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Christianity by the Century: Third Century BCE
by Shirley Paulson, PhD
Angels and Demons
Christianity by the Century: Third Century BCE (300–200 BCE)
In my last post, I traced the powerful influence of Greek philosophy—especially Plato and Aristotle—on Jewish and later Christian thought during the fourth century BCE. As we move into the third century BCE, that Hellenistic influence is still very much alive, but something new is happening. Jewish writers are producing some of the most creative and imaginative texts of the ancient world. This is the century in which angels and demons step into center stage.
I draw on Annette Yoshiko Reed’s book, Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, as we focus on the third century because she highlights the profound impact of this century on later Judaism and Christianity. Whereas Post-Reformation scholarship has largely ignored the contributions of the third century BCE, Reed claims that it is “a forgotten era of Jewish literary creativity” (p. i). She describes it as an “explosion of Jewish literary interest in angels and demons [and] one of the most striking intellectual shifts during these politically turbulent and culturally creative centuries” (p. 6). It produced ideas that became “foundational for later reflection about divinity, the cosmos, and the human condition” (p. 6).
A Hellenistic World
The Jewish people of this era were living under the rule of Hellenistic dynasties that emerged after Alexander the Great’s conquests. The Seleucid Empire, founded by one of Alexander’s generals, stretched from Anatolia to Central Asia and was characterized by multiple royal cities and a surprisingly decentralized power structure. As John Collins observes, Alexander’s conquests “had a profound impact on the eastern civilizations,” unleashing “an unprecedented circulation of ideas among the various peoples” and transforming attitudes toward life itself (p. 29).
This blending of cultures helped to birth an entirely new literary landscape. The rise of libraries in places like Alexandria encouraged what Reed calls an “archival sensibility,” a fascination with collecting and systematizing knowledge (p. 28). Jewish scribes, immersed in this world, began to imagine angels as cosmic record-keepers—writing, reciting, and even traveling with human scribes to the ends of the earth.
The Birth of Jewish Angelology and Demonology
The Dead Sea Scrolls have completely reshaped our understanding of this period. What older scholarship once dismissed as a “silent” era—an apparent gap between the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic writings and later Jewish literature—turns out to have been a crucible of creativity. Texts like the Astronomical Book and the Book of the Watchers (both part of the Enochic literature) reveal the beginnings of Jewish angelology and demonology in vivid detail.
Reed highlights this turning point. By drawing on early so-called pseudepigrapha and Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls, we can discern the scribal settings in which the powers beyond this world become a topic of great interest to Jewish thinkers. These powers—or beings—were “supernatural” in that they inhabited unseen realms, yet “natural” because they were thought to cause visible effects in the whole universe and even in human minds and bodies.
The Pseudepigrapha: Imagination Beyond the Canon
Two works in particular—The Book of the Watchers and Jubilees—stand out as products of this era’s intense creativity. They describe angels who sin, sire demonic offspring, and mediate divine knowledge to humanity. Yet these writings were long marginalized in modern scholarship, victims of what Robert Kraft famously called “the tyranny of canonical assumptions” (p. 24). Post-Reformation tendencies of reading the Bible within a fixed canonical setting led many to treat anything outside the canon as inferior or irrelevant.
Fortunately, more recent scholarship has questioned this supersessionist attitude—the belief that earlier thinkers were inferior or less valuable. Scholars have begun to reintegrate these ‘pseudepigraphal’ texts into the broader study of Judaism and early Christianity. This shift allows us to see how the imaginative worlds of the pseudepigrapha fed directly into later Jewish apocalypticism and, ultimately, Christian theology.
A Legacy for Christianity
Though written centuries before Jesus, these texts laid important groundwork for early Christian thought. The richly populated heavens of the New Testament—with archangels, fallen angels, and cosmic battles—owe much to the third-century BCE Jewish imagination. The Book of Revelation, for instance, cannot be fully understood without appreciating these earlier traditions about angels and demons.
Conclusion: From Silence to Creativity
The third century BCE turns out not to be silent at all but alive with voices—scribes, visionaries, and storytellers—imagining a cosmos filled with angelic messengers and demonic adversaries. This was the soil in which later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic visions would grow. As Reed puts it, this “forgotten era” gave us a new way to understand the divine and the human, the seen and the unseen.
Next time, we’ll explore the second century BCE, when Jewish resistance movements and apocalyptic fervor erupted into open conflict—and further transformed the religious imagination.
This is the third post in a series offering Bible and Beyond readers a chronological reference for events and major ideas that influenced the evolution of various Christianities, Christian History by the Century. In the series we identify key events and people who influenced both the immediate and future generations of those who came to identify as followers of Jesus. This historical series offers readers an opportunity to engage in the collective rethinking of how Christianities have evolved across the centuries—past, present, and future.
Bible & Beyond has hit another article out of the ball park, to use a modern metaphor, and brought another burst of spiritual exploration into the light, to use an ageless metaphor.
Thank you so much for putting this collection of ‘bite size’ nuggets of important history lessons into understandable importance to where the early pre-Christian writers were coming from. Not knowing, understanding history leads to a lot of false assumptions by ‘latter’ interpreters/writers trying to make sense of the early Jesus followers. I was so instructed into the importance of the library collection in Alexandria and now with scholars digging into Nag Hammadi and other early writings within historical context we have a chance to more fully, hopefully more correctly understand what Jesus was really sharing with his followers.