Elaine Pagels
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Elaine Pagels’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I didn't think of my work as a relationship with faith exactly. It was more a relationship with curiosity. I had given up on faith, you know, much earlier. My family wasn't religious. I mean, they would say the grandparents would call themselves Christians, but my father had given it up, you know, for science. He was a scientist. Yeah, he was a biologist. Darwin.
Well, that was just an accident. I mean, religion was not on the spectrum for me. until somebody took me to San Francisco for something, and it turned out it was an evangelical crusade. I didn't know who this guy was, Billy Graham, but he was powerful, and the whole event was extraordinary.
You get invited to be born again and have a new family and start your life over, and I thought, that's great.
Yes. I mean, he had, you know, this 6,000 people singing. And, you know, you can have this experience with God and all this. And I was just totally captivated. He was charismatic. And he surprised me. The whole thing surprised me. But I did feel like the sky opened up. You know, it was like something happened.
Well, it lasted until, you know, the church I went to told me something I couldn't stand. It was a friend of mine in high school had been killed in an automobile accident. And I went back to this evangelical church of which I'd been a part for a year quite intensely. And I said, my friend has been killed in an accident. And they said, that's terrible. Was he born again?
And I said, no, he was Jewish. And then, you know, someone said, well, then he's in hell. And I just felt like I'd been... That was out.
Socked in the stomach. And I just walked out. I never went back.
Why? Because I had some kind of powerful experience with that conversion. It didn't last. I mean, I left that group. That whole evangelical perspective on Christianity didn't work for me. But there was something transformative about it. And it was important. It opened up elements of my experience that nothing else did.
It's about the imagination. I mean, I was living in a world which, you know, science defines what you can see, and there's nothing else, right? That's at least what I was brought up hearing. Mm-hmm. But this was about opening up the imagination. I always thought about it later as the way I felt about The Wizard of Oz as a child, right? Just suddenly I was out there with Dorothy, you know.
The wicked witch gets killed and there's Glenda the Good and there's all of this action going on, this adventure, which is internal but very powerful. And that book's become a template for my life when I was maybe eight years old. Mm-hmm. And these stories of Jesus do that as well. And it did it for me in that moment.
And even though I left it, I thought, wait a minute, why are religions still part of culture? I mean, it is true that there's no culture that doesn't have some form of claims about invisible beings and how we interact with them. So I thought, could it be Buddhism? Could it be Buddhism? Judaism? Could it be Islam? Or is it Christianity? So I decided I wanted to find out, how does that work?
And why do people continue those traditions even long after they're discredited rationally?
That's an interesting question, and it makes me realize that I didn't think of him as a real person. I thought of some grand mythological drama going on in the sky. You know, there's God and Satan and Jesus, and you're in part of a drama. That's why I mentioned The Wizard of Oz. I mean, it's part of an imaginary world.
Yeah. Well, I didn't think about that he wasn't real. I just thought whoever that might have been, this was now some grand drama played out in the universe. And that's how it felt.
Well, when those Gospels now in the New Testament were written, there were others as well. We know that because people at the time said, oh, well, there's the Gospel of Truth and there's the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel to the Egyptians. You know, they named these. And some of the earliest writers say, well, there are…
genuine gospels, and that there are terrible ones. Avoid those. They're written by heretics. They will lead you astray. So we knew there were far more than four, but four became part of a canon, which means a standard, right?
I think they became the canon because they talk about actual narratives of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. These others are not that. They usually consist of sayings, just teachings, which are different from those in the New Testament. as Mark points out when he writes about them, are the public teaching of Jesus, what he taught when he was out with crowds on the hills of Galilee.
And that's repeated in Luke and Matthew as well, also in the Gospel of Thomas. But these other Gospels, which are called Gnostic for all the wrong reasons, by the way, it was partly my fault, claim to give private teaching that he gave secretly to certain disciples, the way any rabbi teaches today, right?
There's one thing to the congregation that's preached, and that teacher will say different things to his closest followers and sort of advanced level students.
Because you can't confirm what's said, I suppose.
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