Feature
The Gnostic Evangelist
The Neo-Gnostic "Alternative Christianity"
of Elaine Pagels
by William J. Tighe
Elaine Pagels is Harrison Spear Pain Professor of Religion at Princeton, and is widely acknowledged, not least by the media, as one of the most renowned American academic experts on Christian origins and the early Church. She obtained her doctorate from Harvard University, where she studied under Helmut Koester. Koester, whose own Doktorvater at Marburg was Rudolf Bultmann, was himself both one of the first promoters of the importance of the Nag Hammadi discoveries for understanding the "diversity" of early Christianity and a strong proponent of the view advanced by Walter Bauer in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Early Christianity (1934)—that there was no "orthodoxy" at the beginning of Christianity, just variant and competing forms of belief and teaching, among which Bauer saw Gnostic forms as dominant until well into the second century.
Bauer's thesis is basic to an understanding of the presuppositions of Pagels's own oeuvre. Bauer maintained that what later became dominant as orthodoxy—or, as he termed it, "ecclesiastical Christianity"—was originally simply the type of Christianity dominant in Rome by or around a.d. 100, but embraced at the time by only a few isolated figures elsewhere. Over the course of the next century, Bauer claimed, the Roman Church forced its understanding on the greater part of the Christian world of the Roman Empire by use of its prestige as the Church of Peter and Paul, its wealth, the able leadership of its bishops, and its compassionate attitude towards repentant sinners and simple Christian believers, with the result that other types of Christianity became marginalized and stigmatized by this dominant form as heretical.
Pagels, although she has considerably altered the details and the supporting arguments, still upholds the essence of Bauer's thesis in claiming that there was no primitive Christian orthodoxy, but only an inchoate welter of diversity: "Christianities" rather than "Christianity." In a way, she has even made it more radical by insisting that the documents comprising the New Testament canon themselves ought not to have, and in fact do not have, any priority either in time of composition, in authenticity of contents, or of authority for belief over other, non-canonical documents.
But in doing this—and this is what differentiates her from the skeptical scholars who comprise the "Jesus Seminar," of whom the most egregious must be John Dominic Crossan—she manages to give the impression that she is not an enemy of religious belief or of Christianity, but rather someone who wants to uncover the true spiritual essence of Christianity and the truth about its origins by stripping away from it "church dogmas" that have perverted the one and obscured the other.
Themes Introduced in The Gnostic Gospels
The Gnostic Gospels (1979), the first of Pagels's popular works, is divided into six chapters. Chapter one, "The Controversy over Christ's Resurrection: Historical Event or Symbol," contrasts the difference between the orthodox (and New Testament) view that Christ's resurrection was real, historical, and physical, and that the apostles (the Twelve plus Paul), as its official witnesses, had an authority within the Christian community that was unique, with the Gnostic view that its physical reality was irrelevant, whether true or false, and that what was important was that the true Gnostic Christian experience spiritual resurrection within himself.
The second chapter, "'One God, One Bishop: The Politics of Monotheism," deals with the ideology of episcopal authority in the Church in the late first and second centuries. Pagels views this as asserted most emphatically in the writings of St. Irenaeus against Gnostic denials, but she also sees it explicitly in the letters of St. Ignatius around the year 100 and in the Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians some time earlier. Basic to the orthodox case, as she asserts, is the identity of "God the Father Almighty" with "the Creator of Heaven and Earth" and with the God of Israel. Some Gnostics were, of course, dualists, as were the Marcionites, but the Valentinians (to whom she gives the lion's share of attention in the book) were willing to confess "God the Father Almighty," but the "Creator of Heaven and Earth" and "God of Israel" they regarded as an inferior being, the demiurge.
It was the demiurge who had established celestial hierarchies, and so the Valentinians were able to reject the argument from hierarchy by which Clement, Ignatius, and Irenaeus were to defend the nature of the Church as a structured community, the distinction of orders between clergy and laity and within the clergy, and the distinction between men and women. Instead (as Pagels sees it), in Valentinian communities a "spiritual equality" obtained by which those who performed functions of leadership and service were chosen frequently and on a temporary basis by lot, without distinction of sex, age, length of membership in the community, and the like.
Chapter three, "God the Father/God the Mother," expands on the idea of an androgynous god in various Gnostic groups, or else the complementary idea that "the male and female principles" are equally expressed in the manifestations of the Gnostic god. This chapter particularly stresses how women played both spiritual and sacramental leadership roles among the Valentinian Gnostics, as well as among the Marcionites, the Montanists, and the Carpocratians, and contrasts this with the strict upholding of differentiation between the roles of men and women in Tertullian, Irenaeus, Clement of Rome, and (as she sees it, ambiguously) St. Paul. She ends the chapter with an allusion to the 1977 papal statement Inter Insigniores rejecting the ordination of women.
The Appeal of Pagels's Emphases
William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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