Elaine Pagels Quotes
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The Secret Revelation of John opens, again, in crisis. The disciple John, grieving Jesus' death, is walking toward the temple when he meets a Pharisee who mocks him for having been deceived by a false messiah. These taunts echoed John's own fear and doubt.
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I realize that I cannot live without a spiritual dimension in my life.
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For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament.
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The Book of Revelation is all about the conflict, the contest between the forces of Good and Evil.
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The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God.
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The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there's no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel.
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I study religion because I find it fascinating and problematic. But I struggle with the idea of what religion is, what being religious means. A lot of people assume that if you write about early Christianity, you must be some kind of Sunday-school teacher.
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At the end of the day I'll go to a yoga class. I used to say that my work was my yoga, because it stretches everything, expands and challenges everything you know and understand and are.
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I just have a sense that, you know, I'm curious about what is religion about, you know? Why do some of us still engage it? It's not because it's a set of old beliefs or old ideas. Or even, particularly, the view that this is the only true religion. Many of us no longer accept those views.
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Once you start to look at the gospels one by one, you realize that followers of Jesus were trying to understand what had happened after he was arrested and killed. They knew Judas had handed him over to the people who arrested him.
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After Ann Godoff, who was editor-in-chief at Random House, left and went to Viking, I got to know Viking and the people there, and liked them very much. I also found a wonderful editor there, Wendy Wolf. It's a very congenial press.
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There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all.
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I had been taught that the separation between religion and politics happened in the Enlightenment. But there were people who tried to create a secular relationship to government 2,000 years ago, and those people were the Jews.
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We don't actually know if the person who wrote the Gospel of John had a written copy of Thomas because we don't know exactly when it was written.
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What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.
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I never thought I would write about the Book of Revelation. It's so dense; it's so complex and puzzling. But then I found I was thinking about a number of themes, one of which has to do with politics and religion.
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The Book of Revelation is such a dream landscape that you can plug any major conflict in it.
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The Antichrist is often identified with the second beast in the Book of Revelation that arises from the land, the beast that tries to make everyone worship the power of evil.
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The Romans weren't trying to kill all the Jews, but they did destroy Jewish resistance to Roman rule. Jerusalem was turned into a Roman army camp, and it was a total devastation.