Biography

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Growing up in a family of scientists, Elaine Pagels was taught that scientific discovery had made religion obsolete and irrelevant.  Despite this early training — or perhaps because of it — Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, is now one of the country’s leading scholars of religion.

 

An intensely inquisitive and thorough historian, Pagels’ impeccable scholarship has won her international respect.  As a young researcher at Barnard College, she changed forever the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement. 

 

Her findings were published in the bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels (1979, Random House), an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts that were unearthed in Egypt in 1945. Known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library, the manuscripts demonstrate that the early Christian movement was far more diverse than previously thought.  They also indicate how women, prominent in certain Christian groups, were subsequently excluded from governing positions in its emerging hierarchy. As the early church moved toward becoming an orthodox body with a canon, rites and clergy, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were suppressed and deemed herectical.

 

Expanding on questions raised in The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels wrote Adam, Eve and the Serpent (1988, Random House), a book that explores the Genesis creation stones and their role in the development of sexual attitudes in the Christian West — as well as the conviction, fundamental to American political life, that “all men are created equal.”

 

Pagels wrote The Origin of Satan (1995, Random House) after two tragic events in her life, the 1987 death of her six-year-old son Mark to a respiratory disease and the 1988 death of her husband of 20 years, physicist Heinz Pagels, in a rock climbing accident. Pagels says that following these events, like many people who grieve, she had a sense of living with invisible presences.  The book is a culmination of her reflections on the many ways that various religions have given imaginative form to what is invisible. She sketches the development of Jewish and Christian perceptions of evil.  She also points out a clear connection between the primarily western view of  the world as a battleground between supernatural forces of good and evil, and the tendency of certain groups — both Christian and Muslim — to demonize others.  This tendency, observes Pagels, resulted in “some very human tragedies.”  She adds, “[Demonization ] is a cultural habit we can no longer afford.”

 

In her New York Times bestseller Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Pagels focuses on religious claims to possessing the ultimate “truth.” She contends that, as Christianity became increasingly institutionalized, it became more politicized and less pluralistic. Says Pagels, “I’m advocating, on some level, the inclusion of [religious texts] that were considered blasphemous. I suggest that there are ways of embracing a far wider spectrum of religious diversity within Christianity and quite beyond Christianity.”

 

Her latest book, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (March 2007), is also a New York Times bestseller. Co-authored with fellow scholar Karen King, the book is the first to illustrate how the newly discovered Gospel of Judas provides a window onto understanding how Jesus’ followers understood his death, why Judas betrayed Jesus, and why God allowed it.

 

Elaine Pagels earned a B.A. in history and an M.A. in classical studies from Stanford University.  In 1970 she earned a Ph.D. with distinction from Harvard University. Pagels has taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and currently is Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University.

 

In 1981 Pagels was awarded a Mac Arthur fellowship. She has written numerous articles of scholarship and a number of book reviews.  Her book, The Gnostic Gospels, won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. It was also chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th Century.

 

She has also been profiled in such national publications as TIME, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Mirabella, The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker.  In February 1997, Pagels was named one of the 25 Most Influential Working Mothers by Working Mother magazine. In 2003 she was a featured commentator on the ABC special program, “Jesus. Mary and Da Vinci.”

 

Elaine Pagels lives in Princeton, New Jersey.