The Gnostic Gospels

A historian of religion, Elaine Pagels was the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University until her retirement in 2024. Born in Palo Alto, California, in 1943, Pagels received a BA in history and a master’s in classics from Stanford University, focusing on ancient Greek language and culture. Afterward, she earned a PhD in religious studies from Harvard University in 1970, specializing in New Testament studies and the history of early Christianity. Before joining the faculty at Princeton, she taught at Columbia University and Bernard College and was one of the first English translators of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

Her first book, published in 1979, was The Gnostic Gospels. Since then, she wrote and published Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (1988), an examination of the concept of original sin in Christianity and its relationship to attitudes toward gender; Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), a study of the gnostic sacred text The Gospel of Thomas; Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (2012), which looks at why and how the Book of Revelations became part of the New Testament; and Why Religion? A Personal Story (2018), an autobiography explaining why the study of religion had personal significance for her.