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Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels Books

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“Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way.”

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Book:Why Religion? A Personal Story
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“Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”

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Book:Why Religion? A Personal Story
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“Recalling this now, I can tell only the husk of the story--a story known inwardly only by those who have experienced such a loss, which we'd wish for no one else to suffer. Those who have not often say, "I can't imagine how you felt, what that was like." I can hardly imagine it either, even having lived through it. Recently, when someone said that, I found myself answering, "Like being burned alive.”

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Book:Why Religion? A Personal Story
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“Meanwhile there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters. And though I'd flared with anger when the priest at Heinz's funeral had warned not to be "angry at God" because of his sudden and violent death, I struggled not to sink under currents of fear, anger, and confusion that roiled an ocean of grief.”

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Book:Why Religion? A Personal Story
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“Walking alone in the dark early the next morning, New Year's Day, the coming year stretched out like a bleak and endless highway, leading nowhere.... Having held on for months, thinking that that if only we can get through to the new year, now I felt plunged into black ice, in danger of drowning.... Suddenly I understood our friends' concern. Could this be what precedes some kind of breakdown--a sudden shift to feel oblivion as temptation, even as seduction?”

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Book:Why Religion? A Personal Story
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“Although the Gospel of Judas does not encourage martyrdom, ironically—or better, paradoxically—it portrays Judas himself as the first martyr. This gospel reveals that when Judas hands Jesus over, he seals his own fate. But he knows, too, that when the other disciples stone him, they kill only his mortal self. His spirit-filled soul has already found its home in the light world above. Although Christians may suffer and die when they oppose the powers of evil, the hope Christ brings will sustain them.”

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Book:Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity
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“When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves—as Jews who had found God's messiah—we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat "unclean" food and engage in "unclean" sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier—an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the "evildoers" against whom John warns? we may be surprised by the answer. Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.”

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Book:Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
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“But Tertullian insists that making choices is evil, since choice destroys group unity. To stamp out heresy, Tertullian says, church leaders must not allow people to ask questions, for it is “questions that make people heretics” — above all, questions like these: Whence comes evil? Why is it permitted? And what is the origin of human beings? Tertullian wants to stop such questions and impose upon all believers the same regula fidei, “rule of faith,” or creed. Tertullian knows that the “heretics” undoubtedly will object, saying that Jesus himself encouraged questioning, saying, “Ask, and you shall receive; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you” (Matt. 7:7). But Tertullian has no patience with such people: “Where will the end of seeking be? The point of seeking is to find; the purpose in finding, to believe.” Now that the church can provide a direct and simple answer to all questions in its rule of faith, Tertullian says, the only excuse for continuing to seek is sheer obstinacy: Away with the one who is always seeking, for he never finds anything; for he is seeking where nothing can be found. Away with the one who is always knocking, for he knocks where there is no one to open; away with the one who is always asking, for he asks of one who does not hear. The true Christian, Tertullian declares, simply determines to “know nothing ... at variance with the truth of faith.” But when people “insist on our asking about the issues that concern them,” Tertullian says, “we have a moral obligation to refute them. . . . They say that we must ask questions in order to discuss,” Tertullian continues, “but what is there to discuss?” When the “heretics” object that Christians must discuss what the Scriptures really mean, Tertullian declares that believers must dismiss all argument over scriptural interpretation; such controversy only “has the effect of upsetting the stomach or the brain.”

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Book:The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics
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“[W]hat made Christians especially dangerous to the Roman order was their refusal to pay what Romans regarded as ordinary respect to their Roman rulers; and this brought some of them into direct and total opposition to the temporal as well as the divine authorities - to the emperors and to their divine patrons, the gods.”

History Of Religion
Book:Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity
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“[W]hen the emperor Constantine abruptly changed Roman policy from one of persecuting Christians to protecting and favoring them with massive gifts of money, tax exemptions, and enormous prestige, the bishops, now in political favor, sometimes used these new resources to promote unanimity; thus in 381, the Christian emperor Theodosius made "heresy" a crime against the state.”

History Of Religion
Book:Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity
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“...the discoveries at Nag Hammadi reopen fundamental questions. They suggest that Christianity as we know it might not have survived at all. Had Christianity remained multiform, it might well have disappeared from history, along with dozens of rival religious cults of antiquity. I believe that we owe the survival of Christian tradition to the organizational and theological structure that the emerging church developed.”

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Book:The Gnostic Gospels
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“We can see, then, how conflicts arose in the formation of Christianity between those restless, inquiring people who marked out a solitary path to self-discovery and the institutional framework that gave to the great majority of people religious sanction and ethical direction for their daily lives. Adapting for its own purposes the model of Roman political and military organization, and gaining, in the fourth century, imperial support, orthodox Christianity grew increasingly stable and enduring. Gnostic Christianity proved no match for the orthodox faith, either in terms of orthodoxy's wide popular appeal...or in terms of its effective organization. To the impoverishment of Christian tradition, gnosticism, which offered alternatives to what became the main thrust of Christian orthodoxy, was forced outside.”

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Book:The Gnostic Gospels
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“Christians have ... identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan... Nor have things improved since. The blood-soaked history of persecution, torture, murder, and destruction perpetrated in the name of religion is difficult to grasp, let alohne summarize, from the slaughter of Christians to the Crusades to the Inquisitiion to the Reformation to the European witchcraze to colonialization to today's bitter coflict in the Middle East.”

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Author:Elaine Pagels
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“Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.”

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Book:The Gnostic Gospels
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“Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.”

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Author:Elaine Pagels
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“Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? . . . these religious debates - questions of the nature of God, or of Christ - simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.'”

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Author:Elaine Pagels
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“The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war.”

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Author:Elaine Pagels
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“The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members.”

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Book:Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity
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“Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy?”

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Book:The Gnostic Gospels
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