This is an important book by an important author and religious scholar.

Pagels is a well-regarded researcher, teacher, and historian (she teaches at Princeton these days), and has written several important books on the development of the early church and Christian doctrine, including “Adam, Eve, and the Serpent”, “The Gnostic Paul”, “The Origin of Satan”, and most recently, “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas”.

This book, written in 1979, provides a good overview and examination of the implications of a collection of texts known as the Nag Hammadi Library (NHL), a set of manuscripts from the earliest Christian communities discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. These documents, while diverse in many ways, include a large number of manuscripts regarding an early stream of thought and theology in the church known as “Gnosticism” (the Wikipedia articles I link to here are good overviews and I won’t reproduce them here). Gnosticism emphasizes an inward-focused path of spiritual development, versus the apostolic doctrinal belief orientation of the Roman church (e.g “I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”).

Pagels’ overview here is readable and accessible to the non-scholar, and introduces the important themes from the NHL texts, and their implications for understanding the development of an “orthodox” theology in the early church. The big takeaway here for me is the notion that the belief statements that constitute the core theology of the Christian tradition are not monolithic ideas that were delivered from heaven intact, but rather the result of a process of conflict and compromise over a period of several centuries, and can legitimately be questioned and re-examined without breaking faith with the tradition as a whole.

Here’s a quote from the conclusion that I think summarizes what is essential and important about the NHL materials and their implications for our understanding of the Christian faith and tradition today:

[...] Certain creative persons throughout the ages, from Valentinius to Blake, Rembrandt, Dostoevesky, Tolsto, and Nietzsche, found themselves at the edge of orthodoxy. All were fascinated by the figure of Christ — his birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection: all returned constantly to Christian symbols to express their own experience. they cannot rest solely on the authority of the Scriptures, the apostles, the church — at least not without inquiring how that authority constituted itself, and what, if anything, gives it legitimacy. All the old questions — the original questions, sharply debated at the beginning of Christianity — are being reopened: How is one to understand the resurrection? What about women’s participation in priestly and episcopal office? Who was Christ, and how does he relate to the believer? What are the similarities between Christianity and other world religions?
[...]
Furthermore, as a person concerned with religious questions, I find that rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian, the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of one’s own experience and that claimed for the Scriptures, the ritual, and the clergy?

If you’re intrigued by some of the historical questions raised in books like The DaVinci Code or are interested in the earliest Church and the development of Christian theology, this book is a great place to start.