The Guile of the Serpent

One of the key issues at the heart of ancient scholarship was speculation as to the origin of the world and man’s position within it. Peter Schäfer takes different teachings and looks at them in relation to one another in the most fascinating way! Imagine being able to look at biblical narratives, myths from the ancient orient, Plato’s angle on the creation of the world and Philon’s interpretation of the Bible, Aristotle’s teaching on ‘the unmoved mover’ and Lucretius’ materialist world view, first rediscovered in the Renaissance, all in one volume. Both Christianity and Judaism adopted and adapted these teachings but did so without the emergence of any ‘Jewish-Christian’ tradition, as his expose so masterfully shows us. In rabbinical Judaism man becomes man as a result of the serpent’s guile while in the Christian tradition man is seen to have been beguiled by the devilish snake and has to live out his life with Original Sin.

These starkly contrasting images of man continue to have an impact in the modern world, from the Enlightenment to the antidemocratic theology of Carl Schmitt.