I've found to my own show that my attitudes about being a woman in 1980, when I started this work, had to do with very ancient stereotypes, many of which I totally disagreed with intellectually. I didn't like them, but there were they were. Many of our political institutions, and many people who would not consider themselves religious in the least, nevertheless have adopted attitudes which are just there in the culture and which come out of that ancient story. when they conversed in 1988 for the series, A WORLD OF IDEAS.

Elaine Pagels is the author of numerous articles and five books and is well known for her work in translating the Nag Hammadi Library, translations which contradicted the image of the early Christian Church as a unified movement. Pagels published the results of her scholarship in THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and The National Book Award and has been published in ten foreign languages. She is also the author of THE GNOSTIC PAUL, ADAM, EVE, AND THE SERPENT, and THE ORIGIN OF SATAN and now, BEYOND BELIEF: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF THOMAS. The recipient of the MacArthur Prize, she has also received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

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