You are right that Elaine Pagels has a lot of knowledge. What makes people like her so insidious is the combination of that knowledge and a thinly veiled agenda.
Whenever I smell an agenda in an academic work or a popular press work by an academic (which better describes her well-known books), my hackles go up, and not just when it comes to religion.
If Pagels were to write an evangelistic work for Gnosticism, I wouldn't care. But her "evangelism" is presented as scholarship, data, and hard facts, when they are often anything but.
Ann Rice (yes, the vampire lady), who recently converted back to Catholicism and wrote what sounds like a very intriguing book on the life of Christ, has had some very perceptive things to say about modern Biblical/theological studies. She said that when she started the process of research for her book, she knew little about Biblical studies, but she knew a lot about researching things and about following arguments. I read excerpts in a print journal, but found essentially the same collections of quotations on-line.
Rice: "...Having started with the skeptical critics, those who take their cue from the earliest skeptical New Testament scholars of the Enlightenment, I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud. I'd have to end up compartmentalizing my mind with faith in one part of it, and truth in another. And what would I write about my Jesus? I had no idea. But the prospects were interesting. Surely he was a liberal, married, had children, was a homosexual, and who knew what? But I must do my reseach before I wrote one word.
...What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments--arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts, lacked coherence. They were not elegant. Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.
In sum, the whole case for the nondivine Jesus who stumbled into Jerusalem and somehow got crucified by nobody and had nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and would be horrified by it if he knew about it--that whole picture which had floated in the liberal circles I frequented as an atheist for thirty years--that case was not made. Not only was it not made, I discovered in this field some of the worst and most biased scholarship I'd ever read.
I saw almost no skeptical scholarship that was convincing, and the Gospels, shredded by critics, lost all intensity when reconstructed by various theorists. They were in no way compelling when treated as composites and records of later "communities."
I was unconvinced by the wild postulations of those who claimed to be children of the Enlightenment. And I had also sensed something else. Many of these scholars, scholars who apparently devoted their life to New Testament scholarship, disliked Jesus Christ. Some pitied him as a hopeless failure. Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books. This emerged in the personality of the texts.
I'd never come across this kind of emotion in any other field of research, at least not to this extent. It was puzzling.
The people who go into Elizabethan studies don't set out to prove that Queen Elizabeth I was a fool. They don't personally dislike her. They don't make snickering remarks about her, or spend their careers trying to pick apart her historical reputation. They approach her in other ways. They don't even apply this sort of dislike or suspicion or contempt to other Elizabethan figures. If they do, the person is usually not the focus of the study. Occasionally a scholar studies a villain, yes. But even then, the author generally ends up arguing for the good points of a villain or for his or her place in history, or for some mitigating circumstance, that redeems the study itself. People studying disasters in history may be highly critical of the rulers or the milieu at the time, yes. But in general scholars don't spend their lives in the company of historical figures whom they openly despise.
But there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise Jesus Christ. Of course, we all benefit from freedom in the academic community; we benefit from the enormous size of biblical studies today and the great range of contributions that are being made. I'm not arguing for censorship. But maybe I'm arguing for sensitivity--on the part of those who read these books. Maybe I'm arguing for a little wariness when it comes to the field in general. What looks like solid ground might not be solid ground at all..."
I certainly wouldn't recommend Rice as a definitive source for Christian doctrine -- she's just returned to Christianity. I also haven't read her book yet. But she does know how to turn a phrase, and she, coming in as an outsider, has absolutely nailed modern Biblical scholarship. I have been reading the works of modern Biblical critics, historians, etc... now for more than 25 years, and because I've always been a believer at heart, I've sought out rebuttals of those ideas, and my conclusion is the same as Rice's.
Most scholarship that challenges traditional Christian accounts and beliefs is sloppily done -- which is generally what happens when one begins with a desired outcome (the trashing of traditional Christianity) and then gathers evidence to support the desired outcome. truth.
One of my favorite works of Biblical scholarship is R.K. Harrison's "Introduction to the Old Testament." I was first introduced to it by a professor at an Orthodox seminary here in the U.S.
In a quiet, understated way, Harrison ripped holes the size of New Jersey into the liberal orthodoxies about "what scholarship has proven" about the Old Testament. One of the things that strikes me about his detailed accounts of the various trends and paths of OT scholarship over the last 150 years is how often serious works rebutting these liberal orthodoxies have been written -- but never answered.
All too often, liberal scholars choose to "answer" their critics with ridicule ("they're ignorant fundamentalists")at best, or by completely ignoring the critiques, at worst.
Sorry... you know what happens when Elaine Pagels and her ilk come up. :-)
If Pagels were to write an evangelistic work for Gnosticism, I wouldn't care. But her "evangelism" is presented as scholarship, data, and hard facts, when they are often anything but
I agree. But, then, the entire Christian faith is a matter of, well, faith, not fact! :) Nevertheless, the same can be said of the opposing side. We accept the Scripture on faith. Jews, who disagree with us do so based on their faith.
However, if it were all a matter of faith things would be easy. Unfortunately, facts get in the way. The world is not as smooth and self-congratulatory as we would like it to be, unless we choose to hide in our own little box and pretend that no one else could possibly be right, or – God forbid – that we may be wrong.