Elaine Pagels, née Elaine Hiesey (born Feb. 13, 1943, Palo Alto, Calif., U.S.), American educator and scholar of the origins of Christianity.
Hiesey studied at Stanford University, receiving a B.A. in history (1964) and an M.A. in classics (1965). While studying for a doctoral degree at Harvard University, she married the physicist Heinz Pagels. After graduating with a Ph.D. in religious studies (1970), she joined the faculty of Barnard College at Columbia University in New York City, becoming chair of the department of religion in 1974. In 1982 she joined the faculty of Princeton University as Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion.
Early in her career, Pagels established herself as a leading scholar of early Christianity and gnosticism (a dualistic religious movement stressing the importance of revealed knowledge for salvation) with the publication of The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis (1973) and The Gnostic Paul (1975). She also joined an international team of scholars that issued an English translation of the gnostic texts that had been discovered in 1945 at Najʿ Ḥammādī, Egypt. Her work exploded the myth of theological unity within the early Christian movement and also explored the feminine imagery prevalent in the gnostic texts. She subsequently published The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which was enormously popular among general readers as well as academics, winning a National Book Critics Circle Award as well as a National Book Award. Although Pagels’s interpretations were sharply criticized by traditionalists, who felt her claims were not supported by the texts and who objected to her feminist interpretation of scripture, they were well received by laypeople who were disaffected with mainstream Christianity.
The deaths of her six-year old son in 1987 and her husband in 1988 inspired Pagels to reflect upon how humans cope with catastrophe and how they apportion blame for tragedy. Her thoughts found their way into two books: The Origin of Satan (1995), which discusses the tendency within the Christian tradition to demonize one’s opponents, and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), which argues that the Gospel of Thomas—whose composition she dated to the mid-1st century ad, about a century earlier than most scholars dated it—was excluded from the Christian canon because its individualistic interpretation of Jesus was theologically and politically threatening to early Christian elites.
Pagels won several prestigious awards, including a Rockefeller Fellowship (1978), a Guggenheim fellowship (1979), and a MacArthur Prize fellowship (1981). Her other works include Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988) and Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity (2007).