BOB ABERNETHY: Now, a profile -- and some religion history. It concerns the early Christian movement, and documents discovered nearly 60 years ago that reveal an early Christianity many find surprisingly diverse. This is also the personal story of Elaine Pagels, historian of religion at Princeton University. She has written best-selling books on what are called "The Gnostic Gospels." Mary Alice Williams reports.

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS: Elaine Pagels seems comfortable keeping Christianity at an academic distance. But in 1982, it got personal. Her only child had just been diagnosed with a terminal lung disease. Pagels found herself outside the Church of the Heavenly Rest, an Episcopal church in Manhattan, doubting its orthodoxy, needing its sustenance.

ELAINE PAGELS (Author, THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS): I was extremely upset. I hadn't slept in days. Distraught. I was trying to calm myself by running that morning. It seemed to me the possibility of a church like this, the way it engages the issues of life and death, put the prospect of losing a child into a context that was much larger than an ordinary one.

WILLIAMS: Raised by nonobservant Protestant parents, Pagels shocked them by joining an Evangelical church at the age of 13, then quit when the church announced a friend of hers would go to hell because he'd not been "born again."

Ms. PAGELS: I realized that I did not accept what they were saying. I didn't agree with it. It didn't make sense to me.

WILLIAMS: But the passionate faith of the Evangelicals had affected her.

Ms. PAGELS: I was aware that something very powerful had engaged me. What is so powerful about it? How does it transform people in the way that it does? I remembered that very well. So I decided that I would have to seek for myself.

WILLIAMS: No small search. She learned Greek and the ancient language Coptic to study the origins of Christianity, and in 1972 became part of a translation team with early access to a gold mine. In 1945, an Egyptian peasant searching for fertilizer found an earthenware jar filled with manuscripts in a cave near the village of Nag Hammadi. His mother burned many of the documents for kindling. What survived were 52 sacred texts, some as old as the four Gospels.

Ms. PAGELS: I realized that conventional views of Christian faith that I'd heard when I was growing up were simply made up -- and I realized that many parts of the story of the early Christian movement had been left out.

WILLIAMS: What came to be known as the Gnostic Gospels (from the Greek word meaning "to know") is an explosive, some say heretical, look at Christianity's evolution. And evidence of fierce theological debate before Christianity was encoded into a set of beliefs.

Ms. PAGELS: What we find when we go back there is that the earliest evidence is very diverse. That's not the story we were told as Christians, because the Christian church chose to simplify it and give us a single version of the story.

WILLIAMS: In order to preserve Christianity, scholars believe church fathers had to unify a fractious lot of competing voices. They found many Gnostic ideas intolerable. In particular, the idea that each of us can become connected to God without priestly intervention was a threat to their authority. Scholars believe the Gnostic texts were buried at Nag Hammadi at the close of the fourth century because church fathers had ordered the monks to burn them.

Ms. PAGELS: The bishop who wanted authority consolidated in himself told them, "Get rid of all those books. You don't need all those books. All you need are the ones that I will mention now." And then he mentions a list, which is our first list of the 27 books of the New Testament. So he told them.

WILLIAMS: And that was politically necessary at the time?

Ms. PAGELS: At the time, I think it was absolutely essential for the survival of the movement, because it was so much threatened by persecution and by complete scattering. So it was at that time necessary, probably, to consolidate the church and try to make a simple message accessible and universal.

WILLIAMS: Pagels's research resulted in her surprise best-seller, THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS. In the wake of that triumph she found her soulmate, married, and became a mother. Then the bottom dropped out. In 1987, their child Mark, at the age of six and a half, died. A year after that, her husband Heinz died in a climbing accident.