In this majestic new book, Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels) ranges panoramically over the history of early Christianity, demonstrating the religion's initial tremendous diversity and its narrowing to ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. It opens with an account of an Arab peasant’s accidental discovery, in 1945, of a cache of thirteen leather-bound ...

On a Zoom call from her neat, book-lined home office in Princeton, New Jersey, Elaine Pagels explains how her latest book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” differs from her ...

In 1945, two brothers dug for natural fertilizer beneath a cliff of Jabal al-Tarif in Upper Egypt. Their tools struck an ancient ceramic jar filled with books, hand-sewn in the manner of antiquity.

The 52 texts discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt include 'secret' gospels poems and myths attributing to Jesus sayings and beliefs which are very different from the New Testament. Scholar Elaine Pagels ...