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Special edition including the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas
Picador
January 2005
On Sale: January 21, 2005
256 pages
ISBN: 0330431978
EAN: 9780330431972
Trade Size (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Religion
Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s most important writers and
thinkers on religion and history, and winner of the National
Book Award for her groundbreaking work The Gnostic Gospels,
now reflects on what matters most about spiritual and
religious exploration in the twenty-first century. This bold
new book explores how Christianity began by tracing its
earliest texts, including the secret Gospel of Thomas,
rediscovered in Egypt in 1945. When her infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary
hypertension, Elaine Pagels’s spiritual and intellectual
quest took on a new urgency, leading her to explore
historical and archeological sources and to investigate what
Jesus and his teachings meant to his followers before the
invention of doctrine–and before the invention of
Christianity as we know it. The astonishing discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, along
with more than fifty other early Christian texts unknown
since antiquity, offers startling clues. Pagels compares
such sources as Thomas’s gospel (which claims to give Jesus’
secret teaching, and finds its closest affinities with
kabbalah) with the canonic texts to show how Christian
leaders chose to include some gospels and exclude others
from the collection we have come to know as the New
Testament. To stabilize the emerging Christian church in
times of devastating persecution, the church fathers
constructed the canon, creed, and hierarchy–and, in the
process, suppressed many of its spiritual resources. Drawing on new scholarship–her own, and that of an
international group of scholars–that has come to light since
the publication in 1979 of The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels shows
that what matters about Christianity involves much more than
any one set of beliefs. Traditions embodied in Judaism and
Christianity can powerfully affect us in heart, mind, and
spirit, inspire visions of a new society based on practicing
justice and love, even heal and transform us. Provocative, beautifully written, and moving, Beyond Belief,
the most personal of Pagels’s books to date, shows how “the
impulse to seek God overflows the narrow banks of a single
tradition.” Pagels writes, “What I have come to love in the
wealth and diversity of our religious traditions–and the
communities that sustain them–is that they offer the
testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery,
encouraging us, in Jesus’ words, to ‘seek, and you shall find.’”
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