Was Yahweh the Devil?

Jesus in the Temple

If you read the climactic quarrel in John 8 without softening the edges, Jesus does something that would get anyone killed in a theocracy: He tells the Jewish religious establishment, point-blank, that their “father” is the devil. Not metaphor, not a gentle pastoral nudge—an indictment. “If God were your Father, you would love me… You are of your father the devil… he was a murderer from the beginning”. This article is dedicated to my friend and philosopher, Adrian.

This essay argues the thesis you’ve already sensed: the “god” venerated by the Jewish religious elite is not the Father who sent Jesus. In other words, Yahweh (as worshiped in that polemical scene) is identified with the archon who rules the present world order. That claim is explosive; it cuts across two millennia of orthodoxy. But take the evidence seriously and the conclusion follows with cold logic.

The confrontation that unmasks a “different father”

A single exchange in John’s Gospel sits like dynamite under centuries of interpretation. In the Temple, Jesus faces the Jewish religious elite and says:

“If God were your Father, you would love me… You are of your father the devil… he was a murderer from the beginning.” (John 8:42–44)

So, Jesus contrasts his Father with their father, identifies their father as “the devil”, and ties that father’s identity to a history of killing “from the beginning”. The god they serve is not the Father Jesus serves.

The Jewish religious elite, enraged by this exposure, pick up stones to strike Jesus, proving that His words are not just allegorical but a direct and dangerous accusation. (John 8:59)

The setting is not a parable circle; it’s a courtroom-style clash. Jesus characterizes their father as a liar and “murderer from the beginning”. So, John 8 isn’t rhetorical insult; it is indictment and unmasking of the “god” the Jewish religious establishment worships.

The “ruler of this world”: temporary governor, not owner

The rest of the New Testament shows a consistent cosmology: the present world-order lies under dark rule.

  • John summarizes: “the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One.” Paul calls him “the god of this age.”
  • During Jesus’ temptation in the desert, the devil offers Him “all the kingdoms of the world,” claiming: “it has been delivered to me and I give it to whom I will.” Jesus does not dispute the claim; He rejects the worship.
  • After the cross, Jesus declares a transfer: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”. (Matthew 28:18)

If dark rule is conceded across these texts, then the “god” (Yahweh) functionally obeyed in the world-system isn’t the Father who sent Jesus.

The Gnostic diagnosis: the Demiurge exposed

Early Gnostic Christians read John 8 by distinguishing the unknown, good Father (source of life) from the Demiurge (a lower, ignorant ruler who fashioned and dominates the material order). In The Secret Book (Apocryphon) of John, the arrogant ruler—Yaldabaoth (“Yahweh”, “Saklas”, “Samael”)—blasphemes: “I am a jealous God and there is no God but me”, exposing his ignorance of the higher Father. The text identifies him as the creator/ruler of this cosmos and the one who enslaves souls.

In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus laughs at the disciples’ piety because “your god” is the one being praised by their ritual—not His Father. That is, their worship is directed to the wrong deity. This is as explicit as the Gnostic tradition gets in reading John 8’s two-fathers logic.

Note the scriptural judo here: the Demiurge’s boast quotes Isaiah’s monotheistic formula (“I am God, and there is no other”, Isa 45). Gnostics argue the boast on the creaturely ruler’s lips actually reveals his blindness to the higher God.

“Murderer from the beginning”: what “beginning”?

If “from the beginning” points to the Genesis story-world, you’re forced to ask: Who kills in Genesis and the early history? Flood, plagues, annihilations—violence that Gnostics assigned to the lower ruler, not to the good Father of Jesus. Hence the Gnostic reading finds perfect traction with Jesus’s line: “murderer from the beginning”.

Orthodox interpreters try to relocate the “murder” to the serpent’s role in spiritual death (Gen 3), but the Gnostic reply is simple: John 8 names two fathers. If the father of the Jewish religious elite is the devil, and their God is the one they say glorifies Jesus but do not love, then the god they serve is the devil, not Jesus’s Father.

Philosophical backstory: from Plato to Persia

Two streams fed the late-antique imagination:

  • Plato’s Timaeus casts a demiurge (divine craftsman) who shapes matter. He’s benevolent in Plato, but the category of a world-former below the ultimate Good was ready-to-hand for reinterpretation.
  • Zoroastrian (Mazdean) dualism distinguished Ahura Mazda (Good) from Angra Mainyu (Destructive Spirit) in eternal conflict—again, a ready framework for envisioning the current cosmos under a hostile power.

Gnostics plugged the Johannine collision (“your father the devil” vs. “my Father”) into these categories to argue that Yahweh—as enacted in the violent, worldly rule—wasn’t the supreme Father at all but the lower governor of the age.

Jewish apocalyptic soil: “sons of light” vs “sons of darkness”

You don’t have to leave Judaism to find a sharp dualism of authorities. The War Scroll (1QM) from Qumran mentions a cosmic war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness—“the army of Belial”—with heavenly and earthly forces aligned. This is the worldview Jesus’s contemporaries breathed. The idea that an evil power is currently ruling the world wasn’t strange or shocking to Jews at that time. It fit their worldview.

So when Jesus speaks of “the ruler of this world” being cast out, He’s not importing a foreign myth; He’s flipping a familiar apocalyptic script: the dark regime’s days are numbered.

Why the Crucifixion was inevitable in this reading

If Jesus represents the true Father and publicly exposes the Jewish religious elite’s other father, Crucifixion becomes inevitable, not accidental. He isn’t their man, not their messiah, not the face of their “god”.

He demonstrates power that does not bow to the lower ruler (Yahweh). In the eyes of the elite, he is the enemy’s envoy—and the logic of regime-preservation kicks in: eliminate the revealer.

The Resurrection of Jesus as regime-change: the archons disarmed

Paul describes the Resurrection of Jesus not just as atonement, but as a cosmic victory parade: Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities,” making a public spectacle of them. This is regime-change language: the powers are stripped and shamed. After His Resurrection, Jesus declares “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”—the transfer the devil tried to bargain away in the desert now arrives by conquest.

This dovetails with Jesus’s own prophecy: judgment has come; the ruler of our material world (devil) is being expelled. If the Resurrection is the eviction notice, then the one previously sitting in the chair was not the Father.

So with Resurrection of Jesus, the ruler of our material world (devil) is exposed and his status drops: from a supposed ultimate god (N), to a dethroned ruler confined to a lower realm (N−1). In Gnostic cosmology, where the aeons are hierarchically ordered (e.g., 13 heavens), even a single-step descent marks a decisive loss of authority and legitimacy.

Why some still await a different “messiah”

If a community’s hope is defined within loyalty to the lower ruler, then the true Messiah (Jesus)—who exposes and defeats that ruler—cannot be accepted as their messiah. The continued expectation for “another” messiah becomes consistent: they await the agent of their lower “god”, not the Son of the Highest. From the two-fathers perspective, this is not stubbornness; it is coherence with a different allegiance.

“But didn’t Jesus affirm Israel’s God?”—the orthodox reply and a Gnostic rejoinder

Orthodox readers appeal to two pillars:

  • Jesus affirms the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one.”
  • He says He came to fulfill the Law and Prophets, not abolish them.

Gnostic rejoinder:
Jesus also says, in the very scene at issue, that His Father is the One “of whom you say ‘He is our God’”—yet they do not know Him and are children of another father. The fact that they claim the God of Abraham does not prove their object of worship is the true Father; it may prove the opposite. That’s exactly His charge.

Moreover, fulfillment doesn’t mean endorsement of everything attributed to Israel’s deity. From a Gnostic angle, “fulfill” means correct, disclose, complete—showing what in the tradition came from the higher Father versus what reflects the lower ruler, Yahweh. The violent commands? “Murderer from the beginning” speaks for itself.

Orthodox theologians (Bauckham, Hurtado) argue early Christians included Jesus within the unique divine identity of Israel’s God—Creator and Sovereign—thus maintaining Jewish monotheism. But that scholarly case itself concedes the stakes: who, exactly, is the One God—which “Father” does Jesus reveal? The Gnostic answer: the One above the world’s ruler, Yahweh.

A short historical note: how such a reading even became thinkable

People don’t wake up and call the creator of heaven and earth “the devil” unless their religious world is already shaking. Three tremors set the stage:

  1. Apocalyptic dualism in late Second Temple Judaism (Qumran): world as battlefield, Belial’s forces vs. God’s.
  2. Philosophical categories (Plato’s benevolent demiurge; later Middle Platonism) and Persian dualism supplied language for multiple levels of deity.
  3. Temple crisis and social fragmentation, climaxing in 70 CE, forced radical theological re-sorting. In that churn, a group hearing Jesus’ barbed claims in John 8 could coherently say: “He revealed the higher Father and exposed the lower god.”

Orthodox guardians like Irenaeus wrote entire books to crush precisely this claim—because many Christians were making it.

“But weren’t pagans worshiping demons before Christ?”—how that fits

Yes—Paul says what the nations sacrifice “they sacrifice to demons.” That doesn’t make the material cosmos itself divine; in this frame, it’s the domain where wayward powers traffic. Jesus’s mission, then, isn’t to validate this domain’s ruler but to liberate humanity from his sway. “The whole world lies in the power of the Evil One”; the Gospel is an announcement that the higher Father has intervened.

Objection-handling in good faith

“Jesus quotes and honors the Hebrew Scriptures”.
So did Philo, Origen, and later Fathers—often by allegory to resolve morally troubling passages. The question is not whether Scripture is honored, but which voice in Scripture is read as ultimate. The Gnostic method is radical: it attributes violent strands to the lower ruler (Yahweh) whom Jesus unmasks, while receiving life-giving strands as rays from the higher Father. Even mainstream exegesis uses selective moral lenses; Gnostics simply draw the line higher.

“Second Temple Jews held strict monotheism; your two-gods talk is alien”.
Scholars of “divine identity” make exactly the opposite point: early Christians re-identified who the One God is around Jesus. That concessive move—re-defining God’s identity—shows the debate is precisely about which God Jesus reveals.

“This vilifies Jews”.
No. The claim criticizes a regime of worship and rule—the “god of this age”—not an ethnicity. Qumran’s own Jewish sects blasted the Jerusalem priesthood as corrupt and spoke of Belial’s army; internal Jewish critique pre-dated Christianity. The Gnostic reading extends an intra-Jewish apocalyptic critique, not an ethnic slur.

So… was Yahweh the devil?

As a hypothesis, here is the cleanest version:

  • The visible order is under a real but subordinate ruler (“the evil one,” “ruler of this world”).
  • The public religious system confuses that ruler with the Most High.
  • Jesus confronts the Jewish religious establishment exposes in John 8—naming their father as the devil—and refuses to receive rule from him in Luke 4.
  • Through the cross, Jesus disarms the hostile powers (Col 2:15) and announces the transfer: “All authority… has been given to me” (Matt 28:18).
  • Some early movements (later called Gnostic) formalized this as “Yahweh = lower god (Demiurge)”, drawing on dualist philosophy and the shock of Scripture’s violence, and citing texts like the Apocryphon of John to differentiate the boaster from the Unknown Father.

On internal coherence and textual “hooks,” the hypothesis holds together. Whether you accept it finally depends on whether you read John 8 as metaphysical disclosure or moral metaphor. If you choose the former, the thesis “Yahve was the devil” becomes—not a provocation—but a diagnosis.

Coda: living with the consequences of this reading

If you embrace the thesis—Yahweh, as the god of the present world-order, is the devil—two practical demands follow:

  1. Spiritual allegiance: measure all depictions of “God” by the character of the Father Jesus reveals—self-giving love, truth, life. Anything contradicting that is the voice of the lower ruler.
  2. Cosmic realism: expect conflict. The Gospel doesn’t promise integration into the world’s structures; it promises their judgment and a new creation under the true Father.

It’s a hard gospel because it’s a revealing one. In John 8, Jesus didn’t speak in metaphors. He pulled the mask. The rest of the New Testament reads like the aftershocks of that revelation.

Key sources (for further reading)

Disclaimer: This article advances a theological hypothesis and does not critique any people. It’s a map for reading Scripture through the sharp edge of Jesus’s own words—not a license for contempt.

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