Beyond Belief | Elaine Pagels

Beyond Belief | Elaine Pagels | Great Author

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Beyond Belief

	Beyond Belief Elaine Pagels Pan Books, 2005 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 171 reviews view larger image
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Special edition including the complete text of the Gospel of Thomas

Elaine Pagels, one of the world?s most important writers and thinkers on religion and history, and winner of the National Book Award for her groundbreaking work The Gnostic Gospels, now reflects on what matters most about spiritual and religious exploration in the twenty-first century. This bold new book explores how Christianity began by tracing its earliest texts, including the secret Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered in Egypt in 1945.

When her infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, Elaine Pagels?s spiritual and intellectual quest took on a new urgency, leading her to explore historical and archeological sources and to investigate what Jesus and his teachings meant to his followers before the invention of doctrine?and before the invention of Christianity as we know it.

The astonishing discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, along with more than fifty other early Christian texts unknown since antiquity, offers startling clues. Pagels compares such sources as Thomas?s gospel (which claims to give Jesus? secret teaching, and finds its closest affinities with kabbalah) with the canonic texts to show how Christian leaders chose to include some gospels and exclude others from the collection we have come to know as the New Testament. To stabilize the emerging Christian church in times of devastating persecution, the church fathers constructed the canon, creed, and hierarchy?and, in the process, suppressed many of its spiritual resources.

Drawing on new scholarship?her own, and that of an international group of scholars?that has come to light since the publication in 1979 of The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels shows that what matters about Christianity involves much more than any one set of beliefs. Traditions embodied in Judaism and Christianity can powerfully affect us in heart, mind, and spirit, inspire visions of a new society based on practicing justice and love, even heal and transform us.

Provocative, beautifully written, and moving, Beyond Belief, the most personal of Pagels?s books to date, shows how ?the impulse to seek God overflows the narrow banks of a single tradition.? Pagels writes, ?What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions?and the communities that sustain them?is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery, encouraging us, in Jesus? words, to ?seek, and you shall find.??

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Excellent work

As with all of Ms. Pagels' books, this is an excellent work. This book reviews the significance of one of the books of early Christianity that was excluded from the Bible, because it did not follow the general theme and orthodoxy that was deemed to be acceptable by the council at Nicene. This is a review of the Gospel of St. Thomas. The Gospel of St. Thomas is an early Christian Gnostic work. According to the work, St. Thomas was a favored disciple of Jesus. After Jesus' death, Thomas went on a mission to India and found a deeper spirituality through meditation and introspection. This book deals with the differences between the Gnostic viewpoints put forward in The Gospel of St. Thomas and the accepted books of the Bible, in particular the Gospel of St. John.

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Great Author

I loving learning all I can about the time of Jesus. Elaine Pagels is a great author. I highly recommend this CD set.

A jewel of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment

I try very hard to read 12 books each year, and there are so many to choose from that narrowing down my annual list is difficult. Elaine Pagels Book "Beyond Belief" was released in 2003, but did not get onto my own book reading to-do list for 3 years, by which time it was surprisingly gone from bookstore shelves. Fortunately, I was able to pick up a used copy here at Amazon. Absolutely sensational, is how I would describe this book, exceeding Elaine's well deserved reputation as researcher, historian and author of the early epoch of Christianity. John Traveler puts it best in his own review of this book on Helium.com "I can promise you this: that whether your appetite is theological, philosophical, spiritual or intellectual, Elaine Pagels and Beyond Belief will not let you down but may leave you hungry for more."

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Good, but misleading subtitle

As many other reviewers have noted, the subtitle of this book is extremely misleading and I cannot see why it was chosen. The Gospel of Thomas, while mentioned (and the text of which is actually included in the back), is far from the focus of the book and it is not, at least, what I expected: a thorough examination focused on the Gospel of Thomas. Rather the book is a sort of introduction to the gnostic gospels using the Gospel of Thomas as a reference and starting point, while at the same time being a personal reflection on the part of Pagels. This makes for good reading and leads to interesting conclusions, though one who was expecting in depth treatment is bound to be slightly disappointed. Rather than the way it is marketed, this work can best be seen as an introduction to the gnostic texts (as well as Pagels' other works) which includes a thoughtful meditation on what their implications are on the understanding of Christianity as well as their impact on the individual.

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