![]() ![]() 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. 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. According to Pagels, the Gospel writers’ creation of Satan gave rise to the moral history of the West. ![]()
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