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Several religious authors throughout history have advanced the notion that the god of the Abrahamic Bible and its sequels is consistent in character with the Devil. They make the case that the Biblical God is a divine force that wreaks suffering, death and destruction and that tempts or commands humanity into committing mayhem and genocide. Tertullian accuses Marcion of Sinope, the first great 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."[31] The Church condemned his writings as heretical. John Arendzen (1909) in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) mentions that Eusebius accused Apelles, the 2nd-century AD Gnostic, of considering the Inspirer of Old-Testament prophecies to be not a god, but an evil angel.[32] Hegemonius (4th century) accuses the Persian prophet Mani, founder of the Manichaean sect in the 3rd century AD, identified Jehovah as "the devil god which created the world"[33] and said that "he who spoke with Moses, the Jews, and the priests … is the [Prince] of Darkness, … not the god of truth."[34] These writings refer to the Abrahamic God variously as "a demiurgus",[31] "an evil angel",[32] "the devil god",[33] "the Prince of Darkness",[34] "the source of all evil",[35] "the Devil",[36] "a demon",[37] "a cruel, wrathful, warlike tyrant",[38] "Satan"[39] and "the first beast of the book of Revelation".[40] |
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