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“... ancient and modern ideas of heaven, however, is related to the theme of two more weighty studies, Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve and the Serpent and Peter Brown’s The Body and Society. This theme is human sexuality. Until very recently, almost all Christians assumed without question that this would have no place in the world to come, where ‘they neither ...”

“... of the discovery for early Christianity since publication of the texts was completed. Professor Pagels, who has been closely associated with the work on the manuscripts, gives us here a fascinating account, with quotations from the texts, of Gnostic beliefs, of the conflict with the Church authorities and its consequence for the development of the social ...”

“... disciples whom Jesus could use to transform himself, or to be transformed by. ‘The betrayer,’ Elaine Pagels writes in Reading Judas, ‘always intrigues us more than the disciples who remain loyal’; she is intimating, perhaps, that we get a certain kind of pleasure from stories about betrayal that we can’t get from stories about loyalty – more ...”

“... promote the idea of Original Sin on which the Christian interpretation of the Fall is based, or so Elaine Pagels argues in her study of the ‘politics of paradise’, Adam, Eve and the Serpent. But even St Augustine took sexual desire to be the evidence for the Fall, not its cause or its chief consequence. One doesn’t have to be a Freudian or, for that ...”

“... of this rival form of Christianity by a politically well-organised Church has been much regretted. Elaine Pagels calls it ‘an impoverishment of Christian tradition’. Nuttall says its defeat ‘is of some interest because in one respect orthodox Christianity seems philosophically more vulnerable than Gnosticism’. He means that none of the Christian ...”

“... on Coptic script thought the writing ‘looked like 21st-century handwriting’. The historian Elaine Pagels questioned whether the fragment, even if real, merited the sensational title King had given it: ‘When you call it “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife”, I just think, “What are you talking about?” At least 99 per cent of this text is missing ...”