FORTY YEARS AGO, in 1979, Princeton University professor Elaine Pagels won the National Book Award for her groundbreaking (and best-selling) first major nonacademic book, The Gnostic Gospels. In it, Pagels lucidly described the history of a little-known early Christian sect, the Gnostics, who believed everyone had a “divine spark” within them and that with some contemplation everyone could make their own connection to God, a belief that was abhorred by more orthodox Christians. In 367 C.E., Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria, ordered monks in Egypt to reject “illegitimate and secret books,” including Gnostic writings.
What makes Pagels’ latest book, Why Religion?: A Personal Story, impossible to put down is the way she interweaves her now 50-year study of the Gnostics with her own personal story. Over the years, she has described the profound losses—one year apart in the late 1980s—in her own life. First, the death of her 6-year-old son, Mark, from a rare pulmonary disease. Second, the death of her husband, Heinz, who fell into a 1,300-foot ravine while hiking in Colorado. Pagels’ newest account is much more detailed and painful than earlier summaries, stunningly raw, almost as though writing about recent events.
The entire ordeal made Pagels feel “as though she was being burned alive.” She had been raised as a Protestant, but her father, a biology professor at Stanford, thought religion passé. To get through these times, Pagels relied on friends, two newly adopted children, Trappist priest Thomas Keating (a teacher of contemplative practices, including centering prayer), and the rituals of a nearby Episcopal church.
But her academic work on the Gnostics also kept her going emotionally. She was captivated by them, although other scholars of early Christianity often would refer to Gnostic texts as “rubbish.”
“I was surprised to find in some of them unexpected spiritual power,” Pagels wrote in her other best-selling book, Beyond Belief, citing this from the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said: ‘If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’” Pagels concludes, “The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves.”
The Gnostic writings were the most important trove of early Christian texts ever found, apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls. In 1945 an illiterate Arab camel driver, Muhammad Ali, stopped in the desert near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi to dig up some fertilizer for his family’s garden and discovered a six-foot-high, reddish earthen jar. Inside were 52 ancient Gnostic texts. They would remain on the Egyptian black market for some years before landing in Cairo’s Coptic Museum, whose scholars sent copies of the texts to academics around the world. In 1965, Pagels was a young, untested scholar (in a field with very few women), just beginning her doctoral work in religion at Harvard. She was assigned to begin translating the texts since she had been studying Coptic.
Pagels found in these texts evidence of early Christian practices with radical implications for the church. Among the followers of the Gnostic teacher Valentinus, Pagels writes, “women were considered equal to men; some were revered as prophets; others acted as teachers, traveling evangelists, healers, priests, perhaps even bishops.”
What, one may ask, were the odds that a young feminist scholar would encounter sacred papyrus texts likely buried by Coptic monks rebelling against Athanasius’ edict, much less eventually emerge with a best-selling book on the topic? Indeed, Pagels’ work has stimulated a continued curiosity about the Gnostics and the roots of Christianity.
“Why not look elsewhere and abandon Christianity?” some people would counsel Pagels. Her answer, “I’d done that, and might never have returned for a deeper look had it never been for the secret gospels.”
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