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What was more, Pagels argued, the early Church Fathers, in their attempt to eliminate this more experiential Christianity in favor of building an orthodox institution-a universal, or catholic, church-declared the texts to be heretical. A wildly diverse compendium of poems, chants, myths, gospels, pagan documents, and spiritual instructions, the texts are distinct evidence of fierce theological debate and of an alternative tradition within early Christianity-a kind of mystical variant, much like the Zen tradition in Buddhism, Kabbalah in Judaism, Sufism in Islam.
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Through a careful reading of the fifty-two sacred texts that survived-they are Coptic translations of Greek originals, some as old as the four Gospels-Pagels made it clear that early Christianity was far more complicated than anyone had ever imagined. What she did not burn ended up in the hands of black marketeers, antiquities dealers, and, eventually, scholars of first- and second-century Christianity.Īccording to Pagels, the Gospel writers’ creation of Satan gave rise to the moral history of the West. That night, his mother burned much of the find in the oven as kindling. Thinking there might be gold inside, he smashed the jar with his mattock, and found instead thirteen papyrus books bound in leather. While digging near the village of Nag Hammadi for sabakh, a soft soil used as fertilizer, Muhammad Ali found a red earthenware jar. Just as Edmund Wilson illuminated for a wide audience the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Pagels explained the value and meaning of a trove of manuscripts unearthed in 1945 in the upper-Egyptian desert by a peasant named Muhammad Ali al-Samman.
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In 1979, Pagels published “The Gnostic Gospels,” a brief and elegant analysis of a series of ancient documents known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library. She had also, at this preposterously early point in her career, hit the academic bull’s-eye.
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Pagels, who is now the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton, had accumulated thousands of hours in the library, the classroom, and the archives, and a working command of Greek, Latin, German, Hebrew, French, Italian, and Coptic as well-an appropriately full quiver for a specialist in early Christianity. History is an art not only of imagination but also of accumulation-of languages, reading, travel, perspective. The historian, by contrast, cannot rely on intuition or mental speed. Ordinarily, only the physicist or the mathematician can hope to enter early middle age having made a scholarly mark indeed, for such a scientist a glide into the thirties without distinction can be cause for despair-or a job in university administration. It is a rarity for a scholar so young to alter even slightly the historical view of something as vast and essential as the Western world’s dominant religion. Sixteen years ago, Elaine Pagels, who was then a professor in her mid-thirties at Barnard College, shattered the myth that early Christianity was a unified movement and faith.