This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

30 years ago, I published a piece in The New Yorker with the title, The Devil Problem.

It was a profile of Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, who had also become

improbably a best-selling author. Pagull's 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels, was scholarly,

but it was also accessible outside the academy and very widely read. She changed how

a lot of people, Christians, and those we might call Christian curious, it affected how they

thought about the Bible itself. Pagels went on to write the origin of Satan, as well as works on

Adam and Eve and the Book of Revelation.

Her latest book is called Miracles in Wonder,

and it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity,

including the stories of Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection.

For many years, Pagels has been a professor of religion at Princeton.

When we spoke earlier this year,

I was struck by how focused she has remained on the topic of belief and how the world of two millennia ago, the world of the Jews and the Romans and Jesus, is to her so vividly alive.

We first met, you're not going to believe this, 30 years ago, and shortly thereafter you

published a book and I decided to write about you. You had suffered unimaginable loss. First,

one of your children had died after a long illness, and then your husband,

Heinz Pagels, had an accident and died while hiking. And you told me, and this is a quote from you

at that time, I found that in times of grief, the church has little to say. It's just too remote.

How did that loss, those losses, affect your relationship

to faith at that time?

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