Hallucinogenic and ominous, the Book of Revelation has inflamed the Western imagination for over 1,500 years, inspiring everything from cheesy horror movies to panics over bar codes (the Number of the ...

Princeton University religion professor Elaine Pagels, who helped bring into the public eye the biblical also-rans—the Gnostic Gospels that didn’t make it into the Christian canon—takes a fresh look ...

Secondly, the last two decades have seen the unearthing of ancient evidence of real Christian debate and division in the early church. The discovery of the so-called Gnostic Gospels and the more ...

How well should a historian write? It’s difficult to disagree with George Orwell, who said any exemplary book should be not only an intellectual but “also an aesthetic experience.” Elaine Pagels, a ...

In this majestic new book, Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) ranges panoramically over the history of early Christianity, demonstrating the religion's initial tremendous diversity and its narrowing to ...

Discussion of Gnosticism at a recent gathering of local clergy generated a comment from one pastor that perhaps Christian scriptures should be kept in a loose-leaf binder so we can add and remove ...

Why would Pagels, a Princeton University religion professor best known for explaining and in many ways promoting the Gnostic gospels as an alternative set of Christian texts, turn her attention to ...

The discovery of 45 lost texts at Nag Hammadi in 1945 gave scholars a new perspective on Gnosticism. They now could read “gospels” and “revelations” by believers the early Church fathers had labeled ...