Sophia, Vol. 43, No. 2, October 2004. Copyright 9 2004 Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Interview

OF DOUBTING THOMAS: THE SUPPRESSED CHRISTIAN TRADITION: AN INTERVIEW WITH ELAINE PAGELS
WITH R A C H A E L K O H N

The 1945 discovery o f ancient documents at Nag Hammadi in Egypt would have great significance for New Testament scholars. But it would take decades, and one woman, to unleash their meaning to the public. In the 1960s, Elaine Pagels was part o f a team at 11arvard University, studying the Nag Hammadi scrolls; in 1979 her slim book The Gnostic Gospels put the formerly suppressed writings o f early Christians into the hands o f ordinary people, l The letters, gospels and poems from Nag Hammadi emergedfrom a community that had been condemned by the church jathers. They show a different set o f beliefs about Jesus than were taught by the church. 2 This radically different view o f the cruciffurion relates one o f the central tenets of Gnosticism, that the material world is false, and that Jesus was not a human but a purely spiritual being, who only adapted himse~'to human perception. The church was not only concerned about Gnostic beliq~ but also about heretical Christian practices, prompting this attack by an early church father, Tertullian in about the late 2nd century. 3 tlere.follows an interview with Elaine Pagels, based on her new work, Beyond Belief, the Gospel of Thomas.

Rachael Kohn: Professor Pagels, your name is synonymous with The Gnostic Gospels which you published way back in 1979. It won the National Book Award, it won the National Book Critics Award, which is pretty amazing for a Biblical scholar. But more than those and many other awards, The Gnostic Gospels played an important role in rethinking contemporary Christianity, how it should look. Is it because people are relieved to discover that there was more diversity in the early years of Christianity than the church ted us to believe? Elaine Pagels: I think it's possible. First of all they're surprised, as I was surprised when I went to graduate school and discovered this. I wasn't expecting it at all, and it simply changes the way we perceive Christianity as a whole, because much of what we think about Christianity goes back to the beginning, Jesus and the disciples, and olden when Christians are asking,

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Well what should we think about this issue, or that issue? They go back and claim whether it's true or not, that Jesus had this view about that subject. It's as though the origin of the movement is crucial to the understanding, and so this really shook and transformed the way many of us think about Christianity altogether. Kohn: Now of course, the story of the discovery of the Gospels themselves, the Gnostic Gospels, is pretty amazing, a bit like the Dead Sea Scrolls a couple of years later. In fact the discovery of both of those caches of early documents, it's really hard to imagine that there has been any discoveries like them. Pagels: I think there haven't, and it's not an accident that they were found in a small area of the Middle East that's very dry, and that simply means that papyrus doesn't rot, so it was actually preserved for thousands of years. That's quite remarkable in itself. Kohn: And I guess it was both a cause for elation and also a bit of sadness. I mean it was quite tragic that some of those early documents didn't actually make it to the scholars. Pagels: Well the Gospel of Thomas was first published in 1959, by a team of European scholars, French, Dutch, German, and when they published it, they were working on the assumption, which everyone would have, that this was a heretical Gospel, it was probably dualistic, nihilistic, blasphemous and had bizarre mythology behind it. And in fact, many people when they first read it and could not find a trace of dualism, nihilism, bizarre mythology or whatever, simply assumed that that shows you how sneaky heretics are, and they proceeded to read these things into this text. And there are many publications which reflect that assumption. It's taken us a very long time to begin to read the Gospel of Thomas without all of those associations immediately flooding in and colouring the way we read it. Kohn: Now the Gospel of Thomas emerged from a Gnostic group? Pagels: That's what we would have said then. And you know, I called these texts Gnostic Gospels because we all assumed that they were what the fathers of the church called Gnostical heretical texts. I wouldn't call them that now, because many scholars who've been working on these texts for the last 25 years, have realised that that's a polemical term. It's sort of like calling everyone you don't like, politically at least in this country, people will say, 'Well they're just Communists', and that could mean anything from Liberal Republicans to whomever. It simply just covers a polemical field. So I don't call them that any more, I don't think it helps, I don't think it's descriptive. Kohn: Then what was the group that became identified by the church as heretical and as indeed Gnostic? I think they were around in the 2nd century?

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Pagels: Well you see, we would have thought there was a group of heretics and they were called Gnostics, but now we see that there were many other kinds of Christianity, many other kinds of groups, and whatever certain leaders of the church decided was not going to be part of the continuity of the church, we're placed in that category, we're called heretical. I mean heresy basically means choice, and this is something that certain fathers of the church thought was not a good idea. Kohn: Well what has been called the Gnostic Gospels, including the Gospel of Thomas, were not included in the New Testament canon. How many Gnostic gospels were there or are there? And is the term 'gospel' even appropriate to describe them? Pagels: The term 'gospel' is appropriate for some of them, because it's on the text, we didn't make those terms up. The Gospel of Thomas ends with the word, I mean the title was placed at the end, 'The Gospel According to Thomas', and we have a Gospel According to Mary, The Gospel According to Philip, The Gospel of Truth, and so forth. But along with those texts which are designated themselves as Gospels, other quite different in many cases from the New Testament Gospels. There are over 45 other writings, which are quite different. They are otten writings attributed to Jesus and his disciples in the early centuries, such as The Secret Book of John, The Prayer of the Apostle Paul, The Letter of Peter to Philip, The Dialogue of the Saviour, all of these texts are attributed to disciples of Jesus and claimed to transmit teaching about Jesus. Kohn: Now they certainly are very different from the Gospels, but are they different from each other? Do they show a degree of uniformity? Pagels: That's exactly the point. They're very different from each other, that's why we really can't classify them as if they were all part of one group. They simply demonstrate a wide range of different perspectives that were circulating among Christians. There are some similarities with some of them. The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Mary, for example, The Gospel of Philip; these texts have in common certain kinds of themes which one finds very little in the New Testament Gospels. Kohn: And what sort of themes are there? Pagels: In particular, the Gospel of Thomas has Jesus speak about bringing forth what is within you, that saying from Thomas in which Jesus says, 'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.' That is the theme that whatever the divine source is that we need to discover, can be found not only by going to Jesus, but also by going to oneself and finding it within.

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It can also be found, according to the Gospel of Thomas, the Kingdom of Heaven, as it's put there, is found inside of you and outside of you, it's not just within, it's also available in the universe itself. One of my favourite sayings is one in which Jesus says 'I am the light that is before all things, 1 am all things, all things came forth from me, all things return to me. Split a piece of wood and I am there; lift up the rock and you will find me.' This suggests that the divine source pervades the universe not only human beings, but even rocks and stones and stars. Kohn: Do you think Jesus was talking there about himself as God, or how would you see it? I mean what happens to the Father, God? Pagels: That'~ a very good question. God is spoken of as Father in this text, but I think he's not speaking about himself, but he himself is, well according to this saying, Jesus is speaking as if he were the divine light in the universe, the divine energy, which brought the universe forth, and which pervades everything, because it comes from that source. Kohn: One of the Gospels found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. It was written by an alternative Christian community, around the 3rd to the 5th centuries, who were disparagingly called 'Gnostics' from the Greek word 'gnosis', for 'knowledge'. They believed that Jesus revealed a secret knowledge of God. No one knows more about the Gnostics and their literature than Elaine Pagels. Is there any connection to Greek philosophical thought in these ideas? Pagels: That's a very interesting question. Probably there is, it's very hard to find any writing in the 1st century that isn't influenced by Greek philosophical thought or other kinds of Greek culture, including, say the Gospel of Luke, or the Letters of Paul, or the Gospel of John. Kohn: How do you think Christianity would have looked, if it had incorporated these Gospels, these Gnostic Gospels into the canon? Pagels: That's a very interesting question, I wish I were a prophet. But I don't know, of course, I think that the exclusion of these Gospels has given us a much more narrow range of what we call Christian, than what we would know if some of these other sources were included. However, the Gospel of Mary, for example, and many other texts, the Prayer of the Apostle Paul, the Secret Book of James, very much like the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament, or the Gospel of Matthew, speaks often about dreams and revelatory dreams and visions which people have. Well of course the Apostle Paul in his Letters, talks about dreams and revelations he had that he saw Jesus in a dream. These are also full of dreams and revelations, and they suggest a kind of Christianity that is open to dreams and revelations in an ongoing way. Now orthodox Christians or what became orthodox Christians declared at the end of the second century,

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that the time for dreams and revelations is over. The Apostolic Age people had visions and dreams that came from God, but now that's all stopped, and you can't have, and I can't have, and no-one can have, that kind of revelation any more, because the time of that sort of olden revelation is ended. This of course is an open question for many Christians, Pentecostalist Christians, Charismatic Christians and millions of others in every Christian confession, do often revere value or receive visions and revelations. The question is, how definitive they are. But you can see that if you had openended access to dreams and revelations, demonstrating what God now is saying, it would be very hard to have a kind of understanding of Christianity that wouldn't be changing all the time, and it's antithetical to the development of the kind of institutions we have. Kohn: Indeed. And other traditions also have a tendency to limit that kind of heavenly authority or divine authority and make sure it's contained by specific texts and no others. But when you identify dreams, I immediately see there one of the reasons why Gnosticism could be so attractive today, because there is quite an interest in dreams via Jung, for example, investing dreams with very much more wisdom, more direction or authority than say, a more rational mind would ascribe them. But are there other beliefs in Gnosticism that are also attractive, specifically about resurrection, say? Pagels: Well indeed, and as you say, there are many Christians throughout the world, an increasing number of new Christians throughout the world who revere dreams and revelations and sources of inspiration in very much the way these texts have. Charismatic Christianity has always done so. There are many other things that surprise us here. One of the great historians of the church, Adolfvon Harnack said that some of these so-called heretics were in his words, the first Christian theologians. For example, while most Christians believe that Jesus was born uniquely, in a way like no other human on the face of the planet, through a virginal conception, and that he was resurrected from the dead, in the sense that his body was raised out of the grave, the Gospel of Philip, for example, suggests that the virgin birth and the resurrection of Christ as a bodily resurrection, are misunderstandings of what those terms mean. The Gospel of Philip suggests that the virgin birth refers to Christ's spiritual birth, that is, that he had earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, and that he was reborn through the divine father, the father in heaven and the holy spirit. And that you also can be born from a virgin when you are baptised and born again as the terminology is. When you're born again as a Christian through baptism, you become the child of the father and also of the holy spirit, who's understood to be the mother. So a virgin birth can apply to every Christian, not just to Jesus.

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Secondly, the Gospel of Philip suggests that resurrection is a transformation and a spiritual awakening, and therefore that can happen not only to Jesus but it happens to everyone who receives a spiritual awakening. Kohn: So are you suggesting there that the reason why the early church was so adamant to retain the belief in the bodily resurrection was in order to mark Jesus off as unique? Pagels: That's an important part of it, and furthermore, it's not just to mark Jesus off, but when you look at the resurrection accounts in the New Testament, when you look at Matthew, Luke and John for example, and you ask, 'What does Jesus do when he comes back from the dead?' Very often what he does is designate who his successors are to be. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, he calls the eleven to him, that is the twelve minus Judas Iscariot, and he says, 'All authority on heaven and earth has been given to me, and now I give it to you. You are my Apostles, go out and be my representatives', and so forth. In the Gospel of Luke and John as well, Jesus calls together those disciples very specifically named, Peter, James, John, Bartholomew, Andrew, and conveys his authority to them and says, 'You are my Apostles, you are my representatives', and of course the doctrines of apostolic succession in the Catholic and Protestant churches claim that present authority, whether it's the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury, or any bishop or priest, is ordained in a process that goes back to those particular apostles. That maintains a sense of unbroken continuity of a specific kind of authority, which can't be claimed by just anyone, by you and me if we're not ordained. So that issue about resurrection is more than about what happens alter death, it's also about who has authority in the church to speak for Christ. Kohn: I think people today recognise that the decisions of the early church to eject various groups and ideas like the Gnostics, was to some extent a political decision, but the Gnostics' idea that Jesus had a secret message, and didn't tell his apostles, means that Jesus lied to them. Now that's hard for a lot of Christians to accept; it makes the New Testament the conventional one, invalid. Pagels: I think it doesn't, lfyou look at the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 4, it says 'Jesus taught everything to his disciples privately. That is in the Gospel of Mark, and the tradition of secret teaching was widespread among rabbis at the time. It is acknowledged in the New Testament. Paul too, says 'I can't teach you everything now, I can only teach you the most elementary things. The other things I will teach you later.' So it was actually very common practice to have, and Mark acknowledges that Jesus had it as well, a public teacher and a private teacher. Now Mark goes on to say 'This is actually what Jesus told the disciples

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in private', and claims to give you the private teaching. The Gospel of John has five chapters of private teaching from Chapter 13 to 18, the so-called Farewell Discourse, that's when Jesus speaks to his disciples. So the idea of private teaching doesn't invalidate the Gospels, it is acknowledged by them. But this claims to supplement them. Now when I first encountered the Gospel of Thomas, I assumed it was light years different from the Gospel of Mark or Matthew. Now I realise, on the contrary, it was probably meant to supplement them. It would make no sense to any of us to open up a book that says 'These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which the disciple Thomas wrote down.' Unless you know who the living Jesus is, who Thomas is, who Peter and James and Matthew and Mary Magdalene are, because they all appear in the text with no introduction. So I'm assuming, and many of us do, that these texts were understood to be supplementary to the texts that we have. Now the question that remains, and I think it's a very valid question, is if Jesus had a secret teaching, as say the Gospel of Mark also acknowledges, is that what we find in the Gospel of Thomas? We don't know the answer to that. Kohn: Yes, it may be even more secret and unrevealed in that text. Pagels: When rabbis taught secret teaching, the purpose of it was to keep certain kinds of teaching from people who were immature, and who would be inflated by it, such as the idea that you have a continuity with the divine, or that you come from God. That could become megalomania in a lot of people. So even throughout the centuries, rabbis have hidden mystical teaching from people they think are immature, and it was traditionally not written down. So it's quite unusual to have these texts written. Kohn: Elaine, in your new book, Beyond Belief the Secret Gospel of Thomas, you show that the most beloved of Gospels, the Gospel of John, is actually a polemic, or indeed a set against the Gospel of Thomas. Now this would make Thomas earlier than John? Pagels: That's a very interesting question, and I've also loved the Gospel of John, and still do in some ways. But what I realised as I was reading the Gospel of Thomas, is that there is teaching there, that is shared with the author of the Gospel of John. Other scholars have pointed out the strong similarities between John and Thomas. They're both written for someone who already knows the basic story, they're both written as supplemental and advanced teaching, they're both written speaking about the Kingdom of God not as something coming at the end of time, but as the present spiritual reality, and they both have what you might call mystical elements to them. But as I read that, and looked at the work of those scholars who've observed the enormous similarities between the two, I came to the

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conclusion, and to me it was a surprise, and it was unwelcome and it seemed very strange, but I realised that the only way one can make sense of the relationship between these Gospels is to see that whoever wrote the Gospel of John knows the kind of teaching you find in Thomas, and thinks that it's been taken there in the wrong direction. We don't know, and that's a good question, whether the Gospel of Thomas had actually been written first, but that kind of teaching had probably been given orally and was known among various groups of followers of Jesus, and the author of the Gospel of John is saying in effect, 'Yes, I know that kind of teaching, I use it too. But you're taking it into the wrong direction'. Kohn: How would you illustrate the difference between John's view of Jesus for example, an'd Thomas' view of Jesus? Pagels: Yes, both the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas for example, speak of Jesus as the divine light of God, and they both go back to Genesis, which says 'In the beginning God said, 'Let there be light', and the first act of creation is one in which God calls forth the divine light. This is not ordinary light because there is no universe yet, but it's the divine energy that brings the universe into being. Both the author of the Gospel of John and the author of the Gospel of Thomas speak of Jesus as 'The Light of the World', and the one who pervades all things, as if he were kind of a divine being himself, because it's not a man speaking, it's one through whom this divine light is manifest. Kohn: So how do they differ? I mean in the Gospel of John one has very strong statements about Jesus being God and from God. How does Thomas imagine Jesus? Pagels: Thomas sees Jesus as also a manifestation of God, and from God. The difference is this: the Gospel of Thomas says 'Jesus comes forth from the divine light, speaks as the divine light of the Universe. That is who he is, and the good news, the Gospel, is that you too come from that light, and so in the Gospel of Thomas in saying 50, Jesus says to his disciples, 'When people say to you, where do you come from, say 'We come from the light, the place where the light came in to being in the beginning.' And if they say to you, 'Well, who are you?' Say 'We are children of the light and children of the living Father.' And so the Gospel of Thomas suggests that all who come to recognise this inner light come to recognise that the image of God within every human is the light that brought us forth and brought everything into creation in the beginning. The Gospel of John, by contrast, says 'Yes, Jesus is the light of the world, but you and I are not', and the good news is very different. The good news is (and John will always use this word) 'Jesus is the only begotten son of God, you are not the child of god, I am not the child of god, only Jesus

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is the son of God, and the good news is, that if you can believe in him you could be saved from sin and darkness which otherwise will destroy you'. Kohn: Wasn't the notion of being the son of man, or the son of God a common Hebrew term, to describe Israel? I'm just wondering how much were the Gnostics continuing Jewish ideas, or were they radically different? Pagels: Actually these texts often, like all of the Gospels, do of course continue Jewish ideas, and as you say the term 'Son of God' is a term for the Messiah of Israel, usually. But these two texts, Thomas and John, speak of Jesus as manifesting the divine light, sort of the divine presence, and that idea that one can find the divine source within oneself, in Thomas, is rejected in John who .says 'No, the only way you can find the divine source is in the one, only son of God, and that is Jesus.' That's why Jesus, in the Gospel of John, is always declaiming. After all, what does Jesus teach in the Gospel of John, he doesn't teach the beatitudes, he doesn't say 'Blessed are the poor', he doesn't do any of the teaching you find in Matthew and Luke, which were part of the tradition. He keeps saying, 'I am the way, I am the light, I am the vine, I am the branches, I am the true bread, I am the resurrection,' and finally, just 'I am', because that's understood to be the name of God. So what Jesus says in the Gospel of John is over and over that he manifests the divine presence and he alone. Kohn: It's sort of fitting that the apostle Thomas is the hero of the Gnostic Gospels, because in the Synoptic Gospels in the church tradition, Thomas is rather infamous as the doubter of Jesus. It sort of fits the view that I've always associated with Gnosticism, that things are sort of turned upside down. Pagels: It's not an accident that Thomas, who is for John alone, by the way, the Doubting Thomas, it's an attack on groups of Christians who revere Thomas as the apostle through whom the secret teaching comes. To say that apostle is not only not an apostle, he has no authority, he understands nothing, he's not one of us, is the way that John, and only John characterises Thomas, but he's not the only apostle who appears in these texts. Another important disciple is Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene depicts her as an apostle who was also one who learned Jesus' teaching, and who taught it. And she as a disciple of course, was rejected by orthodox tradition, partly because the example suggested that women could teach and preach in the way that men did, and that you, in the middle of the 2nd century, became completely unacceptable. Kohn: And therein lies the reason the Gnostic Gospels are so popular today amongst feminist Biblical scholars. I mean they must see there for the first time, models and mentors for them, that the church never offered them.

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Pagels: Yes, what's striking is, many people have thought that the idea o f women taking positions o f leadership, is a twentieth or twenty-first century idea. In fact what we realise now that we have a much wider spectrum o f early Christian teaching is that this issue was very much alive in the beginning o f the church.
The companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it. They said to him, 'Why do you love her more than all of us?' The Saviour answered and said to them, 'Why do I not love you as I love her?' The Gospel of Philip When Orthodox Christianity speaks of God in three persons, it's startling that two o f them are understood to be masculine, and the third, neuter, that is, Father, Son and Spirit. But when you look, say, at the Secret Book of John, from this discovery of these secret texts, Jesus appears to John and says, 'John, John, why do you weep? I am the one who is with you always. I am the Father, I am the Mother, and I am the Son.' And in that one recognises a recognition of the Holy Spirit, as the Mother, the one who gave birth to Jesus. And of course if you look at the Gospel of Mark, Mark speaks of the opening scene in the Gospel of Mark, is Jesus' baptism through the Holy Spirit, on which the spirit descends. Now if you go back to Aramaic or Hebrew, Spirit is a feminine term, and therefore would be understood as a manifestation o f God in possibly a feminine form. But when you translate that word into Greek, you have a neuter, when you translate it into Latin it becomes masculine. So that connotation is lost, that image is lost. Kohn: I can't help thinking that in the Buddhist tradition one finds that the Buddha manifests himself as a female when he's exhibiting his quality o f compassion and this leads me to the idea o f Thomas going to India, he's the apostle who's meant to have gone to India to spread the word. Is there any suggestion or thought that the ideas found in the Gospel o f Thomas, have in any way a Buddhist or even a Hindu base or inspiration? Pageis: It's certainly possible, and very interesting because people who know Buddhism much better than 1 do, suggest that many elements of the Gospel of Thomas sound very similar to Buddhist teaching. For example, the idea of enlightenment and ignorance instead o f sin and redemption, pervades the Gospel of Thomas. The idea o f Jesus as the one who is the enlightened one, he's like a Bodhisattva figure who says 'You too can become enlightened, as the Buddha teaches that every person can potentially become what the Buddha became. There are other sources, however, where one might look for the

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inspiration of this kind of teaching, and one of those is in Jewish mystical readings of Genesis, and that is closer to home. These don't exclude each other, it's certainly true that they say that Thomas went to India, and we know that there were Buddhist missionaries in Egypt at the time the Gospel of Thomas was actually written down. Kohn: When you refer to Jewish mystical interpretations of Genesis, are you referring to cabbalistic notions, or pre-cabbalistic notions? Pagels: That's an interesting question. The earliest we have of cabbala of Jewish mystical tradition, comes from the 12th century, and on, the 13th 14th 15th century in France and Spain. However, when you look at the Gospel of Thomas and other texts called heretical, in the 1st century, they are clearly evidence of Jewish mystical thinking, and sometimes I wonder, Is it Jewish mystical thinking that is branded heretical? That seems possible, whereas Jesus equated with those kinds of mystical teachings, we don't know, but perhaps he was. Kohn: I suppose that gets to the question how much are Gnostic Gospels pointing to or getting closer to the actual figure of Jesus himself, or is it just an authentic expression of a particular group responding to Jesus and developing their own tradition ? Pagels: That's a very good question, and I think it's highly debated among scholars. When people began to study the Gospel of Thomas seriously, which is just a list of the sayings of Jesus, many noted enormous similarities with Mark and Luke, as well as with the Gospel of John. And that started a kind of cottage industry, in what is here called the Jesus Seminar. People like John Dominic Crossin And James Robinson, other scholars, began to assume that the Gospel of Thomas is exactly as you said. The earliest evidence we have of the teaching of Jesus. I think that's questionable. We just don't know. It might be, but I don't think it's persuasive. I take it in a more, if you like conservative way, believe it or not, and take the Gospel of Thomas like the Gospel of John, as an interpretation of Jesus' tradition at the end of the 1st century. I think what this teaches us, well it may teach us about the early teachings of Jesus, but I think that's questionable. What it certainly teaches us is how followers of Jesus within say 60 years after his death, began to understand and interpret his sayings. Kohn: Well this short interview with you and this short discussion with you, we've talked about Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Buddhism. As well as feminism. And it seems to me that the confluence or the presence of these particular religious interests which are so prevalent today in a popular form, may explain why there is so much interest in Gnosticism itself. Pagels: Well that's true, and I can't help smiling when you say that. I think of one reviewer who didn't like at all this material. He said, Well it's

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just a bunch of New Age nonsense. And I thought, Well, it's 2,000 years, it's not so new. I mean it's not as though we came up with these ideas and invented Mary Magdalene as a disciple or the Gospel of Mary, or the teaching of finding God within. Pagels: I do think those ideas are actually very close to the tradition which we have known for thousands of years, and it simply expands on possibilities that are also already available and latent in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of John, for that matter. They're not so far away. At first we thought they were highly exotic and different. In fact when you begin to look at them, they're quite easily connected. The Gospel of Luke also says 'The Kingdom of God is within you' in Chapter 17, and the Gospel of John has as I said, a great deal in common with the mystical teaching of the Gospel of Thomas. Kohn: Well Elaine, it seems that scholars like you are precisely what we need to foster what's been called a kind of inter-spiritual dialogue or exchange amongst religions, that is, in examining closely the characteristics of Gnosticism and indeed other traditions, we can begin to see that we don't need to go on hunts for heretics, we don't need to exclude those who seem different, because at times we might find that we actually share quite a bit. Pagels: Well it's not that there may not be positions that would be seriously heretical from a Christian point of view, but that affinities with Judaism and Buddhism can easily be found in material that is mystical. This is not news, of course, it has affinities with Sufi traditions and with some Buddhist and Hindu traditions as well, as you might expect with mystical traditions. Kohn: Well I suppose we are really lodging into this age of huge interest in mysticism, but the reputation of Gnostics over the years has been that they are not just heretical but that they are immoral, that they reject the world as it is. What has your research in the Gnostic Gospels shown? Is that in fact the case? Pagels: What we found are over 50 manuscripts and they're really quite diverse. Within those you can find some that speak in that language, but these are quite heterogenous. Within them you can also find some that are enormously useful for understanding the early Christian movement, and those are the ones that many of us find most interesting, because they speak to issues that are important. What they also do is challenge the view that all Christians believed that Jesus is the only Son of God, the only way of salvation, that you must believe in the virgin birth, you must believe in the bodily resurrection, you must believe in this, this and this. They show that the Christian movement was deeply concerned with the teachings of Jesus, the teachings of Love your neighbour, Love your brother as the Gospel of Thomas also reaffirms, the

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Gospel o f Truth says that. Those teachings are absolutely central. But the exclusion and the doctrinal developments through the 4th century and the 4th century creeds, are not there, and that's why they open us I think to ask a very fundamental question about what is the heart o f Christian tradition. K o h n : Well indeed, thank you so much for shedding light on those questions, and perhaps even some o f the answers o f indeed what is Christianity.

Endnotes

* This edited transcript is taken from 'The Spirit of Things' Religion Program presented by Rachael Kohn on ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) Radio National, 28 March 2004. The interview was recorded at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, in Atlanta, GA, in November, 2003. (Information about ABC Radio National, and available frequencies, is posted on abc.net.au/rn.) Dr Elaine Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University; Dr Rachel Kohn is presenter of 'The Spirit of Things', Religion, Radio National, The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), Australia. 1. Her other books of note to this discussion include Adam. Eve. and the Serpent (1987), which documents the shitl in Christian history when Christians began to focus on a meaning of the Genesis story which stressed the sinfulness of human nature and sexuality, The Origin of Satan (1995). 2. For instance, this observation:
9 I saw him apparently being seized by them. And I said, 'What am I seeing, O Lord? Is it really you whom they take? And are you holding on to me? And are they hammering the feet and hands of another? Who is this one above the cross, who is glad and laughing?' The Saviour ~id to me, 'He whom you saw being glad and laughing above the cross is the Living Jesus. But he into whose hands and feet they are driving the nails is his fleshly part, which is the substitute. They put to shame that which remained in his likeness. And look at him, and look at me!'

The Apocalypse of Peter

3. 'Their ordinations are carelessly administered, capricious, and changeable9 At one time they put novices in office; at another, persons bound by secular employment . . . . Nowhere is promotion easier than in the camp of rebels, where even the mere fact of being there is a foremost service. So today one man is bishop and tomorrow another; the person who is a deacon today, tomorrow is a reader; the one who is a priest today is a layman tomorrow; for even on the laity they impose the functions of priesthood!' Tertullian.