The First Congregational Church of Berkeley is pleased to partner with Cody's Books to present Elaine Pagels discussing her current book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003, Random House).
"This luminous and accessible history of early Christian thought offers profound and crucial insights on the nature of God, revelation, and what we mean by religious truth. Those who are moved by religion but who find that they can no longer accept the official doctrines of their church will find this marvelous book a source of inspiration and hope."
-Karen Armstrong
Friday, May 23, 2003, at 7:30 p.m.
$10 admission at door, but no one turned away due to lack of funds
Presented by FCCB and Cody's Books
No pre-registration necessary
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Growing up in a family of scientists, Elaine Pagels was taught that scientific discovery had made religion obsolete and irrelevant. Despite this early training, or perhaps because of it, Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, is now one of the country's leading scholars of religion.
An intensely inquisitive and thorough historian, Pagels' impeccable scholarship has won her international respect. While still in her early thirties, she exploded the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement. Her research changed the historical landscape of one of the world's great religions.
Pagels gained international acclaim for her best-selling book, The Gnostic Gospels (1979, Random House), an analysis of 52 ancient manuscripts unearth in Egypt in 1945. The manuscripts, known as the Nag Hammadi Library, include many gospels and other writings previously unknown, and demonstrate that the early Christian movement was far more diverse than previously thought. They also indicate how women, prominent in certain Christian groups, were subsequently excluded from governing positions in its emerging hierarchy.
The Nag Hammadi manuscripts contain not only the gospels of Phillip and Mary Magdalene among others, but chants, poems, myths, pagan text and spiritual instruction, pointing to mystical traditions within the early Christian tradition. As the early church moved toward becoming an orthodox body with a canon, rites and a clergy, the bishops and archbishops denounced these manuscripts and declared them heretical.
Expanding on questions raised in The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels wrote Adam, Eve and the Serpent (1988, Random House), a book that explores the Genesis creation stories and their role in the development of sexual attitudes in the Christian West - as well as the conviction, fundamental to American political life, that "all men are created equal."
After two tragic events in her life, Pagels wrote The Origin of Satan(1995, Random House). In 1987 she lost her six-year old son Mark to a respiratory disease. In the summer of 1988 her husband of twenty years, physicist Heinz Pagels, died in a rock climbing accident. Pagels says that following these events, like many people who grieve, she had a sense of living with invisible presences. Reflecting on the many ways that various religions have given imaginative form to what is invisible, she next wrote the book that became The Origin of Satan.