Elaine Pagels

Author

• Born: February 13, 1943
• Place of Birth: Palo Alto, California

AMERICAN HISTORIAN

IDENTITY: Christian

Biography

The educator and historian of religion, Elaine Pagels, is the daughter of William McKinley Hiesey, a research plant biologist, and Louise Sophia Van Druten. To the astonishment of her politically liberal, Protestant, nonchurchgoing parents, she joined an evangelical church at the age of thirteen; she abandoned it a year later when she found it separated her from the people she loved. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, she was attracted to the study of Greek, the language of the New Testament, and she read Homer and Pindar and became fascinated with the way Christianity became the symbolic focus for millions of people over a few thousand years. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Stanford in 1964 and her MA from the same school in 1965. After a brief time studying modern dance at the Martha Graham studio in New York City, Pagels entered the doctoral program in the Department of Religion at Harvard University in a program in the history of religion directed by Krister Stendahl. She believed religion would hold her attention for a lifetime because it involved politics, art, history, anthropology, imagination, and fantasy. She hoped to uncover a “real Christianity” unpolluted by history or ideology through objective scholarship. Her professors at Harvard introduced her to the Gnostic codices discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. These fifty-two early Christian alternative texts were written about 600 Common Era (CE) in Coptic, an Afro-Asiatic language descended from ancient Egyptian and related to the Monophysite Christian church. The documents suggest that the Christian church was more diversified during its first two centuries than in the twenty-first century. Pagels’s doctoral dissertation, The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis, addressed the controversy between Gnosticism and orthodoxy in early Christianity and was published in 1973. She married Heinz R. Pagels, a theoretical physicist, on June 7, 1969, and received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970.

Pagels began teaching religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1970. In 1981, she was named Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1973, a Mellon Fellowship from the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies in 1974, a Hazen Fellowship in 1975, a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1978, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979, and the MacArthur Prize Fellowship, the so-called genius grant, in 1981.

In 1987, Pagels and her husband Heinz suffered the loss of their six-year-old son, Mark, to a rare lung disease. Fifteen months later, Heinz Pagels fell to his death while hiking in Aspen, Colorado. Elaine Pagels was left to raise their two remaining children, both adopted and under three. In 1995, Pagels married Kent Greenawalt, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University, in a ritual of her own that was conducted in an Episcopalian church in Princeton, New Jersey. After the death of her first husband, Pagels began to reflect on how an invisible presence, like a missing loved one, can take hold of the grieving mind. She also became interested in intra-Jewish conflict and the early Christian church. Her experience with the Christian Easter liturgy, where candles in a menorah are blown out and candles flanking the altar are lit, disturbed her with the implication that Christianity acknowledged no revelation in the Jewish tradition.

Pagels centered her 1995 work, The Origin of Satan (1995), on how, in the first three centuries CE, Christians defamed rival or hostile groups by labeling them as servants or worshippers of Satan. Pagels argues that the capacity for evil goes back culturally to the Jewish teaching that every person has within them both an evil impulse and a good impulse. She is not convinced by the doctrine of Original Sin. Rather, she felt drawn to the gnostic “Gospel of Philip,” emphasizing the individual’s capacity for evil. In her opinion, Christianity and the Christian tradition suppress people’s awareness of their own greed, rage, fear, and violence.

Pagels believes that when Christianity suppressed the gnostics “who thought of themselves as Christians,” it cut much of the heart out of the Christian movement. What remained were sets of dogmas and beliefs, some extraordinary stories and writings, and sufficient clues and relics of religious experience to have sustained millions of people for centuries. What was lost, however, was beautiful and useful. The original gnostic texts showed how the architecture of the Western cultural mind was constructed and the limitations of that dominant structure.

Pagels is also well known for Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988). In the 2000s and 2010s, she published Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), which was a New York Times Best Seller; Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007), which she cowrote with Karen L. King; and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012), in which she explores the New Testament Book of Revelation of Saint John in the context of other Jewish, Christian, and Pagan books of revelation.

As the twenty-first century progressed, Pagels continued her academic study of religion. In 2018, Pagels published a memoir titled Why Religion?: A Personal Story. This book explores Pagels personal experiences in the context of her religious academic work. Pagels remains the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels continued to be recognized for her work as well. In 2012, Pagels received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. Also, in 2015, Pagels was awarded the National Humanities Medal.

Bibliography

“About Elaine Pagels.” Elaine Pagels, www.elaine-pagels.com/about-elaine-pagels. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Brooke, Allen. "Elaine Pagels." The Hudson Review, vol. 65, no. 3, 2012, pp. 521-525.

Colby, Vineta, editor. “Elaine Pagels.” World Authors, 1985–1990. New York: Wilson, 1995.

Coughlin, Ellen K. “Wrestling with the Idea of Satan.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 July 1995, p. A6.

Demnick, David. “The Devil Problem.” New Yorker, 3 Apr. 1995, p. 54.

“Elaine Pagels.” The National Endowment For The Humanities, www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/elaine-pagels. Accessed 8 July 2024.

Ludwig, Eugene Michael. Working in the Intersection: Elaine Pagels as Historian. Berkeley: Berkeley, 1998.

McVey, Kathleen. “Gnosticism, Feminism, and Elaine Pagels.” Theology Today, vol. 37.4, 1981, pp. 498–501.

Moyers, Bill. A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women About American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future. Ed. Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Pagels, Elaine. “The Divine Intercourse.” Interview by Andrew Solomon. Interview, vol. 25.12, 1995, p. 118.

Pagels, Elaine. “No Sympathy for the Devil.” Interview by Jenny Schuessler. Publishers Weekly, 31 July 1995, p. 59.

Tabor, Nick. “Elaine Pagels on Religion, Mourning, Scholarship, and Faith.” New York Magazine, 30 Oct. 2018, nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/elaine-pagels-on-religion-mourning-scholarship-and-faith.html. Accessed 8 July 2024.