Elaine Pagels

Best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize nominee

"On Faith" panelist Elaine Pagels is Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University and author of best-selling books about the pluralistic nature of early Christianity. Her book Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, focuses on religious claims to possessing the ultimate truth. Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels (1979), an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts unearthed in Egypt and known as the Nag Hammadi Library. The book was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th Century. She also authored The Origin of Satan (1995), and Adam, Eve and the Serpent (1988). Pagels was awarded Rockefeller, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships in three consecutive years. Her next work, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, is co-authored with Karen King and set to be published in the spring of 2007. She is on leave from Princeton for the academic year 2006-2007 while a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. Close.