Pagels, Elaine

Elaine Hiesey Pagels (1943–) is a foremost religious scholar, with a specialty in probing and interpreting the Gnostic traditions of Christianity. After growing up on a farm in Palo Alto, California, Elaine Hiesey attended Stanford University, where she received both a B.A. (1964) and an M.A. (1965). She then traveled east to attend Harvard, obtaining her Ph.D. in religious studies (1970). In 1969, she married Heinz R. Pagels, a noted theoretical physicist, and subsequently gave birth to two children. Professionally, Pagels successfully climbed the academic ladder. In 1982, she left a position as a fully tenured professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, to become the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University.

In 1987, Pagels's 5-year-old son succumbed to chronic lung disease. Fifteen months later, her husband was killed in a hiking accident. These events caused Pagels, an Episcopalian, to question her religious beliefs. Afterward, her ongoing journey to understand the truth of the origins and development of Christianity led her to become one of the most respected religious scholars in the world. Her contributions were recognized through the awarding of a Rockefeller Fellowship (1978–79), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979–80), and the MacArthur Fellowship (1980–85).

When Elaine Pagels was only 2 years old, two Egyptian brothers stumbled onto a ceramic jar filled with books while digging for natural fertilizer in Jabal-al-Tarif. The discovery of this 4th-century treasure trove, which came to be known as the Nag Hammadi Library, proved to be a watershed in the study of the historical aspects of Christianity and provided Pagels with a wealth of material. Pagels's studies ultimately led her to study Greek, Latin, Coptic, Hebrew, French, Italian, and German, and she participated in translating two of the documents in the 48-volume collection.

Her doctoral dissertation was published as The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis (1973), an exposition of Heracleon's Commentary on John's Gospel. In The Gnostic Paul (1975), she presents 2nd-century Valentinian Gnostic interpretations of Paul that are based on secret oral traditions traced back to the apostle through his pupil Theudas, demonstrating that sin and redemption in Paul's letters were read by Paul's interpreters in both a Gnostic and an anti-Gnostic fashion. Two different pictures of Paul emerge, neither of which are exclusively correct.