Elaine Pagels

I remember first hearing about the Gnostic Gospels during the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code craze of the early aughts. At that time, the gospels were offered up as sort of legitimate “source material” for some of the wilder imaginings in Brown’s novel. I was curious about them, so I bought Pagels’ book. At the time, I simply wasn’t educated enough to understand what I was reading. I’m not sure I even finished her book. It sat on my shelf for many years. After reading the Bible and show more excerpts from the Talmud, in addition to two histories of the Bible, I figured that rereading Pagels’ book would enrich my understanding of early Christianity. I was not wrong.

Pagles helped me understand something that I had been curious about for much of my adult life. As someone who grew up influenced by Christian grandparents, but who was not raised Christian myself, I could never fully understand how early Christianity quickly surpassed its mother religion, Judaism, and became so dominant in the world within a span less than four hundred years. What Pagels helped to explain is that this phenomenon was not accidental. She makes her point by exploring the contrast between Christian orthodoxy and gnosticism. Her book is less about the gnostic texts themselves and more about their place in the building of the early Christian church.

But first, what does “gnostic” mean and what are the gnostic gospels? Gnostic, at its most rudimentary, means knowledge. As the term relates to religious or philosophical thought, it describes the intuitive process of getting to know oneself. This process includes continual questioning and was influenced by the Greek philosophers. There wasn’t a separate gnostic religion, rather there were diverse groups within early Christianity (long before “the Church” had been established) who shared the belief that to know oneself at the deepest level is to know God.

The Gnostic Gospels are a collection of thirteen papyrus books discovered in a huge earthenware jar in Upper Egypt in 1945 by an Arab farmer. After scholarly examination, they were determined to be Coptic (Egyptian dialect) translations from c. 350-400 CE of original Greek texts that dated from no later than c. 120 CE. They included texts from the earliest century of the Christian era: previously unknown gospels of Thomas and Philip as well as other apocalyptic gospels and letters.

The one criticism I have of Pagels’ book is that we don’t get a full sense of what any one of the gnostic gospels was like to read. She quotes from the texts, however, in fairness, her purpose is not to offer up a translation of them. Her intent is to show how the gnostic and orthodox forms interacted and to explain what the interaction tells us about the origin of Christianity.

The Christian religion did not develop in a vacuum; instead it was a religious, social and political movement. During its early centuries, Christians were persecuted in the most horrific ways. In response, Christian leaders intentionally set out to develop an orthodoxy that would “rally the troops”. There was a need for Christians to coalesce and defend themselves. Christians were being persecuted while they were simultaneously growing in large numbers across large geographical swaths. An orthodox canon was critical to the development of a strong Christian social and political identity. Gnosticism, with its diverse beliefs, did not lend itself to strength in numbers. It would almost seem that no two gnostics could agree on anything because they wanted to keep asking questions and explore deeper for knowledge. Gnosticism appealed to only a certain type of intellectual believer. Orthodoxy was relatively more straightforward and in some ways simpler. It relied on a commitment to the apostolic creed rather than endless questioning and seeking. It appealed to the masses. Orthodox leaders, people such as Clement, Bishop of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, over time developed concepts that evolved into the hierarchy that still exists today in Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. Pagels shows that it was this orthodoxy and this church architecture, that strengthened the early church. Once the Roman emperor, Constantine, converted, the structure was in place that enabled Christianity to spread and take lasting hold so effectively.

And while Gnosticism itself did not take hold as a competing religion, remnants of it have survived. For example, gnostics attributed some of their religious traditions to figures who stood outside the twelve apostles - Paul, Mary Magdalene, and James, the brother of Jesus. These figures did not “die” with the supremacy of orthodoxy and still live on today as important early Christians. The Gospel of John, one of the four orthodox gospels, was also an important gospel to gnostics, though for different reasons.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the Gnostic Gospels. I do wish that Pagels had included more examples of gnostic texts, so that I could start to formulate my own opinions. I also believe that there was an opportunity to show that while the gnostic churches themselves may have died out, there must be connections to later developments in the Reformation and beyond. One wonders if Luther or any of the Protestant reformers used any of the same arguments as the gnostics against the heavy hierarchy of the church. Perhaps the subject of another book… show less

Once again Pagels provides an incisive and readable overview of the origin of the Bible and the historical context shaping both Christian & Jewish identities, and the Catholic Church as an institution. This title focuses on how the concept of Satan emerged from the story of Job (the angel "challenging" God's faith in his servant, Job), evolving from a "loyal obstacle" to a representation of evil. Pagel's findings are that the evolution had more to do with social developments than show more theological: groups of people vilified their enemies by associating them with Satan. Somewhat counterintuitively, this trend was followed primarily by Jews against other Jews, not against non-Jews, as they struggle to define / defend themselves and their faith in the face of increasing repression.

Pagels' analysis highlights the war between Jews and Roman authorities (especially the siege of Jerusalem) as the key contextual event in which to place an understanding of the Bible. This war and its aftermath motivated the very writing of the Bible, and defined who would be around to write it. Interestingly, this event is also pretty much irrelevant to understanding Jesus, since he died 30-35 years before -- unless by "understanding Jesus" is meant the portrait put forth by different groups claiming him as their own, in which case this is merely another way of saying "understanding the Bible" (and helps explain the rift between heretics such as the gnostics and the Church).

Also interesting: Pagels seems to have come to this topic / question in part out of her grieving for her husband, who died in a hiking accident. That Pagels would acknowledge this personal motive in her introduction marks out the perspective she uses in all her popular writings: a critical and scholarly examination undertaken by a believer. I respect her scholarship and thesis all the more for this perspective. show less

I have pretty much loved everything I have read by Elaine Pagels (and I think I've read most everything she has written), so what a joy to read this memoir where those works are set in the context of her own life. I have always loved her ability to make scholarship accessible, and this book gives such a beautiful, wrenching, unpretentious, honest portrayal of why and how it matters to her (and her readers).

Elaine Pagels is best known for her works on ancient Christian heterodoxies such as The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief. Several of her later books, however, use related research to invert the question, and to interrogate the sources and effects of orthodoxy. These titles include The Origin of Satan and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. The 2012 volume Revelations belongs to this later class. It examines the Johannine Apocalypse in its original historical context and its early reception, up to show more and barely through the formation of the Christian scriptural canon. In the process, Pagels paints pictures of early Christianity that are likely to be unfamiliar to the wide audience to whom the book is addressed.

In particular, and contrary to standard Christian framings of the text of Revelation, she observes that its author John was almost certainly not a self-identifying "Christian." He was instead a Jew who identified Jesus as the Messiah. He was concerned with Roman persecution of Jews, and overtly resentful of gentile converts to Pauline proto-Christianity whom he regarded as pseudo-Jews. She contrasts John with his contemporary Ignatius Christophoros, a chief originator of the concept and pattern of the Christian orders of clergy. It is one of many ironies concerning John's Revelation that it would eventually be used by Christians to vilify Jews and to enforce the political structures of orthodox Christianity.

Given my own longstanding interests, I was especially tickled that Pagels spent nine pages on Apuleius of Madaurus, whom she used to provide a window on the pagan intellectual and religious context in the second century. In her account, Apuleius comes off rather like an ancient Roman Robert Anton Wilson.

Other key figures in the book include Irenaeus, a founder of Christian heresiological thought, and Athanasius, a Constantinian bishop at the core of the effort to unify "creed, clergy, and canon" (169). The history attempts to account for the fact that John's Revelation went from being one of many such visionary documents in circulation to its later status as the only "authorized" Christian text of its type. (It was, of course, still in the company of its Hebrew precedents in Isaiah and Daniel.) In a way, it became the vision to end all visions, a "seal" forbidding the canonization of other such writings and inoculating against them.

Only in a short "Conclusion" is there any treatment of more recent receptions of Revelation, and it pivots on the Reformation and the US Civil War. It doesn't even mention the subsequent widespread reading of the text as a curious species of allegorical science fiction, nor the way that it has been influential in the genesis of new religious movements--Christian and post-Christian--in the modern era. Inasmuch as the Revelation to John forms the locus classicus for many of the central mythemes of Thelema, I would strongly recommend this book to Thelemites. It supplies an overview of positive history to complement psychological treatments of the vision such as Lawrence's Apocalypse and esoteric exegesis like that of Pryse's Apocalypse Unsealed. show less