Elaine Pagels: Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity FREE March 22, 2007

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Elaine Pagels and
Karen L. King
Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity
Two celebrated scholars illustrate how the newly discovered text provides a window onto understanding how Jesus' followers understood his death, why Judas betrayed Jesus, and why God allowed it.

Elaine Pagels is a preeminent figure in the theological community whose impressive scholarship has earned her international respect. The Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Pagels was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships in three consecutive years.

As a young researcher at Barnard College, she changed forever the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Christian Church as a unified movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels, an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts that were unearthed in Egypt. Known collectively as the Nag Hammadi Library, the manuscripts show the pluralistic nature of the early church and the role of women in the developing Christian movement. The Gnostic Gospels won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best books of the 20th Century.

In her most recent New York Times bestseller, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Pagels focuses on religious claims to possessing the ultimate "truth." Pagels is also the author of The Origin of Satan, which chronicles the evolution of Jewish and Christian concepts of evil and Adam, Eve and the Serpent, which examines the creation myth and its role in the development of sexual attitudes in the Christian West. Her new book, Reading Judas, co-authored with Karen King, is the first book to illustrate how the newly discovered text provides a window onto understanding how Jesus' followers understood his death, why Judas betrayed Jesus, and why God allowed it. Pagels earned an M.A. from Stanford University and Ph.D. "with distinction" from Harvard.

Karen L. King is the Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard University in The Divinity School. She took her BA with honors in Religious Studies at the University of Montana, Missoula. She completed her Ph.D. in History of Religions: Early Christianity at Brown University. After completing her doctorate, she taught for 14 years at Occidental College in Los Angeles, before moving to her current position at Harvard University. Trained in comparative religions and historical studies, her teaching and research specialties in the history of Christianity lie in women's studies, orthodoxy and heresy, and the Nag Hammadi literature. Her publications include The Secret Revelation of John; The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle; What is Gnosticism?; Revelation of the Unknowable God; Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (ed.); and Women and Goddess Traditions in Antiquity and Today (ed.).

Official Website: http://www.lfla.org/aloud/php/a.calendar.bioText2.php?month=03&year=2007&day=22