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Special edition like the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas
Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s most important writers and thinkers on religion and history, and winner of the National Book Award for her groundbreaking work The Gnostic Gospels, now reflects on what counts most about spiritual and religious exploration in the twenty-first century. This bold new book explores how Christianity commenced by tracing its earliest texts, like the secret Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered in Egypt in 1945.
When her infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, Elaine Pagels’s spiritual and intellectual quest took on a fresh urgency, leading her to explore historical and archeological sources and investigate what Jesus and his teachings meant to his followers prior to the invention of doctrine–and prior to the invention of Christianity as we know it.
The astonishing discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, along with an increase of than fifty other early Christian texts unknown since antiquity, offers startling clues. Pagels compares such sources as Thomas’s gospel (which claims to give Jesus’ secret teaching, and finds its closest affinities with kabbalah) with the canonic texts showing how Christian leaders chose to include some gospels and exclude others from the collection we've come to learn as the brand new Testament. To stabilize the emerging Christian church in times of devastating persecution, the church fathers constructed the canon, creed, and hierarchy–and, in the process, suppressed many of its spiritual resources.
Drawing on new scholarship–her own, and this of an international band of scholars–that has come to light since the publication in 1979 of The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels demonstrates what counts about Christianity involves a lot more than any one set of beliefs. Traditions embodied in Judaism and Christianity can powerfully affect us in heart, mind, and spirit, inspire visions of a fresh society based on practicing justice and love, even heal and transform us.
Provocative, beautifully written, and moving, Beyond Belief, the most personal of Pagels’s books thus far, shows how “the impulse to seek God overflows the narrow banks of a single tradition.” Pagels writes, “What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions–and the communities that sustain them–is the fact that they provide the testimony of innumerable visitors to spiritual discovery, encouraging us, in Jesus’ words, to ‘seek, and you shall find.’”
From the Hardcover edition.
