What surprises me, after reading six or seven of Dr. Pagels’s books, is to learn that she may be something of a mystic. She’s endured enormous sufferiWhat surprises me, after reading six or seven of Dr. Pagels’s books, is to learn that she may be something of a mystic. She’s endured enormous suffering: losing her young son and husband. She’s able to write keenly about her irrational moments, when she was waylaid by grief, including her anger at those hoping to condole with her. At the same time, she uses what she’s learned from her work as a scholar of the so called secret gospels. So the book’s to an extent a recapitulation of her agony and subsequent self-analysis. What she had to do to come through. It’s astonishingly moving and filled by uncanny coincidences that remind me of what C.G. Jung said about synchronicity.
“This second loss [of Heinz] striking like lightning, ignited shock and anger beyond anything I’ve ever imagined, and I fiercely resisted both. It wasn’t just that my parents routinely stifled such feelings; much of our culture worked to shut them down. For as the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo notes in his powerful essay ‘Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage’:
Although grief therapists routinely encourage awareness of anger among the bereaved, upper-middle-class Anglo-American culture tends to ignore the rage devastating losses can bring . . . . This culture’s conventional wisdom usually denies the anger in grief.
“In his essay Rosado tells us how he shared such denial until a devastating loss shattered it. Before that, he says, when talking with men of the Ilongot tribe in the northern Philippines, he was at a loss to understand what motivated their tribal practice of headhunting. When asked, the men simply told him that grief— especially the sudden rupture of intimate relationships—impelled them to kill. Their culture encouraged the bereaved man to prepare by engaging in ritual, first swearing a sacred oath, then chanting to the spirit of his future victim. After that, he swore to ambush and kill the first person he met, cut off his head, and throw it away. Only this, his informants explained, could ‘carry his anger.’
“Dismissing what they told him, Rosado kept looking for more complicated, intellectually satisfying reasons to account for this ritual—until his young wife, the mother of their two children, accidentally fell to her death. Finding her body, he says, the shock enraged and overwhelmed him with ‘powerful visceral emotional states . . . the deep cutting pain of sorrow almost beyond endurance, the cadaverous cold of realizing the finality of death . . . The mournful keening that started without my willing, and frequent tearful sobbing.’ At the time he wrote in his journal that, despairing and raging, he sometimes wished ‘for the Ilongot solution; they are much more in touch with reality than Christians. So I need a place to carry my anger— can we say that a solution of the imagination is better than theirs?’
“His question challenged me: Are the elusive [uncanny] experiences noted above, which I dared hope hinted at something beyond death, nothing but denial—what Rosaldo derisively calls ‘a solution of the imagination’? Noting that some Ilongo men converted to Christianity after headhunting was outlawed, Rosaldo initially suggested that such converts were simply turning to fantasies of heaven to deny death’s reality. What he wrote of anger, though, helped me acknowledge my own. Much later, for me as for him, raw experience poured into what I was writing, as I sought to untangle my own responses, while sensing how powerful our culture shapes them.”
I’ve been looking for someone like either Karen Armstrong and/or Elaine Pagels, whose works I have devoured. It’s funny, I guess it’s because I’ve heaI’ve been looking for someone like either Karen Armstrong and/or Elaine Pagels, whose works I have devoured. It’s funny, I guess it’s because I’ve heard him on TV so often, but I can hear Aslan’s professorial voice as I read—a bit of synesthesia.
I think of this as exegesis for the non-religious person who nevertheless finds the complex history of Christianity–and monotheism generally—a fascinating area of inquiry. I particularly like how scholars of religion pick the historical bits out of the morass of the fantastic—so we can see what function the mythologizing serves? If we are to believe, as I do, that the stories were created out of a fundamental need to understand.
Very interesting is Aslan’s discussion of the diminishment of John the Baptist “...from from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet and mentor to Jesus—to the last gospel, John, in which the Baptist seems to serve no purpose at all except your acknowledge Jesus’s divinity.” (p. 86)
“‘I myself saw the Holy Spirit descend upon him from heaven like a dove,’ John [the Baptist] claims of Jesus, correcting another of [the gospel] Mark’s omissions, before expressly commanding his disciples to leave him and follow Jesus instead. For John the evangelist, it was not enough simply to reduce the Baptist; the Baptist had to reduce himself, to publicly denigrate himself before the true prophet and messiah. ‘I am not the messiah,’ John the Baptist admits in the fourth gospel. ‘I have been sent before him . . . He must increase, as I must decrease.’ (John 3:28-30)”
“This frantic attempt to reduce John’s significance . . . betrays an urgent need on the part of the early Christian community to counteract what the historical evidence clearly suggests: whoever the Baptist was . . . Jesus very likely began his ministry as just another of his disciples.” (p. 88)
Interesting, too, is the story of how Paul broke the ur-church away from its Jewish underpinnings—defying James et al. in Jerusalem who constituted the brain trust for Jesus’s message—and began to virtually invent aspects of the way Jesus is still viewed today, i.e. that fidelity neither to the Temple nor the Law of Moses was required, that circumcision was no longer necessary. Moreover, Paul preached that Jesus’s intention all along had been for the creation of a celestial Kingdom of God, not an earthly one meant to take on the Roman usurpers, and this according to Aslan was entirely new. Paul, on reaching Rome, moreover, decided he would in the future preach exclusively to gentiles, and ignore the Jewish community which resisted his innovative message. He believed himself, you see, to be in almost daily touch with the spirit of Jesus, who spoke, and revealed his ministry, now solely to himself.
It was with the Roman destruction of the Temple and the people of Jerusalem in 66 CE, that the mother assembly of Jerusalem consisting of Jesus’s disciples was destroyed, and Paul’s famous letters, the only writings about Jesus that then existed, “became the primary vehicle through which a new [largely gentile] generation of Christians was introduced to Jesus the Christ. Even the gospels were deeply influenced by the letters. One can trace the Pauline theology in Mark and Matthew. But it is in the Gospel of Luke, written by one of Paul’s devoted disciples, that one can see the dominance of Paul’s views, while the gospel of John is little more than Pauline theology in narrative form.” (p. 215)...more
This is sort of wonderful. King follows the ancient polemical and modern scholarly views of Gnosticism down through the ages. Her main point is that tThis is sort of wonderful. King follows the ancient polemical and modern scholarly views of Gnosticism down through the ages. Her main point is that the late 19th-early 20th century scholars for the most part accepted and reinforced the views of the early church polemicists (Irenaeus, Tertullian, etc.). She gives detailed example after detailed example. We look at the work of Harnack, Reitzenstein, Bousset, Bultmann, Bauer, Jonas and others. She then undertakes a review of shifting scholarly positions after the astonishing discovery in 1945 of a trove of ancient mostly Gnostic manuscripts near the Upper Egypt village of Nag Hammadi. These manuscripts, written in Coptic, were hidden in a jar under the sand and estimated to be 1,600 years old. They threw much light on the formation of the early church and raised many questions. Does King belabor her point a bit? Yes, she is nothing if not a scholar, but it's such a fascinating overview, requiring only minimal googling for the general reader, that one is borne along nicely. Her writing is clear and free of jargon save for the first chapter or so where she pays the requisite obeisance to scholarly argot. Though she isn't the writer her peer Elaine Pagels is, King nevertheless does a rock solid job. She wants to follow the sequence of ideas and compare and contrast them as she goes along. Just the sort of treatment I was looking for. Thorough and admirable....more
There is a lot here about Irenaeus, a major second-century figure in the establishment of the early Church and its gospels, which were later confirmedThere is a lot here about Irenaeus, a major second-century figure in the establishment of the early Church and its gospels, which were later confirmed at the Council of Nicea (325). There is also very interesting material on Emperor Constantine. I had not known, for example, that his support of the early Church had so pervaded the everyday workings of his empire. In addition to sponsoring the Council of Nicea, Constantine ruled the empire from the perspective of a Christian, issuing numerous edicts favorable to the Church and Christians. Not long before that, of course, Romans were throwing Christians to the lions. The book is worthwhile reading. It's filled with interesting bits. But it's not a cohesive work. I found it lacking the overarching unity such as I found in The Gnostic Gospels and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. It seems clear that the data before Dr. Pagels, who is really a wonderful writer, did not permit the sort of unity that I as a reader sought. So she can't really be blamed. Beyond Belief touches on a private tragedy in Dr. Pagels’s life. Though the book is religious scholarship, the inclusion of such a heartbreaking tale gave it a human dimension this reader warmed to. I felt the narrator to be someone I knew something about, and that made my progress through the text far more pleasurable than it would have been had she employed the usual scholarly anonymity....more
The apocryphal gospels, discovered by a farmer in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, are here explained in the context of late second-century RC churThe apocryphal gospels, discovered by a farmer in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, are here explained in the context of late second-century RC church history. Gnostic (gnosis, Gk: knowledge) Christians did not believe that human intermediaries (priests, etc.) were necessary for an individual to find God. For the gnostics, enlightenment was an entirely inward and self-determined process. Gnostic Christians believed that Jesus was not divine but an ordinary man with an extraordinary message. They did not believe in the resurrection of the flesh. They did not believe in the eucharist, nor did they have any eschatalogical beliefs. They believed in a higher supreme god and a lower creator god, Yahweh, the Jewish god, who maliciously made man in his image and demanded to be worshipped by him. They believed that "secret wisdom" was handed down to the Apostles by Jesus, esoteric knowledge which was not vouchsafed to ordinary believers but only to mature ones. The gnostics believed that through their way of knowing God they were able to exceed the knowledge of the Apostles. There is language in the New Testament to support this idea of Jesus's secret wisdom. For the masses Jesus had only parables, exoteric knowledge appropriate to the less spiritually advanced. Late in the book some of the techniques for achieving gnosis are reviewed and they are surprisingly close to those used by Buddhists. Though Buddhists are nontheistic what they and the gnostics do has uncanny similarities. Elaine Pagels shows us that there was no early Christian golden age. That is to say, an age that had uniform teachings accepted by all. Instead the teachings were far more diverse than they are today, and highly contentious. Moreover, the RC church could have developed radically differently if some of these writings had been accepted, instead of being purged, as they were, so that someone, perhaps a monk belonging to a monastery near Nag Hammadi, buried them in a jar under the sand 1,600 years ago. I found the book fascinating and fun to read. I recommend it highly, as I do her Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics and Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas....more
I don't think Karen L. King has been good for Elaine Pagels's prose. I strained thoughout to hear Pagels' distinctive voice and could never quite locaI don't think Karen L. King has been good for Elaine Pagels's prose. I strained thoughout to hear Pagels' distinctive voice and could never quite locate it. Instead the tone seems a little rushed, a little shrill almost, as opposed to Pagels's much more relaxed and considered pace. Second, while the arguments broached here are compelling enough they never seem to go as deep as Pagels' on her own seems to go when writing without a collaborator. If you want to start with a great Pagels book try The Gnostic Gospels. This is an astonishing work. It looks at some of the gospels that were not made canonical by the early Catholic Church; that is to say, gospels that did not make it into the New Testament because among other things they supported a non-clerical based view of Christianity. These gospels were found in Upper Egypt in 1945 buried in the sand near a place called Nag Hammadi. The Gnostics, basing their faith on these texts before they were expunged, preached an "inner way" to Jesus Christ that required neither priest nor institution. For this reason they were branded heretics by early Church zealots and persecuted. The second book I would recommend as a possible starting point for those not familiar with Pagels's work is Adam, Eve & the Serpent. This volume tackles the question of why we in the West consider sex sinful today. Pagels's argument is fascinating. It turns out that it was St. Augustine of Hippo, the 4th century theologian, who pretty much single handedly created original sin--a concept, it should be emphasized, that Christians were unburdened with before his writings changed everything. Augustine, you see, was quite the rake and libertine in his youth who became guilt-ridden by his (healthy) sexuality and came to see it as a curse. Both books are must reads, which you start with is up to you....more
Loading...
