Would anyone take up Satan’s case and be his PR agency? Because according to this news story- Satan a victim of bad PR, professor says, the Devil has been unfairly and wilfully maligned and deserves a reassessment, according to a new study.

Professor Henry Ansgar Kelly, a medievalist, says the Devil has had unfair press and has been the victim of groundless aspersions. Satan is no more evil than the head of MI5 or the prime minister, he says.

In his book Satan: A Biography, to be published by Cambridge University Press this month, the California university academic argues that interpretation of the Bible shows that the Devil suffered a “severe blackening of character” by the clergy, early church fathers, artists, philosophers and religious scholars. The “Devil is in the detail” - literally, he says.

Most Christians believe that Satan was an angel named Lucifer who rebelled against God at the beginning of Creation. After being thrown out of Heaven, he tempted Adam and Eve into sin, and since then has strived to win souls for his kingdom of Hell. But Professor Kelly argues that none of this is in the Bible, and that it represents conclusions drawn by the early church fathers and read back into the Bible.

He argues from Revelation, at the end of the Christian Scriptures, that Satan remains in Heaven, as the “accuser of humankind”, and will stay there until the Battle of Armageddon, when he will be imprisoned in the abyss. After a brief release, he will be imprisoned in the lake of fire for eternity.

Professor Kelly argues from Luke iv that Satan is a minister of God in charge of the world.
“He’s a government heavy, whose main job is to test human beings and to accuse them of their misdeeds, but he is cynical and overzealous in performing his duties,” the professor says. “We can think of an unscrupulous and feared official investigator or prosecutor, like J.Edgar Hoover or senator Joseph McCarthy.”
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