85 Quotes by Elaine Pagels

The Gospel of Judas is a real surprise. It pictures Judas ..not as the worst villain in the history of the world as he's been thought of in Christian tradition..but as the one disciple whom Jesus entrusts with secret understanding.

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.

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.

These ancient stories in religion speak to our desire. But they move us toward hope.

The sense of a spiritual dimension in life is absolutely important, and the religious communities are also important. The question of believing in a set of creedal statements is a lot less important, because I realize the Christian movement thrived then and can now on other elements of the tradition.

So often, religion is identified in terms coined by Christianity as sets of belief. But I had the sense that it not only involves practice, but also emotion and levels of our experience that are almost precognitive.

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.

About the gnostic writers themselves and the setting in which they lived we know little, although gnostic Christians were influential enough to be denounced at length.

The Book of Revelation is such a dream landscape that you can plug any major conflict in it.