All too often, the major religions have been used to hold women back from equal footing with men and to prefer particular groups as chosen above all others. Often such religious claims are based more on belief than fact, so the work of historian and theologian Elaine Pagels has been particularly helpful in uncovering the work of women in the early Christian tradition and the value of religion, even in 2020.
Pagels was born Elaine Hiesey in Palo Alto, California on February 13, 1943. Her parents were Louise Sophia (Boogaert) Hiesey and William McKinley, a botanist and professor at Stanford University. She became an evangelical Christian in her teens but later left that branch of faith because of the intolerance she found in its communities. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history (1964) and a master’s degree in classical studies (1965) from Stanford. Then she moved across the country to earn her PhD in religious studies from Harvard University in 1970.
Pagels met her first husband, physicist Heinz Pagels, while working on her doctorate, and the couple married in 1969. The couple had one son and adopted two other children. She also had a second marriage with Kent Greenawalt, a law professor at Columbia University, for a decade, from 1995-2005.
Pagels began teaching at Barnard College in 1970, and by 1974 she was chair of their Department of Religion. Then in 1982 she moved on to Princeton University, where she was hired as the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion. She teaches a 2-2 load, two classes in the fall and spring semesters, while doing new research and writing while also giving public appearances. If you want to take her classes, be aware that many are limited enrollment, and competition can be fierce. For her years of work at the university and within the fields of history and religion, Princeton honored her in 2012 by naming her one of two winners of their Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities.
Many of Pagels’ books have won awards, such as the 1979 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Criticism category and the National Book Award in 1980. That award-winning book is The Gnostic Gospels and is number 72 on the Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century. This book, as with most of her other books and articles, shows us that Christianity wasn’t a unified religion even from the first century and that the feminine played an important role in the early days of the religion.
Pagels’ next book, Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (1988), dug deeply into the role of women in early Judaism and Christianity. She discovered a mixture of blame and praise as well as women who were active leaders and not just moral lessons. Beyond that she discovered evidence of a political agenda to remove the power of women from the religion as it grew in authority. As you can imagine, reception of the book was mixed. This review is just one of many that attack her work and her career; its author refuses to call her Doctor or Professor, dismisses her evidence as repetitive (it isn’t), and accuses her work of having a feminist agenda. This belittlement of women’s scholarship wasn’t new in 1988, and it isn’t over today.
Pagels’ personal tragedies, such as the death of her son in 1987 and her husband the following year, and perhaps the attacks on her work, helped turn her next research projects toward questions of belief. The Origin of Satan (1995) traced the development and popularity of the figure of Satan and the early Christian attacks on Judaism and “pagan” or traditional Roman religion. Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003) argued that politics are what drove several books from the official Bible, an older fact in religious history, but applied specifically to Thomas as a “doubter” who challenged the organized and state-supported Church. Again, both books received mixed reviews, but sales of her work indicate a strong appetite for historical assessment of one of the most powerful religions in the world today.
For her historical discoveries of the early Christian faith, Pagels has received several other awards. These include a December 1981 MacArthur Fellowship and a 1979 Guggenheim Fellowship. These awards were important to a young scholar whose works were being attacked for being un-Christian or antireligious when they are honest historical works. She was also given a National Humanities Medal in 2015 by the National Endowment for the Humanities for her work, which is scholarly yet accessible to laypeople.
Pagels’ most recent book, Why Religion? A Personal Story (2018), examines her own belief but also explores why, in an age of science and technology, so many people still have religious faith and practices. The personal narrative in this book is very intense, including the deaths of her first husband and son as well as her surviving a sexual assault at the hands of her graduate advisor. This book has drawn more positive reviews and commentary than her earlier books, but even here they belittle her authority by refusing to use her title of Doctor or Professor, as this article does. The positive evaluations often feel more like praise for her rediscovery of her faith than acceptance of the historical evidence she has uncovered.
Pagels does not publicly complain about these attacks on her professionalism by a loud minority of critics. Instead, she keeps researching, teaching, speaking, and writing. By doing so, she helps us understand the truth behind the religions that want to control our world. You can find links to videos, articles, and books at her website.