Two weeks ago, at the height of the Gospel of Judas mania, a Google News search of “Elaine Pagels” plus “expert” scored 157 hits; she was the media’s prime go-to person for a scholarly read on the import of the Coptic manuscript. Pagels was most often cited in stories such as the following from the NYT:
Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specializes in studies of the Gnostics, said in a statement, “These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse – and fascinating – the early Christian movement really was.”
I am going to demonstrate that Professor Pagels’s media reputation as a scholar is undeserved, her reputation as an expert in Gnosticism still less so. The case for the prosecution will require some careful reading. Those who want to follow along with the sources at their elbow should find a copy of Pagels’s 1979 book The Gnostic Gospels (NY: Random House). Those who have some Latin and a library handy may want the Sources Chrétiennes edition of Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses (ed. Rousseau & Doutreleau, Paris: Cerf, 1974, 1982) and can bookmark page 278 of Vol. 211 and page 154 of Vol. 294.* Others can get most of the gist from the translation available in Vol. 1 of The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951), with a finger in pages 380 and 439. OK, to work.
Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels is in large measure a polemic against St. Irenaeus (approx. 130-202 AD), Bishop of Lyons and a Father of the Church, and is aimed in particular against the defense of ecclesial orthodoxy offered by Irenaeus in his work Against Heresies – which was written in Greek but which survives, for the most part, in an ancient Latin translation.
In a chapter called “One God, One Bishop,” Pagels is concerned to show that the doctrine of monotheism and the hierarchical structuring of the Church were mutually reinforcing ploys designed to consolidate ecclesiastical power and eliminate diversity – specifically, the diversity that Pagels finds in the Gnostics whom Irenaeus was at pains to refute. Pagels claims that Valentinian Christians (disciples of the Gnostic Valentinus) “followed a practice which insured the equality of all participants” and put the bishop Irenaeus in a double-bind situation by ignoring his orders. Says Pagels (page 43: brackets, ellipsis, and emphasis are Pagels’s):
What Irenaeus found most galling of all was that, instead of repenting or even openly defying the bishop, they responded to his protests with diabolically clever theological arguments:
They call [us] “unspiritual,” “common,” and “ecclesiastic.” … Because we do not accept their monstrous allegations, they say that we go on living in the hebdomad [the lower regions], as if we could not lift our minds to the things on high, nor understand the things that are above.
Pagels’s quotation of Irenaeus is tagged by an endnote reference which, on page 162, reads “Ibid. [Irenaeus AH], Quotation conflated from 3.15.2 and 2.16.4.” To put it mildly, an interesting method of citation. Let’s look at the sources.
The first part of Pagels’s quote comes from Book III, Chapter 15 of Against Heresies, where Irenaeus is arguing for the genuineness of the whole of the New Testament, here against the Valentinians:
Hi enim ad multitudinem propter eos qui sunt ab Ecclesia, quos communes et ecclesiasticos ipsi dicunt, inferunt sermones, per quos capiunt simpliciores et illiciunt eos, simulantes nostrum tractatum, uti saepius audiant. [They give speeches to the crowd about those from the Church, whom they call “common” and “ecclesiastic,” through which they entrap the simple and entice them, counterfeiting our teaching, that they might listen to them more often.]
From this sentence Pagels takes only the words communes et ecclesiasticos ipsi dicunt, omitting the larger context. Note that the “[us]” which Pagels inserts in her quotation refers not, as her context requires, to bishops, but to all the Catholic faithful: those who belong to the Church. After the ellipsis, her quote resumes midway through a sentence found in Book II, Chapter 16. In this chapter, Irenaeus is primarily concerned neither with the authenticity of Scripture nor with the Valentinians, but with the doctrine of creation propounded by another Gnostic heresiarch named Basilides. Once more, let’s examine the text:
Etenim hoc quod imputant nobis qui sunt a Valentino, in ea quae deorsum Ebdomade dicentes nos remanere, quasi non adtollentes in altum mentem neque quae sursum sunt sentientes, quoniam portentiloquium ipsorum non recipimus, hoc idem ipsum qui a Basilide sunt his imputant. [For that which the followers of Valentinus impute to us – claiming that we remain in the lower Hebdomad, as if we could not lift our minds on high or perceive the things that are above, since we reject their own extravagant discourses – this very thing the followers of Basilides impute to them.]
We note that the last phrase is omitted and the order of the preceding clauses reversed to disguise the non sequitur – and for a very good reason: Irenaeus actually says that the same allegations made against the orthodox by the Valentinians are made against the Valentinians by their fellow Gnostics, the disciples of Basilides, and that’s an embarrassment to Pagels’s notion of the Gnostic-Catholic divide. To recapitulate: Pagels has carpentered a non-existent quotation, putatively from an ancient source, by silent suppression of relevant context, silent omission of troublesome words, and a mid-sentence shift of 34 chapters backwards through the cited text, so as deliberately to pervert the meaning of the original. While her endnote calls the quote “conflated,” the word doesn’t fit even as a euphemism: what we have is not conflation but creation.
Re-reading Pagels’s putative quotation, you may have noticed that the word “unspiritual” corresponds to nothing in the Latin. It too was supplied by Pagels’s imagination. The reason for the interpolation will be plain from the comment that immediately follows (page 44 in The Gnostic Gospels). Remember that she wants to argue that Irenaeus was interested in authority and the Valentinians in the life of the spirit:
Irenaeus was outraged at their claim that they, being spiritual, were released from the ethical restraints that he, as a mere servant of the demiurge, ignorantly sought to foist upon them.
Put simply, Irenaeus did not write what Prof. Pagels wished he would have written, so she made good the defect by silently changing the text. Creativity, when applied to one’s sources, is not a compliment. She is a very naughty historian.
Or she would be, were she judged by the conventional canons of scholarship. At the post-graduate institute where I teach, and at any university with which I am familiar, for a professor or a grad student intentionally to falsify a source is a career-ending offense. Among professional scholars, witness tampering is no joke: once the charge is proven, the miscreant is dismissed from the guild and not re-admitted.
The Gnostic Gospels, like those portions of Pagels’s later work with which I am familiar, is chock-full of tendentious readings and instances where counter-evidence is suppressed. The example of “creativity” here discussed may fairly be called a representative specimen of her methodology, and was singled out not because it’s the worst example of its kind but because it’s among the most unambiguous. No one who consults the source texts could give Pagels a pass, and that means she forfeits the claim to reliability as a scholar. Attractive as her ideological sympathies may be to many persons – including many academics – she does not deserve to be ranked with serious textual scholars like Claremont’s James Robinson, and her testimony on the accuracy of inventions such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code cannot be solicited without irony.
I am not calling for academic sanctions but, more simply, for clarification. Pagels should be billed accurately – not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist. Her oeuvre is that of fiction – in fact, historical romance. Had New York Times reporters sought Barbara Cartland’s views on discoveries in Merovingian religion or paleography, most of us would find it odd, but we’d expect them to make it plain that was romance, not history, in which she had the right to an opinion.
Paul Mankowski, S.J.
Pontifical Biblical Institute
Rome
April 23, 2006
