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

There is that statement on pp. 8-9 – but read the rest of the book. Pagels is always telling us what the “Valentinian exegetes” taught. Yet there aren’t any citations or footnotes. In other words, she is the source for what the Valentinian Gnostics taught. It’s her own creation. Is this scholarship? Nobody has the courage to say that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. This isn’t scholarship. This is Pagels creating an “alternate reading” of Paul that conforms to the rest of her “academic” work.

As Pagels writes later in the book: “To read Paul either way – as hypergnostic or hyperorthodox – is to read unhistorically, attempting to interpret the apostle’s theology in terms of categories formulated in second-century debate. On the other hand, whoever takes account of the total evidence may learn from the debate to approach Pauline exegesis with renewed openness to the texts.”

What she has done is polarize all scholarship (as hypergnostic or hyperorthodox), and then place her scholarship in the moderate middle – which means that Paul is kind of orthodox and kind of gnostic. It’s a clever way of shielding herself from criticism…

What I’m saying in my book and on this site is that we should and must read Paul through the lens of the second century debates. There is not an “objective” lens through which we can examine Paul as Pagels assumes. Rather Pagels is reading Paul through 20th century categories.

I was angry because of your deceptive misrepresentation of Pagel’s book.

What utter nonsense, this isn’t her thesis at all. The book is about how the Gnostics interpreted Paul, not what Paul himself actually taught. Here is a quote from the introduction of the book (Pages 8 and 9):

“The present study focuses specifically on Paul as he is being read in the second century. The subject is, of course, NOT PAUL HIMSELF but “the gnostic Paul” – that is, the figure that emerges from second-century gnostic sources. This investigation into the history of hermeneutics makes no attempt to reconstruct a historical account of the apostle himself, or of the issues he confronted in his own communities. Instead the task is to investigate how two conflicting views of Paul emerge and develop as early as the second century.”

I would suggest that you try reading the book, before you attempt to criticize the author.

Like a majority of Christians in the world, I am a Roman Catholic Christian.