Elaine Pagels, welcome to the show.

Thank you, I'm happy to be here.

I've recently been getting really interested in the Gnostic Gospels, the so-called

Gnostic Gospels. And in my work as someone who's interested in philosophy and religion,

they've always sort of been on the sideline. I've always been aware that there are these

texts that didn't make it into the New Testament that have these weird and wacky stories about Jesus and a totally different idea about the origins of Christianity

But I really want to go on a deep dive and so I'm going to be making some episodes

Discussing particular texts the famous texts the Gospel of Thomas the Gospel of Judas but what I wanted to do today was

get an overview of this library what it it is, where it comes from, what it means for our studies of early

Christianity. So I suppose I can only begin by asking what is a Gnostic gospel?

Ah, well it's first of all a misostic gospel. Ah, well, it's first of all a misnamed gospel.

And I'm partly responsible for that

because when I first wrote a book about them,

these are texts that surprisingly landed upon our group of graduate students and

faculty when I was a graduate student at Harvard in the 70s, for example.

And we were astonished to hear about a discovery in 1945 of over 50 ancient writings, ancient religious writings, they're not all

Christian by any means.

There are a great, it's almost a miscellaneous library in many ways. So classifying them in that way is a misnomer.

And I called them Gnostic Gospels because we didn't know what else to call them.

I would now call them early Christian Gospels.

They're ones that displeased some of the bishops and did not make the New Testament canon for very specific reasons.

But they

...