Summary: excellent scholarship
Comment: A refreshingly unbiased look at early Christian thought be a very serious scholar.
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Summary: One passage, hundreds of interpretations.
Comment: Pagels sets out the focus of her book on page 9:
"This book will explore the attitudes that Jesus and his followers took toward marriage, family, procreation, and celibacy, and thus toward "human nature" in general, and the controversies these attitudes sparked as they were variously interpreted among Christians for generations -- or for millenia, depending on how one counts."
Pagels' book assumes some primary knowledge of early Church history, as Pagels' primary focus is on the different uses of the early chapters of Genesis in reference to the political and theological challenges of the first five centuries of Christianity. Although the six chapters loosely follow the chronology, the focus of the content in each chapter is topical, rather than historical. It's a little difficult at first to read the chapters together into a whole, but the themes that emerge in the early chapters do build upon one another, up to the sixth chapter in which the interpretation of the creation and fall is discussed the most. Some of these themes are the following:
1. Is it better to be celibate or to have a family? Even as far back as the New Testament, the question isn't 100% clear. According to Luke (as Pagels reads it), Jesus' admonition against divorce is absolute, and the "marrying and giving in marriage" is a sign of commitment to the affairs of this world instead of the coming Kingdom of God. In both instances, passages from Genesis (chapters 1 and 6) are applied to make the point. However, Matthew's use of Luke's material here adds some qualifiers to the prohibition of divorce. On a similar note, the differences can't be ignored between Paul's celibacy and lukewarm approval for marriage in I Corinthians and "Paul's" outright advocacy of marriage and family in I Timothy.
2. What exactly is "liberty"? The Christians, when they were treated as second-class citizens under Roman rule, argued for the right not to worship the imperial gods, which many thought were real demons who were the impure product of the "sons of God" and "daughters of men" in the pre-flood times (Genesis chapter 6). The Roman idea of liberty was living under a good emperor, and that the criticism of their practices amounted to a form of treason. In support of this, the idea that all men were created by God "in his image" proved appealing to those in the underclass who suffered in the empire. But when Christianity became the religion of the empire, questions of religious liberty were asked in a completely different context.
3. Is the path to God, or a more intimate relationship with him, achievable through human effort? The gnostics thought so -- they took interpretations of Genesis to extraordinary lengths, some holding that mankind was governed by preexisting forces that were beyond their free will, and that it was the reintegration of the good forces within us through knowledge that made Christians complete. The ascetics also thought human effort brought them closer to God, by rejecting both sexualty and the comforts of the world. Oddly enough, the way that each of these movements were criticized went in two different directions. In repudiating the gnostics, the church fathers argued that Christianity was not about finding a cosmic ebb and flow and the acceptance of suffering, but about a moral freedom to choose a moral life. Two centuries later, the muscular efforts of the ascetic life were made dim by the emergence of Augustine's pessimism about human nature, i.e., that no effort was sufficient to escape our defective natures.
At the end of the formation process, with all of these elements in the mix, we end up with a view of humanity that to the outsider would appear to be the worst of all options: the original sin is perpetuated by the childbirth process, nature itself is defective (with disease and stillbirth cited as evidence), no one can remove the stain of the original sin -- not even converted believers. Pagels explains that this view of mankind, and of the fall, was not only well-suited to a centralized church authority, it also provided the individual with an explanation of why bad things happen in the world.
Whether intentional or not, a good deal of the book is framed in reference to how Christian orthodoxy has been formed in reaction to a crisis -- the Jewish society, the Roman empire, the gnostic subversiveness, and the Pelagian opposition to centralized church rule. While it may seem that the Catholic Church has been the same for at least 1600 years, Pagels' book provides a partial glimpse of how much in flux the first 400 years were in shaping orthodoxy.
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Summary: The mirror she holds before you will blind most
Comment: Elaine Pagels fascinates me. Her research and comprehension as a writer/historian helps one focus, if one has an open mind and the comprehension to do so, on questions vital to our understanding who we are and how we became who we are. For those of us who believe in high ethics and individual responsibility, who have charity and compassion in our hearts yet believe ourselves to be intelligent and educated, this book is a triumph. One begins to understand how one can live and believe in the ethics and example of the great spiritual leaders of antiquity without believing the myths, the fear and miracles, and the need to elevate ourselves above all other forms of life. Elaine Pagels holds the mirror before you, as she does in her other books, and blinds those who must hang on to salvation and anything that saves them from the natural ebb and flow of life. We know too much but not enough, so we struggle for something more, anything to comfort us from the truth. "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent" reveals too much for those who need a "fix" to get through the day. Elaine Pagels deals with something larger and profounder than saving one's soul. She is a true liberator of the human spirit, even with the harsh truths that flow from her typewriter.
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Summary: Courageous!
Comment: This book goes a long way toward explaining from an historical viewpoint how Christianity moved from the creation-is-good view of the Hebrew Bible to the humans-are-bad, body-is-bad view of Augustine. Pagels is a scholar who knows how to make this material accessible and isn't afraid of possible "heresy."
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Summary: Unsure What To Believe
Comment: Ms. Pagel's book was a fascinating interweaving of historical facts. But I was unsure as to how to take the whole thing. The conclusions that a person come to can be from two perspectives: Someone looking at their own religion from a position of acceptance, and one looking at a religion from the outside, trying to understand it without being committed to the truths of it. I found that Ms. Pagel made many suppositions that can only come from a person that does not understand what it means to be a Christian or a Jew. She states that Christians USED the creation story to justify their sexual beliefs, and that it is Christianity's position that sex is inherently sinful and was responsible for the fall of man and original sin. That could not be further from the truth. Speaking as a Christian, sex is considered to be created by God not only for procreation but for pleasure as well, God simply wants that wonderful relationship to be within the protection of a marriage relationship. According to everything I have been taught (and I have belonged to many churches) the fall of man was because of disobedience, not because of sex. So I believe Ms. Pagel has a bit of a bias. However, I still recommend the book.
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