What Pagels reveals on her psycho-linguistic couch is rather startling. So I don’t think it’s too far fetched to suggest that historians like Pagels are really conducting cultural psychotherapy. And, least obvious of all, we can uncover our often hidden intentions, what isn’t visible at all, in what we say. The not so obvious consequence of visibility is that we can see how what we mean by what we say evolves. The obvious but largely unrecognised advantage of writing is that it makes language visible. The Gnostic Gospels won both the Nat'l Book Critic’s Circle Award & the Nat'l Book Award & was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th Century. As the early church moved toward becoming an orthodox body with a canon, rites & clergy, the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were suppressed & deemed heretical. Known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library, the manuscripts show the pluralistic nature of the early church & the role of women in the developing movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels, an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts that were unearthed in Egypt. The Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, she was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim & MacArthur Fellowships in three consecutive years.Īs a young researcher at Barnard College, she changed forever the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement. So, Matthew says, Jesus’ mother “was discovered to have a child in her womb through the holy spirit” (1:18) and God’s angel explains to Joseph that the child “was conceived through the holy spirit.” Jesus’ birth was no scandal, Matthew says, but a miracle-one that precisely fulfills Isaiah’s ancient prophecy.Elaine Pagels is a preeminent figure in the theological community whose scholarship has earned her international respect. But the translation of almah into the Greek parthenos (“virgin”), as many of Jesus’ followers read the passage, confirmed their conviction that Jesus’ birth, which unbelievers derided as sordid, actually was a miraculous “sign.”21 Thus Matthew revises Mark’s story by saying that the spirit descended upon Jesus not at his baptism but at the moment of his conception. In the original Hebrew, the passage had read “young woman” (almah), apparently describing an ordinary birth. Apparently Matthew knew the Hebrew Bible in its Greek translation, where he would have read the following: “The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel-God with us” (Isaiah 7:14). There the Lord promises to give Israel a “sign” of the coming of God’s salvation.
“For example, in opposition to the rumor that Jesus was born illegitimate, Matthew and his predecessors found vindication for their faith in Jesus in Isaiah 7:14.
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