Q&A Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels’s life has been an exploration of the inexplicable. The rigorous theological scholar first created a furor 40 years ago with her groundbreaking best seller, The Gnostic Gospels. A professor of religion at Barnard College in New York at the time, Pagels wrote about the secret gospels—as they were called—that had only recently been rediscovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. Having studied them during graduate school at Harvard, she shed light on how these little-known texts influenced early Christianity.

She went on to publish widely read books on Adam and Eve, the origin of Satan, the gnostic gospels of Judas and Thomas, the book of Revelation. She teaches today at Princeton University. In her most recent book, a memoir entitled Why Religion? she talks about the loss of her son Mark at age six from a