Originally Posted by arnoldo

FYI, for a more scholarly examination.......

Originally Posted by Johnny Skeptic

Better yet, for an even more scholarly examination, please read all of Elaine Pagel's and Bart Ehrman's major books.

Originally Posted by arnoldo

Both of those individuals support Christianity, try again.

http://bartdehrman.com/index.htm
http://www.princeton.edu/religion/pe...?netid=epagels

Originally Posted by bartdehrman

The Booklist

The popular perception of the Bible as a divinely perfect book receives scant support from Ehrman, who sees in Holy Writ ample evidence of human fallibility and ecclesiastical politics. Most of the textual discrepancies, Ehrman acknowledges, matter little, but some do profoundly affect religious doctrine. To assess how ignorant or theologically manipulative scribes may have changed the biblical text, modern scholars have developed procedures for comparing diverging texts. And in language accessible to nonspecialists, Ehrman explains these procedures and their results.

Editorial Review From the Publisher

In times of questioning and despair, people often quote the Bible to provide answers. Surprisingly, though, the Bible does not have one answer but many "answers" that often contradict one another. Consider these competing explanations for suffering put forth by various biblical writers: The prophets: suffering is a punishment for sin. The book of Job, which offers two different answers: suffering is a test, and you will be rewarded later for passing it; and suffering is beyond comprehension, since we are just human beings and God, after all, is God. Ecclesiastes: suffering is the nature of things, so just accept it. All apocalyptic texts in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: God will eventually make right all that is wrong with the world. For renowned Bible scholar Bart Ehrman, the question of why there is so much suffering in the world is more than a haunting thought. Ehrman's inability to reconcile the claims of faith with the facts of real life led the former pastor of the Princeton Baptist Church to reject Christianity. In God's Problem, Ehrman discusses his personal anguish upon discovering the Bible's contradictory explanations for suffering and invites all people of faith--or no faith--to confront their deepest questions about how God engages the world.

Originally Posted by princeton.edu

Core Faculty
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Elaine Pagels
Department/Program(s):

Department of Religion
Position: Faculty

Title: Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion.

Area(s):

Religions of Late Antiquity
Office: 240 1879 Hall

Phone: 609-258-4484

Email: epagels@princeton.edu

Profile

Elaine Pagels joined the Princeton faculty in 1982, shortly after receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. Perhaps best known as the author of The Gnostic Gospels, The Origin of Satan, and Adam, Eve and the Serpent, she has published widely on Gnosticism and early Christianity, and continues to pursue research interests in late antiquity. Her most recent books include Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (was on the New York Times best-seller list) and Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, co-authored with Karen King of Harvard.

Recent Publications

1. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003)
2. Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Snaping of Christianity -co-authored w Karen L. King (2007)

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

[Pagels] follows the well-known thesis that Walter Bauer first put forth in 1934 and argues that the Christian church was founded in a society espousing a number of contradictory viewpoints.

Originally Posted by southerncrossreview.org

Book Review
Beyond Belief
The Secret Gospel of Thomas
by Elaine Pagels

According to Pagels, John is the only evangelist who actually states that Jesus is God incarnated. But not only Pagels says so. In one of his commentaries on John, Origen – a church father, (c.240) - writes that while the other gospels describe Jesus as human, “none of them clearly spoke of his divinity, as John does.” One may object that the other three, synoptic (“seeing together”) gospels call Jesus “son of God”, and this is virtually the same thing. But such titles (son of God, messiah) in Jesus’ time designated human, not divine roles. When translated into English fifteen centuries later, these were capitalized – a linguistic convention that does not occur in the original Greek. When all four gospels, together with Paul’s letters, were united in the New Testament (c. 160 to 360) most Christians had come to read all four through John’s lens, that Jesus is “Lord and God”.

Pagels feels that if the Gospel of Thomas were included in the New Testament instead of that of John, or even if it were included along with John, the development of Christianity would have been quite different. Whereas Mark, Matthew and Luke identify Jesus as God’s human agent, John and Thomas characterize him as God’s own light in human form. Both claim to reveal, at least to a certain extent, Jesus’ “secret teachings”, and assume that their readers are already familiar with the synoptic gospels.

Originally Posted by James Holding

A letter-writer asked me to look into this classic book in the field and check it for accuracy. Here's the scoop: Though it was written some time ago, it lives up to its future lineage as quite the usual mix we've come to expect from the modern Jesus Seminar crowd -- a mix of accurate information mixed in with speculation of varying degrees being passed off as accurate information. You'll have to discern which is which yourself, but this may help you decide.

A good cautionary premise: Pagels is one of those critics infected with that naive sort of universalism that supposes that every religious belief is valid if it is valid for the holder. Now The Gnostic Gospels is admittedly an excellent primer for the history of the Nag Hammadi texts, the beliefs and writings of the Gnostic movement, and some aspects of church history. You can trust Pagels on these accounts, certainly, for information if not for critical evaluation. Where you have to watch out with this text is where the typical line on the dates of the Gospels is uncritically accepted, and where it seems that the heretics are given favor just because their beliefs are preferred by Pagels over Christianity's intolerant exclusivism -- her profession of neutrality as to who is "right" or "wrong" notwithstanding. Case in point: Pagels' treatment of the differences in belief over the resurrection of Christ -- orthodoxy's physical body versus the intangible ghost and spiritual "resurrection" of the Gnostics. The orthodox view is misrepresented by both bad data (the same misinterpretation of "flesh and blood" we have found Robert Price guilty of) and by unwarranted speculation (it is supposed that Luke's Emmaus road story suggests a "different view" of resurrection, when there is no grounds at all for saying that it does), and is not even described with reference to Jewish views of resurrection, which were ALWAYS physical and would seal the matter clearly in favor of the orthodox view. Pagels can hardly be trusted for a fair evaluation of the data when not all of the data is presented.

On the other hand, the Gnostics are given every possible break: Their cowardly avoidance of persecution by adaptation of syncretism is seen as a case of independent and worthwhile thinking (hard to believe, when that sort of attitude was normal for the period in Rome); their self-authenticating internal witness to "truth" is described in sympathetic terms; likewise their appeal to having had "secret wisdom" or knowledge, certified only by the claim that the giving of the knowledge to them was secret as well! A critical thinker would not give such claims the time of day, but Pagels is not interested in determining who is right or wrong; she thinks only that the differences were matters of power and politics, where only might made right and the history was written by the winners who were only interested in making the losers look bad rather than in truth versus fiction. Subjective and personal interpretation is all. And postmodernism had its early predecessors.

Of the rest of the work, little needs to be said; the basics are the same, and there are those few outrageous statements you can easily pick out. (Did Martin Luther really mean the same thing as the Gnostics when he said that the true church was "invisible"??) The Gnostics, like Pagels thought that mixing truth with error was just no big deal; but a wiser authority than Pagels tells us that broad roads lead inevitably to destruction.