The earliest Christians inherited rich yet contradictory traditions about the origins and activities of demons from Greco-Roman poetry and philosophy as well as from the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish apocryphal literature. New Testament authors depicted Satan and his minions as the adversaries of Christ and the enemies of humankind, but they did not offer a comprehensive guide to their character or nature. Early Christian apologists drew inspiration from Israel’s demonization of the gods of their enemies to blacken all pagan deities as lesser, malevolent forces who worked against the saving mission of Jesus. In the same breath, they refuted the Neoplatonic interpretation of demons as helpful intermediaries between mortals and the divine. Featured in almost every genre of early Christian literature from the earliest visionary tours of Hell, where “angels of Tartarus” tortured sinful souls, to apocryphal stories about the apostles, in which magicians aped their God-given powers with diabolical assistance, demons emerged as unambiguously hostile entities in Christian articulations of a new worldview in which “the god of this world,” Satan, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4).