Acclaimed scholar Elaine Pagels is known for her work on the Gnostic Gospels and the origins of Christianity. Now in a beautiful, raw memoir she shows how that academic work was born out of loss and ...

Elaine Pagels, who canceled her Nov. 11 appearance in Dallas because of illness, will speak 2:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 6 at a sold-out Arts & Letters Live event. This story was originally posted on Nov. 1 ...

Why do people have faith in what they cannot see? Author Elaine Pagels explores the concept of religious belief, and shares her own experience with finding faith in the face of tragedy, in her new ...

A professor once said to me that religious scholars come in two varieties: those who openly admit the connections between their scholarship and their autobiography, and liars. By this standard, Elaine ...

As a child, religion scholar Elaine Pagels had very little exposure to religion. Her father, a biologist, brought her up to think that religion was obsolete and the Gospels were “just crazy old folk ...

Elaine Pagels has made a career out of rewriting Christian history. Her first book, the 1979 best seller The Gnostic Gospels, reappraised Christian documents long considered heretical. In the books ...

Pagels’ 1989 book The Gnostic Gospels was the first to offer a thorough and widely accessible account of a set of writings found in Egypt in 1945 that date back as early the second century and offer a ...

Elaine Pagels is a professor of religion at Princeton University known for her bestselling writing on the gnostic gospels, secret ancient texts considered heretical and omitted from what is now the ...

It sounds like a strategy meeting with the campaign team: “Whom do men say that I am?” Staff members start tossing out responses from the latest polling: “Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some ...

WHY RELIGION? A Personal Story. By Elaine Pagels. Ecco. 235 Pages. $27.99. On a bright winter morning, Elaine Pagels ducked into the vestibule of the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York to warm up ...