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Did Christianity Go Wrong? |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Harry Y. Gamble |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2004 |
| Size: 2,509 Words, 16,229 Characters |
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BEYOND BELIEF
The Secret Gospel of Thomas
Elaine Pagels
New York: Random House, 2003
241 pp., $24.95
In Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton, presents us with an unusual book, interweaving reflections on the early history of Christianity with her own religious autobiography. Booksellers and librarians may therefore have some difficulty deciding where to shelve it. The subtitle, The Secret Gospel of Thomas, is not particularly apt, since only the second of five chapters pays much attention to that document, discovered almost half a century ago and much studied since. Pagels' real interest in this study, as in several of her previous books, is gnosticism, and more especially what might nowadays be called gnostic "spirituality."
Autobiographical reflections introduce four of the five chapters. From these we learn that in her youth Pagels belonged to an evangelical Christian community wholly confident of its conservative convictions, and that, though she appreciated the strong sense of belonging that characterized a close-knit group of believers, she soon came to feel that the cost was too high: indifference, disparagement, and exclusion were encouraged toward those who did not share their viewpoint. Disaffected by this experience, Pagels set out to discover "the real Christianity," assuming that she could find it in early Christian writings, namely in the New Testament, the writings of the church fathers, and perhaps even in some then-recently discovered apocryphal documents, which she began to study at Harvard and has continued to f...
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...see that, besides belief, Christianity involves practice--and paths toward transformation." One suspects that readers who are themselves religiously committed will scarcely be surprised to hear this, since it is something they have always known and indeed take entirely for granted. They may be puzzled, however, why a scholar of religion should have had difficulty in coming to this recognition.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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