Elaine Pagels Quotes & Sayings

The Secret Revelation of John opens, again, in crisis. The disciple John, grieving Jesus' death, is walking toward the temple when he meets a Pharisee who mocks him for having been deceived by a false messiah. These taunts echoed John's own fear and doubt. — Elaine Pagels

Really, I don't like to do any household chores. There was a time when I loved to cook, but that was when I wasn't writing books. — Elaine Pagels

By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil.
[...] By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth. — Elaine Pagels

The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God. — Elaine Pagels

The Gospel of Thomas claims to be the secret sayings of Jesus. There are 114 of them, so it says many things, but the central message is that Jesus is the one who reveals the divine light that brought the universe into being, and that you and I also reveal that light. — Elaine Pagels

The Antichrist is often identified with the second beast in the Book of Revelation that arises from the land, the beast that tries to make everyone worship the power of evil. — Elaine Pagels

For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament. — Elaine Pagels

We use the word 'synoptic' to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means 'seeing together,' because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke - whoever wrote those Gospels - used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common. — Elaine Pagels

What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material. — Elaine Pagels

The Book of Revelation is all about the conflict, the contest between the forces of Good and Evil. — Elaine Pagels

ascetic practices. — Elaine Pagels

There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all. — Elaine Pagels

About the gnostic writers themselves and the setting in which they lived we know little, although gnostic Christians were influential enough to be denounced at length. — Elaine Pagels

What would prevail in Christian tradition was not only the stark sayings of the gospels attributed to Jesus and the encouragements to celibacy that Paul urges upon believers in 1 Corinthians, but versions of these austere teachings modified to suit the purposes of the churches of the first and second centuries. — Elaine Pagels

No intelligent person, the sophisticated pagan might have explained, actually worshiped images of the gods, or worshiped living emperors; instead, the gods' images - and the images of the emperors themselves - provided an accessible focus for revering the cosmic forces they represented. — Elaine Pagels

I an not saying that religious ideas are nothing but a cover for political motives [...]. Instead, I intend to show that religious insights and moral choices, in actual experience, coincide with practical ones. — Elaine Pagels

The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there's no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel. — Elaine Pagels

What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was. — Elaine Pagels

What's different about the Gospel of Thomas is that, instead of focusing entirely on who Jesus is and the wonderful works of Jesus, it focuses on how you and I can find the kingdom of God, or life in the presence of God. — Elaine Pagels

After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press. — Elaine Pagels

The Romans weren't trying to kill all the Jews, but they did destroy Jewish resistance to Roman rule. Jerusalem was turned into a Roman army camp, and it was a total devastation. — Elaine Pagels

The great majority of Christians of the first few centuries did not advocate - and probably did not imagine - that such moral equality could be implemented in society. Most assumed, no doubt, that they could realize such moral equality only in the coming Kingdom of God. — Elaine Pagels

Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy? — Elaine Pagels

We don't actually know if the person who wrote the Gospel of John had a written copy of Thomas because we don't know exactly when it was written. — Elaine Pagels

Flee the darkness. Do not be led astray to your destruction.'79 — Elaine Pagels

Although the gospels of the New Testament
like those discovered at Nag Hammadi
are attributed to Jesus' followers, no one knows who actually wrote any of them. — Elaine Pagels

People who are comfortable with very clear boundaries and group definitions don't like the instability and ambiguity of people who say they are more advanced Christians, or they don't have to do what the bishop says. — Elaine Pagels

Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate . . .'73 — Elaine Pagels

He's an intimate betrayer. That's what's so troubling. Judas turned in his own teacher. — Elaine Pagels

I realize that I cannot live without a spiritual dimension in my life. — Elaine Pagels

I have sympathy for anyone who finds consolation anywhere we can. And many people do find it in religious tradition as it has been. I mean, I love much of that tradition. But somehow, that just didn't speak to me in the way that it does to some. — Elaine Pagels

The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical 'blasphemy' proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them. — Elaine Pagels

Christianity becomes just a set of things you believe in. It's almost an intellectual kind of abstract issue. — Elaine Pagels

Christians have ... identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan ... Nor have things improved since. The blood-soaked history of persecution, torture, murder, and destruction perpetrated in the name of religion is difficult to grasp, let alohne summarize, from the slaughter of Christians to the Crusades to the Inquisitiion to the Reformation to the European witchcraze to colonialization to today's bitter coflict in the Middle East. — Elaine Pagels

Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan. — Elaine Pagels

The Book of Revelation is such a dream landscape that you can plug any major conflict in it. — Elaine Pagels

There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance, it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing. — Elaine Pagels

I am enormously susceptible to religious environments - the music, the liturgy and the prayers. — Elaine Pagels

Why did the consensus of Christian churches not only accept these astonishing views but establish them as the only true form of Christian doctrine? ... these religious debates - questions of the nature of God, or of Christ - simultaneously bear social and political implications that are crucial to the development of Christianity as an institutional religion. In simplest terms, ideas which bear implications contrary to that development come to be labeled as 'heresy'; ideas which implicitly support it become 'orthodox.' — Elaine Pagels

The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition. — Elaine Pagels

I got to thinking about the Book of Revelation that was written by a Jewish prophet who was also a follower of Jesus who hated the Roman Empire. I realized that the Book of Revelation could be a way to reflect on the issue of religion's relationship to politics. — Elaine Pagels

[W]hen the emperor Constantine abruptly changed Roman policy from one of persecuting Christians to protecting and favoring them with massive gifts of money, tax exemptions, and enormous prestige, the bishops, now in political favor, sometimes used these new resources to promote unanimity; thus in 381, the Christian emperor Theodosius made "heresy" a crime against the state. — Elaine Pagels

Once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him. — Elaine Pagels

Throughout the ages, Christians have adapted John of Patmos's visions to changing times, reading their own social, political and religious conflicts into the cosmic war he so powerfully evokes. Yet his Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear and desires for vengeance but also to hope. — Elaine Pagels

Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine husband or lover of any. — Elaine Pagels

At the end of the day I'll go to a yoga class. I used to say that my work was my yoga, because it stretches everything, expands and challenges everything you know and understand and are. — Elaine Pagels

Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone, possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction - in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years. — Elaine Pagels

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church. — Elaine Pagels

People who study the way religions develop have shown that if you have a charismatic teacher, and you don't have an institution develop around that teacher within about a generation to transmit succession within the group, the movement just dies. — Elaine Pagels

Orthodox theologians insisted that the rest of humankind were only transitory creatures, lost in sin - a view that would support what would become their dominant teaching about salvation, offered only through Christ, and, in particular, through the church they claimed to represent. — Elaine Pagels

[W]hat made Christians especially dangerous to the Roman order was their refusal to pay what Romans regarded as ordinary respect to their Roman rulers; and this brought some of them into direct and total opposition to the temporal as well as the divine authorities - to the emperors and to their divine patrons, the gods. — Elaine Pagels

I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views. — Elaine Pagels

There is a light within each person, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness. — Elaine Pagels

These ancient stories in religion speak to our desire. But they move us toward hope. — Elaine Pagels

[T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid. — Elaine Pagels

There's practically no religion that I know of that sees other people in a way that affirms the others' choices. But in our century we're forced to think about a pluralistic world. — Elaine Pagels

So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death. — Elaine Pagels

It is the winners who write history - their way. — Elaine Pagels

I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I'd heard when I was growing up were simply made up - and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out. — Elaine Pagels

The story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas gave a moral and religious rationale to anti-Jewish sentiment, and that's what made it persistent and vicious. — Elaine Pagels

I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school teacher. — Elaine Pagels

What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical. — Elaine Pagels

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. — Elaine Pagels

I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion. — Elaine Pagels

The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war. — Elaine Pagels

The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members. — Elaine Pagels

Fundamentalism does mean reading quite conservatively and literally, saying 'the Bible is the word of God and we have to follow it. What it says is this.' — Elaine Pagels

I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews. — Elaine Pagels

The prophets Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for example, often used the metaphors of adultery and prostitution to indict those they accused of being "unfaithful" to God's covenant. — Elaine Pagels

I want to speak! Fear restrains me. I have — Elaine Pagels

So often, religion is identified in terms coined by Christianity as sets of belief. But I had the sense that it not only involves practice, but also emotion and levels of our experience that are almost precognitive. — Elaine Pagels

Jesus Christ rose from the grave.' With this proclamation, the Christian church began. This may be the fundamental element of Christian faith; certainly it is the most radical. — Elaine Pagels