainstream opinion in suggesting that שטן still had the generic meaning and only became the proper name "Satan" at a later date, by about the 2nd century BC.

Tertullian accuses Marcion of Sinope, the first major heretic of Christianity in the 1st century, that he "[held that] the Old Testament was a scandal to the faithful [...] and [...] accounted for it by postulating [that Jehovah was] a secondary deity, a demiurgus, who was god, in a sense, but not the supreme God; he was just, rigidly just, he had his good qualities, but he was not the good god, who was Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ." The Church condemned his writings as heretical.

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