Forget Judas, let’s have sympathy for the Devil
By Ruth Gledhill
August 05, 2006

A medievalist professor from California says that Satan is not really bad, just misunderstood
THE DEVIL has been unfairly and wilfully maligned and deserves a reassessment, according to a new study.

Professor Henry Ansgar Kelly, a medievalist, says that the Devil has had an unfair press and 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 exegesis 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. the rest