Summary: The design of Genesis
Comment: Two creation accounts were later joined in GENESIS. In the first four hundred years Christians regarded freedom as the primary message of GENESIS. In Jesus's time anti-pagan feelings were strong among the pious and rural Jews. John the Baptist may lived with the Essenes. Jesus warned of the coming day of judgment. Rabbis, teachers, came to replace the hereditary caste of priests.
GENESIS commands be fruitful and multiply. Jesus reversed traditional priorities. He celebrated the single and childless. Within a century of Paul's death ascetic aspects of Jesus's message spread rapidly. Chrisitians attacked the gods and the imperilled pagans.
Christians in different provinces showed great diversity. Christians were distinguished for their moral rigor. Some Christians resented being told what to think and how to behave by the bishops. Some sought to know God directly through gnosis. Gnostics constituted an institutional threat.
After Constantine, heresy became a crime against the state. Jesus had said there were no grounds for divorce. Paul spoke of marriage in negative terms. Paul and Jesus sought to prepare for the end of the world. As the religious basis of society, Christians were to look to one another. They claimed moral equality. Some Gnostics believed in an internal source of desire and action.
Augustine was joyful when he gave up ambition and embraced celibacy. The ascetics were athletes for God. Augustine de-emphasized free-will and affirmed secular government in qualified fashion. He offered a theology of politics. The Christian view of freedom changed as Christianity became the religion of emperors.
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Summary: All things old are new again...
Comment: Elaine Pagels is perhaps best known as the author of the popular text, `The Gnostic Gospels', highlighting a lesser known arena in early Christian history. Her reputation is somewhat controversial, as is her writing, but one thing is certain - she is a good writer, interesting to read, and she will make her readers think. This particular book, `Adam, Eve and the Serpent' deals with issues surrounding sexuality and gender, a hot topic in the social and cultural situations of today, but similarly of concern throughout much of Christian history. There is a tug-of-war between `traditional values' (leaving aside that there are various traditions) and `revisionist' or `modern' ideas, and few are in agreement over where the boundaries should be drawn.
Pagels explores some of the ways in which these traditional roles of gender and patterns of sexual expression arose to become so powerfully ingrained in western Christian society. To this day, most people make the appeal to the early chapters of Genesis both as the paradigm for what God intended for the world as well as the explanation, if not the actual instance, of sin and evil encroaching upon the world. Pagels begins with a copy of the first few chapters of Genesis, and traces ways in which ancient Jewish and early Christian communities interpreted these chapters.
Each chapter in Pagel's book highlights a particular theme. The first chapter looks at the understanding of Jewish culture of the early Genesis stories that would have formed the world view of Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles and church leaders, all of whom were born and raised into this Jewish culture. Jesus and Paul do not seem to see original sin as being a sexual sin or act, according to Pagels, and humanity after Adam and Eve are still called to make a moral choice out of freedom that goes beyond sexuality.
Later chapters deal with the development of interpretation in light of the political and social situation, first as an oppressed minority, then later as a significant political presence in the empire. Pagels also devotes a chapter to looking at the Gnostics and their views toward gender and sexuality, the radicality of which sowed some of the discord between their community and the greater orthodox church. Pagels then devotes considerable space to the Augustinian development of ideas of sexuality, gender and human nature in relation to Genesis, as all subsequent Christian viewpoints in the West have some relationship, pro or con, to the Augustinian foundations. The prevailing idea of original sin as being sexual derives largely from Augustine (although some of it is based upon misinterpretation).
Pagels discusses briefly the issues of exegesis (interpretation) versus eisegesis (reading into the text, or projection) - it is often said that one can find most anything one wants in the bible by interpretation; Pagels has been charged with this as well. However, as an explanation of the ways in which certain texts were understood and passed on, Pagels is a good voice to include - her scholarship and research support is sound, and her interpretations fit within reasonable limits. This is a book that introduces the reader to ideas perhaps unknown, intriguing, and certainly worthy of conversation.
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Summary: The Village Reader Review
Comment: Jesus interprets Genesis 1 to 3 in a radical new way, and the subsequent four centuries of orthodox and Gnostic Christians resulting thought process leads to modern ideas on relationships.
In first century Jerusalem there was conflict between the pagan Rome and Jewish culture and religion. There were also a struggles between Jews that had an accommodative posture toward Rome (led mostly by the upper classes and Priests that had the most to lose) and those, mostly more conservative and rural, that resisted Roman influence. In modern terms, Jesus was a resistance leader.
Pagels argues the conflict was partly due to Jesus' interpretation of Genesis. In Genesis 1:28, the basis for marriage was procreation - and by Jewish law, marriage without children was grounds for divorce. Christ turned the law upside down. When asked what the grounds for divorce were, his answer, in Matthew 19:4-6, is that there are none. "This answer shocked his Jewish listeners and, as Matthew tells it, pleased no one".
After the crucifixion, but long before the Reformation, two groups competed for the heart and soul of Christianity - the orthodox and Gnostics. The same Scriptural texts supported radically different viewpoints. Orthodox Christians read Genesis as "history with a moral" - and their viewpoint was "a proclamation of moral freedom". Pagels implies this led to the development of the rights of man, democracy and equality under the law. Gnostics believed that Genesis was a "myth with a meaning". They argued that Genesis could not be read literally because it didn't make sense. There were two different creation texts which didn't agree (Genesis 1:26, 27 and 2:7); they questioned if Adam and Eve could hear God's footsteps (Genesis 3:8) and wonder why God an omniscient God would ask "where are you?" (Genesis 3:9). They looked for a deeper meaning to scripture.
For four centuries orthodox and Gnostic waged a philosophical battle for the heart of Christianity. Orthodoxy won, and only now, nearly sixteen hundred years later, are some of the early arguments and texts being reexamined, after the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1945 and the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. This well written, probing, thought provoking book is a part of a reexamination of the development of religious thought.
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Summary: The many influences of one myth...
Comment: "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent" is a brief, fascinating introduction to the world that shaped early Christian thought. Pagels writes that, during the first four centuries of the common era, there were many different schools of thought about religion, almost as many as there are in the contemporary American setting that she writes.
In this book, she examines how one myth -- the story of the fall of Adam and Eve-- shaped different religious thinkers. Some, like Augustine, took it as an illustration of the inherantly sinful nature of people, and used the story to flesh out his highly influential beliefs about original sin. Other religious thinkers, like Gnostics, saw the myth as an allegory about the spirit (Eve) within the flesh (Adam) and even went so far to see the serpant as an early foreshadowing to Christ. The fall wasn't a bad thing -- it was an allegory of emerging spiritual consciousness.
Readers may be surprised to discover just how influential the Adam and Eve myth really was. For many under Roman rule, it was the first introduction to a notion of human equality-- all people were equal creations of God-- and a spark that lead to contemporary American concepts that "all men are created equal." (Just to be accurate, in both of these periods it was only men who were seen as equal, and no consideration was given to women, slaves, etc...) Pagels points out that an idea like this, which the American founding fathers took to be 'self-evident' is in fact an empirically unprovable concept, and philosophers like Aristotle would have found it absurd.
Elsewhere in the book, Pagels provides an interesting window into Christian attitudes about celibacy. I was surprised to learn a life of renunciation was seen as a freedom from the responsibilities of family life -- my modern mind was more trained to see it as a purely religious concept, not a practical one.
Pagels has a succint, controlled writing style that is hypnotic. In just 154 pages, she covers a lot of ground. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and would be curious to see other treatments of the singular influence of certain Bible stories.
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Summary: So Much For That Simple And Unified Body Of Early Christians
Comment: Elaine Pagels' knowledge of the development of Christianity during its first four centuries is very much in evidence in ADAM, EVE AND THE SERPENT as she describes the evolution of diverse interpretations of the Genesis creation stories held by succeeding generations of the new sect. In her account attitudes toward marriage, family, procreation and celibacy are shown to vary widely.
The author portrays Jesus as a man who views himself as a prophet sent to warn mankind of the coming Kingdom of God. Preparation for this event, according to Jesus, will require an allegiance that is stronger even than one's ties to family and nation.
The message of Jesus and later Paul was mostly about repentance and purification. Pagels claims that this emphasis became modified as the religion spread to Rome, Greece, Asia and Africa. A struggle then ensued between orthodox believers who sought a new ethical system and institutional structure which set them apart from the neighboring pagans and the gnostics who wished to achieve an elevated level of spiritual consciousness without the supervision of bishops and clergy.
The author points out that the lessons of the creation stories as interpreted by the first Christians allow them to validate the freedom of humans to choose between good and evil. In the fifth century Augustine looks at Genesis more as a story of human bondage. While the earlier Christians see people as being capable of self government, the prevailing attitude among believers reverses itself abruptly after the time of Constantine.
Elaine Pagels writes with clarity and she has the ability to make difficult material seem understandable to those of us who are not academics.
In this book I learned more about the incredible assortment of beliefs prevalent within the early church. The vision of a simple and unified body of beginning Christians has always apparently been just a myth.
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