- Nov 26, 2019
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Oh, I also forgot item no. 3, for @BobRyan
b
The current scholarly consensus is that Lucifer in the verses you are reading refers to Nebuchadnezzar and not the devil. Christians were actually not infrequently named Lucifer during the late Roman Empire. Actually, the most famous bishop of Sardinia is the fourth century Lucifer of Cagliari, who was a supporter of the Origenist movement and, like the Cappadocian Fathers, an admirer of the writings of the early church father Origen; this caused him to incur the enmity of Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible, and also of Epiphanius, a Greek bishop who wrote a series of books known in English as the "Medicine Chest" which describe the various cults that existed on the fringe of the Christian religion in the fourth century, and which also quoted and included much of an earlier second century work on the same thing, the famous six-volume book Against Heresies by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons.
Now, Jerome and Epiphanius are universally venerated as saints, but interestingly, on the island of Sardinia, Lucifer of Cagliari is also venerated as a saint. So there is actually a St. Lucifer, but if you ever read about this, it is not referring to the devil, but to a very pious and important bishop of the fourth century. Actually, had he not gotten into a controversy with Jerome and Epiphanius over Origen, he probably would be universally venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The problem was that Origen was (in the opinion of a great many people, wrongly) accused of somehow being responsible for the Arian heresy that exploded in the fourth century, despite having died in the peace of the church decades before it, and he was posthumously declared anathema by the Chacledonian Christians in the sixth century (fortunately, this anathema is not binding on the Church of the East, or the Oriental Orthodox, or on Protestant churches, as acceptance of the Three Chapters is not a matter of universally accepted doctrine).
It was only much later, in the high middle ages and the Renaissance, when in the Western Church, Lucifer began to be interpreted by some as being the proper name of the devil. I myself do not think that the devil's proper name has been revealed to us (Beezlebub, if I recall correctly, was a demon and also the name of a Canaanite deity). And certainly, the name originally given to the devil, before his fall, would not be a Latin name like Lucifer. The apocryphal book 1 Enoch refers to an angel named "Sataniel" but does not specifically identify this angel as being malevolent, although this is also strange because "Satan" does mean "the accuser," with implications of slander. And 1 Enoch is a strange book anyway (the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox church does regard it as canonical, but they do not, I am told, read from it any doctrines which would contradict the established doctrines of the other Orthodox churches, especially the Coptic Orthodox Church, which they were an archdiocese of until the early 20th century; I believe it was either Haile Selassie or his immediate predecessor who negotiated for the Ethiopian church to be made independent of Egyptian Christian oversight).
b
The current scholarly consensus is that Lucifer in the verses you are reading refers to Nebuchadnezzar and not the devil. Christians were actually not infrequently named Lucifer during the late Roman Empire. Actually, the most famous bishop of Sardinia is the fourth century Lucifer of Cagliari, who was a supporter of the Origenist movement and, like the Cappadocian Fathers, an admirer of the writings of the early church father Origen; this caused him to incur the enmity of Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible, and also of Epiphanius, a Greek bishop who wrote a series of books known in English as the "Medicine Chest" which describe the various cults that existed on the fringe of the Christian religion in the fourth century, and which also quoted and included much of an earlier second century work on the same thing, the famous six-volume book Against Heresies by Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons.
Now, Jerome and Epiphanius are universally venerated as saints, but interestingly, on the island of Sardinia, Lucifer of Cagliari is also venerated as a saint. So there is actually a St. Lucifer, but if you ever read about this, it is not referring to the devil, but to a very pious and important bishop of the fourth century. Actually, had he not gotten into a controversy with Jerome and Epiphanius over Origen, he probably would be universally venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. The problem was that Origen was (in the opinion of a great many people, wrongly) accused of somehow being responsible for the Arian heresy that exploded in the fourth century, despite having died in the peace of the church decades before it, and he was posthumously declared anathema by the Chacledonian Christians in the sixth century (fortunately, this anathema is not binding on the Church of the East, or the Oriental Orthodox, or on Protestant churches, as acceptance of the Three Chapters is not a matter of universally accepted doctrine).
It was only much later, in the high middle ages and the Renaissance, when in the Western Church, Lucifer began to be interpreted by some as being the proper name of the devil. I myself do not think that the devil's proper name has been revealed to us (Beezlebub, if I recall correctly, was a demon and also the name of a Canaanite deity). And certainly, the name originally given to the devil, before his fall, would not be a Latin name like Lucifer. The apocryphal book 1 Enoch refers to an angel named "Sataniel" but does not specifically identify this angel as being malevolent, although this is also strange because "Satan" does mean "the accuser," with implications of slander. And 1 Enoch is a strange book anyway (the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox church does regard it as canonical, but they do not, I am told, read from it any doctrines which would contradict the established doctrines of the other Orthodox churches, especially the Coptic Orthodox Church, which they were an archdiocese of until the early 20th century; I believe it was either Haile Selassie or his immediate predecessor who negotiated for the Ethiopian church to be made independent of Egyptian Christian oversight).
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