Top 40 Elaine Pagels Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is a light within each person, and it lights up the whole universe. If it does not shine, there is darkness.”

— Elaine Pagels

2. “It is the winners who write history – their way.”

— Elaine Pagels

3. “The Book of Revelation is the strangest book in the Bible, and the most controversial. Instead of stories and moral teaching, it offers only visions – dreams and nightmares, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, earthquakes, plagues and war.”

— Elaine Pagels

4. “The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical ‘blasphemy’ proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them.”

— Elaine Pagels

5. “He’s an intimate betrayer. That’s what’s so troubling. Judas turned in his own teacher.”

— Elaine Pagels

6. “Ptolemy’s disciples told the story, before the beginning of time there existed in the primal aeon only the primordial Source of all being, what they called the abyss, the depth, or primal origin, progenitor of all that was to come into being.”

— Elaine Pagels

7. “For those who find suffering inevitable – in other words, for any of us who can’t dodge and pretend it’s not there – acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me.”

— Elaine Pagels

8. “The story of the betrayal of Jesus by Judas gave a moral and religious rationale to anti-Jewish sentiment, and that’s what made it persistent and vicious.”

— Elaine Pagels

9. “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.”

— Elaine Pagels

10. “Many gnostics, on the contrary, insisted that ignorance, not sin, is what involves a person in suffering.”

— Elaine Pagels

11. “Contrary to orthodox sources, which interpret Christ’s death as a sacrifice redeeming humanity from guilt and sin, this gnostic gospel sees the crucifixion as the occasion for discovering the divine self within.”

— Elaine Pagels

12. “Only the Jews, of all the nations under Roman rule, had won the right to separate their political obligations from religious ones, to obey Roman law as subjects of the emperor but to worship their own God.”

— Elaine Pagels

13. “No intelligent person, the sophisticated pagan might have explained, actually worshiped images of the gods, or worshiped living emperors; instead, the gods’ images – and the images of the emperors themselves – provided an accessible focus for revering the cosmic forces they represented.”

— Elaine Pagels

14. “Christians who remain faithful to their baptismal vows can expect the same heavenly reward: heaven is not arranged in first-class, second-class, and third-class compartments, according to the degree of renunciation one has practiced in this life.”

— Elaine Pagels

15. “I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.”

— Elaine Pagels

16. “My father scowled, warning that going to graduate school was a crazy idea for a woman. “If you’d been admitted,” he warned, “you’d never get married – you’ll turn into one of those lonely women who carry a briefcase and go to the movies alone! No, do something that really makes sense: take typing and become a secretary, or teach in an elementary school.”

— Elaine Pagels

17. “The hardest and the most exciting thing about research into Christian beginnings has been to unlearn what I thought I knew, and to shed presuppositions I had taken for granted.”

— Elaine Pagels

18. “Yet their metaphor indicates that the gnostics were neither relativists nor skeptics. Like the orthodox, they sought the “one sole truth.” But gnostics tended to regard all doctrines, speculations, and myths – their own as well as others’ – only as approaches to truth.”

— Elaine Pagels

19. “Recalling this now, I can tell only the husk of the story – a story known inwardly only by those who have experienced such a loss, which we’d wish for no one else to suffer. Those who have not often say, “I can’t imagine how you felt, what that was like.” I can hardly imagine it either, even having lived through it. Recently, when someone said that, I found myself answering, “Like being burned alive.”

— Elaine Pagels

20. “What can never be proven or verified in the present, Tertullian says, “must be believed, because it is absurd.”

— Elaine Pagels

21. “Many of us, wishing to be spared hard work, gladly accept what tradition teaches. But the fact that we have no simple answer does not me that we can evade the question.”

— Elaine Pagels

22. “The gnostic understands Christ’s message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching: “seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this.”

— Elaine Pagels

23. “Times of mourning displace us from ordinary life.”

— Elaine Pagels

24. “This debate over Genesis revealed a major disagreement among second-century Christians, a disagreement whose outcome would shape church doctrine ever after.”

— Elaine Pagels

25. “Why do we feel guilty, even when we’ve done nothing to bring on illness or death – even when we’ve done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that’s one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way.”

— Elaine Pagels

26. “Both polygamy and divorce, on the other hand, increased opportunities for reproduction – not for women, but for the men who wrote the laws and benefited from them.”

— Elaine Pagels

27. “Excessive wealth, enormous power, and luxury, Chrysostom charges, are destroying the integrity of the churches. Clerics, infected by the disease of “lust for authority,” are fighting for candidates on the basis of family prominence, wealth, or partisanship.”

— Elaine Pagels

28. “Yet to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the secret of gnosis.”

— Elaine Pagels

29. “I knew that I could not possibly teach; the energy and clarity that teaching requires, which I’d always taken for granted, were gone.”

— Elaine Pagels

30. “These gnostics recognized that their theory, like the orthodox one, bore political implications. It suggests that whoever “sees the Lord” through inner vision can claim that his or her own authority equals, or surpasses, that of the Twelve – and of their successors.”

— Elaine Pagels

31. “The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich recently drew a similar distinction between the God we imagine when we hear the term, and the “God beyond God,” that is, the “ground of being” that underlies all our concepts and images.”

— Elaine Pagels

32. “Christmas lights, again, piercing like knives. The spirit of that season was never more remote than during those dark December days.”

— Elaine Pagels

33. “Research for this book has made me aware of aspects of Christianity I find disturbing.”

— Elaine Pagels

34. “What would prevail in Christian tradition was not only the stark sayings of the gospels attributed to Jesus and the encouragements to celibacy that Paul urges upon believers in 1 Corinthians, but versions of these austere teachings modified to suit the purposes of the churches of the first and second centuries.”

— Elaine Pagels

35. “What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.”

— Elaine Pagels

36. “What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical.”

— Elaine Pagels

37. “So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.”

— Elaine Pagels

38. “The prophets Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, for example, often used the metaphors of adultery and prostitution to indict those they accused of being “unfaithful” to God’s covenant.”

— Elaine Pagels

39. “Among Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries no one questioned the legitimacy of divorce. The only question was what constituted adequate grounds;.”

— Elaine Pagels

40. “Instead, as we shall see, such figures emerged from the turmoil of first-century Palestine, the setting in which the Christian movement began to grow.”

— Elaine Pagels

41. “In addition to the eternal, mystical Silence and the Holy Spirit, certain gnostics suggest a third characterization of the divine Mother: as Wisdom. Here the Greek feminine term for “wisdom,” sophia, translates a Hebrew feminine term, hokhmah.”

— Elaine Pagels

42. “You have no choice about how you feel about this. Your only choice is whether to feel it now or later.” Although her comment helped a little at first, during the next twenty-five years I would keep discovering that how much I was able to feel, or not, and when, was not a matter of choice.”

— Elaine Pagels

43. “Meanwhile there was work to do: raising our children, wading through a mass of legal papers, finances, and taxes, and recovering the professional life that was now our sole support, while, at a subterranean level, feeling adrift in dark, unknown waters. And though I’d flared with anger when the priest at Heinz’s funeral had warned not to be “angry at God” because of his sudden and violent death, I struggled not to sink under currents of fear, anger, and confusion that roiled an ocean of grief.”

— Elaine Pagels

44. “But in terms of the social order, as we have seen, the orthodox teaching on resurrection had a different effect: it legitimized a hierarchy of persons through whose authority all others must approach God. Gnostic teaching, as Irenaeus and Tertullian realized, was potentially subversive of this order: it claimed to offer to every initiate direct access to God of which the priests and bishops themselves might be ignorant.102.”

— Elaine Pagels

45. “The great majority of Christians of the first few centuries did not advocate – and probably did not imagine – that such moral equality could be implemented in society. Most assumed, no doubt, that they could realize such moral equality only in the coming Kingdom of God.”

— Elaine Pagels