Elaine Pagels is well known for her work on gnostic texts. The Gnostic Gospels is perhaps her most popular work, winning the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. Here, she draws on her intimate knowledge of the Nag Hammadi texts to re-frame early Christianity.

“It is the winners who write history—their way” writes Pagels (142). Orthodox Christianity as we know it was written by those who ‘won’ the culture wars. Those with power in alignment with empire crafted the narrative while suppressing alternative versions. The gnostic texts are the product of alternative visions of spirituality. In gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth, flesh-and-blood materiality is a prison to be escaped. It traps the spark of the divine, inhibiting its union with God.

I agree with some of Pagels’ claims. For example, it’s not a big stretch to see the realpolitik in suppressing a group of pneumatics who deny earthly authority. The writing of the early church fathers repeatedly emphasizes the need to fall in line under episcopal authority. This thread is woven throughout history. Consider, for example, how the Later Rain revival movement with its strong emphasis on prophetic authority sat in uneasy tension with institutional pentecostalism.

I would also agree that repressed (defeated?) gnostic impulses in early Christianity like a “river driven underground” continue to resurface throughout history (150). My disagreement lies in the value and truth of gnosticism. New Testament authors reject this view, with John going so far to say that “every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 4:2 NRSVue). For the Jewish authors of scripture, materiality is God’s good gift to creation, not something to be escaped.

In writing about the passion of Jesus that inspired the subsequent suffering and martyrdom of so many followers, Pagels writes:

What one does physically—one eats and drinks, engages in sexual life or avoids it, saves one’s life or gives it up—are all vital elements in one’s religious development. But those gnostics who regarded the essential part of every person as the “inner spirit” dismissed such physical experience, pleasurable or painful, and a distraction from spiritual reality—indeed, as an illusion. (101)

It’s clear to me why earthy orthodoxy prevailed.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. Vintage Books, 1979.