The Gnostic Gospels

Elaine Pagels is a scholar of early Christianity, and this book, published by Random House and winner of a National Book Award, is a work of academic scholarship written for a general audience about the Nag Hammadi texts and the early Christian groups later labeled Gnostic. Its strength is bringing serious textual scholarship on then recently studied primary manuscripts to a wide readership, arguing that these groups represented a genuine internal diversity in early Christianity rather than simply heresy. Its limit is that Pagels's particular interpretive framing, emphasizing Gnostic texts as a kind of proto-feminist or individualist alternative to orthodoxy, has been questioned by some other scholars as reading modern concerns into ancient material, so her specific interpretive claims are best held apart from the primary text translations themselves.