February 12 is the birthday of American religious historian Elaine Pagels, born Elaine Hiesey in Palo Alto, California (1943). She was raised by Protestant parents who weren't particularly observant. When she was 13, she rebelled by joining an Evangelical church. When her friend, who was Jewish, was killed in a car accident, church members told her that he would go to Hell because he was not "born again." She later said, "Distressed and disagreeing with their interpretation — and finding no room for discussion — I realized that I was no longer at home in their world and left that church." Though she rejected all organized religion for several years after that, she remained fascinated by the passion and power of belief.
When she was 16, she was hanging out at the St. Michael's Alley coffeehouse in Palo Alto when a handsome physics grad student caught her eye. His name was Heinz Pagels; they were married in 1969. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees at Stanford, and then studied dance with Martha Graham for a while before returning to academia at Harvard. She got a Ph.D. in religion in 1970 and, two years later, was asked to join a team of translators who were working on the Nag Hammadi library: a collection of early Christian texts that had been banned from the Bible. The Gnostic gospels, as they came to be called, had been discovered in an earthenware jar in Egypt in 1945, and they revealed a different interpretation of Christianity. The early church leaders were trying to come up with a unified, simple narrative, and these philosophies didn't fit, so Bishop Athanasius ordered them eliminated from the Christian canon in the year 367. After studying and working with the heretical texts for several years, Pagels wrote a book about them. The Gnostic Gospels (1979) was a surprise hit. It won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the 100 best books of the 20th century by Modern Library.
On the heels of the book's success came tragedy. In 1982, her toddler son Mark was diagnosed with a terminal lung disease. He died five years later, and her husband was killed 15 months after that in a mountain-climbing accident near their summer home in Aspen, Colorado. "It was unbearable," Pagels later said: "A lot of people think you get religious when you grieve, but I wasn't one of them. In my experience, it just didn't make any sense." But she kept studying, examining the biblical figure of Satan and turning later to the Gospel of Thomas. In her New York Times best-seller Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), Pagels explores the Gospel of Thomas through her own personal exploration of spirituality and loss. The Gospel of John portrays Thomas as a doubter who cannot believe without seeing, and as someone who has no faith in the divinity of Jesus. In contrast, the Thomas Gospel teaches that everyone can have a direct experience of divinity, because we are all made in God's image.
Recently, Pagels has turned to the controversial Book of Revelation, and argues that it is not prophecy, as it has always been perceived, but a symbolic account of current events, written during a time of anxiety about the future of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Her book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation came out in 2012.
-----------
I''ve read the Gnostic Gospels, but didn't know about her later works.
I'm currently reading another book about Biblical history, Zealot, by Reza Aslan...as an audio book. This focuses on the historic Jesus, and has quite a few references to the differences in the Gospels authors.
It's interesting to consider the actual historic times, and compare it to the way some people take the words describing them literally.
