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" These ancient stories in religion speak to our desire. But they move us toward hope. "
Elaine Pagels
Religion
Desire
Move
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" The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there's no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel. "
Elaine Pagels
Secrets
Surprise
Misunderstanding
" The Book of Revelation is such a dream landscape that you can plug any major conflict in it. "
Elaine Pagels
You
Landscape
Book
" What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material. "
Elaine Pagels
Material
Other
Orthodox
" After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press. "
Elaine Pagels
Know
Left
People
" What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was. "
Elaine Pagels
Movement
Gospel
Early
" I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews. "
Elaine Pagels
Relationship
Politics
People
" We don't actually know if the person who wrote the Gospel of John had a written copy of Thomas because we don't know exactly when it was written. "
Elaine Pagels
Who
Person
Because
" The Secret Revelation of John opens, again, in crisis. The disciple John, grieving Jesus' death, is walking toward the temple when he meets a Pharisee who mocks him for having been deceived by a false messiah. These taunts echoed John's own fear and doubt. "
Elaine Pagels
Crisis
Doubt
Walking
" People who are comfortable with very clear boundaries and group definitions don't like the instability and ambiguity of people who say they are more advanced Christians, or they don't have to do what the bishop says. "
Elaine Pagels
People
More
Group
" I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I'd heard when I was growing up were simply made up - and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out. "
Elaine Pagels
Growing Up
Story
Faith
" I have sympathy for anyone who finds consolation anywhere we can. And many people do find it in religious tradition as it has been. I mean, I love much of that tradition. But somehow, that just didn't speak to me in the way that it does to some. "
Elaine Pagels
People
Speak
Love
" I realize that I cannot live without a spiritual dimension in my life. "
Elaine Pagels
Live
Life
My Life
" For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament. "
Elaine Pagels
People
Years
Tradition
" The Book of Revelation is all about the conflict, the contest between the forces of Good and Evil. "
Elaine Pagels
Book
Conflict
Good
" Throughout the ages, Christians have adapted John of Patmos's visions to changing times, reading their own social, political and religious conflicts into the cosmic war he so powerfully evokes. Yet his Book of Revelation appeals not only to fear and desires for vengeance but also to hope. "
Elaine Pagels
Hope
Fear
Reading
" I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion. "
Elaine Pagels
Politics
Book
Thinking
" I am enormously susceptible to religious environments - the music, the liturgy and the prayers. "
Elaine Pagels
Religious
I Am
Am
" The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions - dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war. "
Elaine Pagels
Book
Dreams
Bible
" The Gospel of Thomas claims to be the secret sayings of Jesus. There are 114 of them, so it says many things, but the central message is that Jesus is the one who reveals the divine light that brought the universe into being, and that you and I also reveal that light. "
Elaine Pagels
Message
You
Gospel
" Really, I don't like to do any household chores. There was a time when I loved to cook, but that was when I wasn't writing books. "
Elaine Pagels
Books
Writing
Time
" The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church. "
Elaine Pagels
Kind
Literature
Protest
" Startling as the Gospel of Judas sounds, it amplifies hints we have long read in the Gospels of Mark and John that Jesus knew and even instigated the events of his passion, seeing them as part of a divine plan. "
Elaine Pagels
Plan
Seeing
Events
" Once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him. "
Elaine Pagels
Start
You
People
" About the gnostic writers themselves and the setting in which they lived we know little, although gnostic Christians were influential enough to be denounced at length. "
Elaine Pagels
Enough
Know
Lived
" The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God. "
Elaine Pagels
You
Die
Insult
" Unlike many deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine husband or lover of any. "
Elaine Pagels
Divine
Israel
God
" The Antichrist is often identified with the second beast in the Book of Revelation that arises from the land, the beast that tries to make everyone worship the power of evil. "
Elaine Pagels
Power
Beast
Book
" Orthodox theologians insisted that the rest of humankind were only transitory creatures, lost in sin - a view that would support what would become their dominant teaching about salvation, offered only through Christ, and, in particular, through the church they claimed to represent. "
Elaine Pagels
Rest
View
Lost
" There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all. "
Elaine Pagels
New
Letters
Evidence
" There are some kinds of Christianity that insist you have to believe literally in doctrine. The Gnostic gospels open out the complexity and multiplicity of approaches to this. If you think the story of the virgin birth is mistranslated, for instance, it doesn't mean you have to throw out the whole thing. "
Elaine Pagels
Think
Believe
Birth