Elaine Pagels Quotes

• “When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether—or how much—to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves—as Jews who had found God's messiah—we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat "unclean" food and engage in "unclean" sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier—an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the "evildoers" against whom John warns? we may be surprised by the answer. Those whom John says Jesus "hates" look very much like the Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.”

  Elaine Pagels

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• “What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.”

  Elaine Pagels

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• “What is clear is that meaning may not be something we find. We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to create meaning.”

  Elaine Pagels

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• “No longer married, suddenly I was widowed. From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body.”

  Elaine Pagels

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• “By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil.
  [...] By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth.”

  Elaine Pagels

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• “I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.”

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• “Times of mourning displace us from ordinary life.”

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• “Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering.”

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• “Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way.”

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• “Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are as natural as birth, woven inseparably into our human nature.”

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• “...although being "angry at God"--or at myself, or him, or anyone else--made no sense to me, I was often overwhelmed by sudden, intense bursts of anger that had no outlet, no appropriate target.”

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• “Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate . . .’73”

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• “So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.”

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• “Are we to believe that Adam and Eve actually heard God’s footsteps rustling in the garden of Eden, as the text suggests, when it says that Adam and Eve hid themselves,”

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• “No intelligent person, the sophisticated pagan might have explained, actually worshiped images of the gods, or worshiped living emperors; instead, the gods' images - and the images of the emperors themselves - provided an accessible focus for revering the cosmic forces they represented.”

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• “[T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid.”

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• “Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of Christianity I find disturbing.”

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• “Throughout those nameless days, my temper exploded at slight frustrations. Trembling, sitting in my stomach,m would spread until my whole body was shaking.”

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• “You have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later." Although her comment helped a little at first, during the next twenty-five years I would keep discovering that how much I was able to feel, or not, and when, was not a matter of choice.”

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• “What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical.”

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• “Among Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries no one questioned the legitimacy of divorce. The only question was what constituted adequate grounds;”

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• “The great majority of Christians of the first few centuries did not advocate - and probably did not imagine - that such moral equality could be implemented in society. Most assumed, no doubt, that they could realize such moral equality only in the coming Kingdom of God.”

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• “For those who find suffering inevitable--in other words, for any of us who can't dodge and pretend it's not there--acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me.”

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• “thus the story of Eden was made to reinforce the patriarchal structure”

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• “What can never be proven or verified in the present, Tertullian says, “must be believed, because it is absurd.”

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