Ransom? The whom is it paid?

The New Testament nowhere suggests that Jesus’ death was the price paid to someone (such as the devil) to achieve our liberation. Some patristic writers, however, assumed that they could press this analogy to its limits, and declared that God had delivered us from the power of the devil by offering him Jesus as the price of our liberation.

Origen (ca. 185–ca. 254), perhaps the most speculative of early patristic writers, was one such writer. If Christ’s death was a ransom, Origen argued, it must have been paid to someone. But to whom? It could not have been paid to God, in that God was not holding sinners to ransom. Therefore, it had to be paid to the devil.—Alister McGrath, Theology: The Basics (2nd ed.), 84