Elaine Pagels on how the Gospels developed

I don’t deal much with religion issues on this blog, but religion does intrigue me — and that’s why Elaine Pagels’s new book Beyond Belief, (which is about the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas) is on my reading list. It’ll be awhile before I get a chance to read it, but I did catch a great interview with Pagels at Edge.org. Much of it deals with a discussion about the circumstances under which the Christian gospels were written.

“Many Jews and many Christians have assumed that their holy scriptures were some kind of immutable truth that descended from heaven,” Pagels says. “That of course is the story of Sinai. And what this work shows, the work of historians of religion, is that in fact these kinds of texts are accretions that develop over time, they come out of arguments — you can show what those arguments are. You can show how opposite points of view are articulated in the traditions that these Christians think come straight from the mouth of Jesus himself, that in fact what’s put in the mouth of Jesus himself are words that come out of debates that occur 60 to 70 years after his death. Now that is interesting, because it makes it impossible to maintain a kind of literalist and simplistic view of revelation. That is really the basis of much Christian teaching, and in fact particularly much of American Christianity in particular.”

I’d be interested to hear feedback on the book from anyone who’s read Beyond Belief, where, apparently, Pagels expands on these kinds of topics.