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“I was brought up to think religion was kind of irrelevant,” she says, but one question stirred her curiosity as a Harvard graduate student: Why was religion still around in the twentieth century?
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Pagels was raised in a culturally Protestant household, where her father, a research biologist, “had given it all up for Darwin.” As a teenager, she appalled her parents by dabbling in conservative Christianity. “The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical ‘blasphemy’ proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them,” Pagels wrote in 1979 in The Gnostic Gospels. Her book, which won both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, introduced the public to unorthodox contemplations by early Christians that questioned, among many things, whether suffering derives from sin or ignorance, whether the resurrection of Christ was symbolic rather than literal, and whether God was both divine Father and Mother. Written in Coptic, the manuscripts are translations of earlier Greek Christian writings, including gospels believed to have been hidden by monks in the fourth century. To fill in the gaps, Pagels, a Princeton University professor and MacArthur fellow, has studied the Nag Hammadi Library, a cache of more than 50 texts discovered in 1945 by an Egyptian farmer digging for fertilizer.