I don’t think so.

Tylor, you say that Pagels argues that the historical Paul was a Gnostic. You still haven’t provided any examples of passages here she makes any such statements. You say that “there aren’t any citations or footnotes” when there are literally hundreds; look on pages 10-12 for the footnotes to the introduction chapter, the notes to the Romans chapter are on pages 46-52, the notes to the 1 Corinthians chapter are on pages 87-94. I could go on but I think I’ve made my point.

Are you going to retract you statements? I don’t want to believe that you are a deliberate liar. Hopefully this is all just a mistake.

Melissa

Your last two comments (including this one) have been great. I really appreciate your perspective and writing style.

I’d be honored if you would consider writing a guest post for pauliscatholic.com

Please let me know if you’re interested. I’d include any links you want.

Pagels has carpentered a non-existent quotation, putatively from an ancient source, by silent suppression of relevant context, silent omission of troublesome words, and a mid-sentence shift of 34 chapters backwards through the cited text, so as deliberately to pervert the meaning of the original. While her endnote calls the quote “conflated,” the word doesn’t fit even as a euphemism: what we have is not conflation but creation.

Put simply, Irenaeus did not write what Prof. Pagels wished he would have written, so she made good the defect by silently changing the text. Creativity, when applied to one’s sources, is not a compliment. She is a very naughty historian.

Or she would be, were she judged by the conventional canons of scholarship. At the post-graduate institute where I teach, and at any university with which I am familiar, for a professor or a grad student intentionally to falsify a source is a career-ending offense. Among professional scholars, witness tampering is no joke: once the charge is proven, the miscreant is dismissed from the guild and not re-admitted.

I am not calling for academic sanctions but, more simply, for clarification. Pagels should be billed accurately — not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist.

As Jimmy Akin puts it: Ouch!

I was rather confused by you last post here. You say “there aren’t any citations or footnotes” yet her book contains literally hundreds of footnotes, most of which contain multiple references to primary sources.

Also could you provide an example of a place where she argues that Paul himself was a Gnostic, rather than discuses how the Gnostics perceived him.

It seems to me that if there is anyone who has agenda or portray Paul in a particular way it is you – the web address of this site for example reads “Paul is Catholic”, when a few spaces are added to separate the words. Of course you are quite entitled to argue your case but it is unprofessional to accuse Pagels of poor scholarship simply because her views are not in agreement with your own.

Melissa