Amy Jill Levine did a fairly balanced job in that Teaching Company series I have of The Old Testament.
They can stick their "pro-abortion" credentials though.
I'm not familiar with the others.
Two questions still relieve some of the controversy of this however (for me anyway):
1)How could Christianity have proliferated without Judas? and,
2)How could America have been founded without Christianity?
This seems much ado about nothing. But then, I come at it from a Jewish perspective.
You got that one in the ten ring... Pagels is a fraud, a New Age cover-up artist for the neo-pagans...
Her whole book, The Origin of Satan, can be shown false by just one thing - - the etymology of the word “Satan” itself, which is a Hebrew word...
It is not so much hatred for the Christians (and they do hate Christians), but it is their seething hatred for the Judaic roots of Christendom. They really hate Genesis and Mosaic Law in particular, the Christians are just a proxy for that hatred. Their Jewish enablers are traitors (left wing Jews) who worship the Golden Calf (sort of like those enablers the Maccabees slaughtered along with the pagan Greek occupiers in 164 BC).