Elaine Pagels and the Gnostic Gospels

all right hey everybody welcome back to the podcast uh today we're joined by a brand new guest her name is elaine pagels and she's best known for uh books like the gnostic gospels beyond belief why religion reading judas and so many more and so elaine welcome to the podcast i'm super excited to talk with you thank you i'm happy to be here glenn thank you so i have all of your books um in front of me on my shelf i'm going to need an elaine pagel shelf pretty soon for all of your books but i'm going to try to direct my questions to uh three main areas so number one the gnostics number two uh the gnostic scriptures in particular the gospel of judas because that's super new to me and then lastly number three i have a little bit more of a personal question for you um after reading i guess my late night reading through your through your memoir why religion and we obviously could spend i don't know 50 episodes doing all of those different questions but we'll see how deeply we can drill down in the time that we have but first though maybe for our listeners who aren't too familiar with you tell us a little bit about yourself and who are you and what do you do a general intro to elaine pagels well thank you um well i grew up in california in a sort of nominally christian family although my father had given it all up for darwin as soon as he discovered the theory of evolution and decided religion was just for people who were not educated and they didn't know about science so it was very condescending and kind of a snobbish attitude and but i loved most of all stories poems music dance and especially poems stories music and dance that had to do with what i call a spiritual dimension it could be christian it could be a a bar mitzvah with amazing singing by a cantor and a synagogue it could be a hopi dances on the reservations not that i participate equally in those because christianity is my cultural context your home yeah and it's with my home and it's where i um engage the most and where i struggle the most with questions about it um and when i was about 14 i was taken to a billy graham crusade without knowing much about what it was and it was absolutely stunning i thought the preacher was amazing he spoke about america in a way i never heard anyone talk about it as a country that had used hydrogen bombs to destroy hundreds of thousands of people in japan and a country that had segregation and slavery i mean my parents were very patriotic so i've never heard anyone speak that way sure as a kind of prophet he was quoting the prophet isaiah saying ah sinful nation i think what that was very interesting startled me and then he gave the altar call and said you know you can be born again and become a new person and i was 14 and i thought that sounds irresistible yeah you know yeah you want a new life you want independence at that age it's a great age to be converted actually sure so i just absolutely loved it i went down and had the altar call and it was and got very much involved in an evangelical group for about a year um it was very compelling and it opened up it opened up the world to me it was like i lived in a one-dimensional flat earth with no depth in it but this sort of gave a spiritual dimension to it yeah and that was powerful yeah you put on those like 3d glasses and all of a sudden right yeah uh it is it's it's it's like your your life can it can live on a much larger canvas yeah yeah and now and now what do you what do you do like where is your life now well i i left that group at a certain point out of deep disappointment with an event that contradicted what i had loved about it sure i've been told it was about the love of god and when a high school friend of mine was killed in an automobile accident um and and i went back to my evangelical friends they said well terrible i mean was he born again and i said no he was jewish and they sort of looked at me and said well then he's in hell and i just felt like i've been hit in the stomach and wow i was so stunned and saddened i just walked out of there and never went back but years later i kept thinking there's something there that was very important very powerful was it christianity was it religion could it have been any religion i didn't know something yeah so i went back to graduate school to find out what do we really know about jesus how do we know how did this movement start anyway and how did it become what it became and to my real astonishment the professors where i went to graduate school were looking at a whole secret library of gospels that i'd never heard about we called them the gnostic gospels because we didn't know what to call them they just weren't the new testament gospels although there are enormous amounts of overlap with the gospels of matthew and luke and john but they were not in the new testament canon as we have it now and some of them spoke to me very deeply one of them is the gospel of thomas and half of that it's only it's only 14 pages and it's not meant to replace the other gospels glenn it's meant to be a amplification that's what you find there yeah like a supplement yes an addition because the gospels of the new testament as you know they offer the public teaching of jesus you know jesus is outdoors and there are thousands of people and he speaks and some of the things he said were written down by people who probably worked hard to remember them sure and then later wrote them down yeah and they're in the gospels of matthew and luke matthew 5 sermon on the mount in luke 6 and 7. very famous teaching very important teaching but these other gospels claim to be what jesus didn't preach in public they claimed to tell you what he said in private when he was alone with his disciples and mark says in chapter four that when he was alone with his disciples he spoke to them and only to them about the mystery of the kingdom of god but mark really doesn't tell you what that means mark just says well he only spoke to outsiders in parables and mark gives you mainly parables sure and this this some of these other sources claim to give you secret teaching we don't really know if they do yeah but the gospel of thomas struck me very deeply [Music] yeah that seems to be the one that's the most it's like the odd one because i when i first heard about it i was expecting stories like you said and then you you open it up and it's just all these sayings and a lot of them are very familiar because a lot of them are found in the gospels i'm familiar with but some of them are not but i had a friend who said to me you know when you start reading some of the gnostic texts like you'll know the voice of the shepherd in the text like something like when you're reading it and something strikes you as oh this is something that jesus most certainly would say like you'll just know it in your spirit if that's if that's part of your past yeah well actually half there's only in that in thomas it's just a list of 140 14 sayings sure and half of them are almost identical with what you find in the sermon on the mount in matthew and the sermon on the plane in luke the other half are other kinds of sayings and i felt deeply affected by them particularly the one in which jesus says if you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you what you do not bring forth within you what you do what you do not bring forth um will just could destroy you or i'm sorry i'll start over if you bring forth what is within you what you bring forth will save you um if you do not bring forth what is within you what you do not bring forth will destroy you and i took that as a psychological statement because i think it has truth on that level and later i came to see it was a theological statement about all of us being created in the image of god as genesis 1 26 and 27 says yeah god creates humankind in his image and it speaks about the image of god not as a physical phenomena but as a kind of energy that could only be described in a metaphor as light which which has a it's just sort of visible and yet it's it's a spiritual energy sure sure and so you know it's a very powerful gospel and i thought it was consistent with the teachings i'd found in the others and yet it goes uh to another level it seemed to me and and so but many people said well wait a minute these gospels aren't in the new testament this has got to be garbage and and some people that's what i was taught [Laughter] when you were taught that my my writings were dangerous they were because um if you if you insist that jesus said nothing that isn't in the new testament well the gospel of john says jesus said many things that weren't in the new testament that's right but they weren't all written down the world would not contain all of the books it would take well that could be a little exaggeration but nevertheless the point is there was a lot else yeah and so we don't know but they did speak to me very deeply yeah absolutely so let me ask you some questions about um the gnostics we've already used that that word and i find this term to be very very confusing because i grew up hearing that basically the gnostics were this evil group of people because they were bent on leading christians away from the true orthodox christianity that was handed down from jesus and the apostles but you know then i i finn i got out of seminary and i started to do my own study your work david brackey barterman karen king and others and i discovered that various scholars seem to have various ideas about who the gnostics were what narcissism is and what narcissism entails like there seems to be a lot of ambiguity around this this topic so i was wondering if you could help us maybe get our feet a little bit wet in this topic like for you who were the gnostics and what does the term gnosticism entail well it's a really tough question as you know because like you i mean i was told the gnostic gospels that means they're the bad ones right right the bad west exactly and the ones that are that don't belong and they're they're obviously fake the word in greek means gnosis means insight and when you read second century fathers of the church like clement of alexandria who's one of the major fathers of the christian church um he uses the term gnostic to mean a christian with with especially deeper insight and that's the way the term was used in the second century but later it was taken by people who disliked any of these claims to secret teaching as a very pejorative word so they intended to tell you it's dangerous it's wrong it's heresy it's it's uh it's leading you astray now heresy the greek word means choice there's nothing really wrong with choice from some points of view but some of the bishops didn't want people to have choice they wanted to say what we tell you is absolutely the truth and that's it you have no choice about our way of the highway exactly and that's that's the way many christians see their convictions yeah many muslims do orthodox jews orthodox means straight thinking [Music] i always compare it with orthodontia which means straight teeth but straight thinking means you have to think the way we do and what they meant by straight thinking is what the church teaches publicly and that nothing considered private teaching was accepted by certain fathers of the church because you can't really verify it from several sources which is a way of trying to figure out if something is a verifiable saying you know so it is hard to verify yeah i feel like kind of on your own trying to interpret it yeah because i feel like every book i pick up it describes in a different way like there's some that describe it as it's one small branch of christianity there's many other branches others kind of talk about it as it's this almost like this umbrella term for a whole bunch of different branches and some say we should get rid of the term altogether so like i was opening up books hoping to find a single answer and instead i got a whole bunch of different answers what you're getting are sequential answers because gnostic from the second century to the 20th pretty much meant don't read this stuff right let's stay away but when we found these other texts they weren't called gnostics they didn't call themselves that um and and karen king began to look at and and also michael williams at the university of seattle began to look at these and say wait a minute the term gnosticism was made up in the 19th century these people didn't call themselves gnostics they call themselves christians but it becomes a negative word when people are trying to narrow down which books you're supposed to read and which books you're supposed to throw away but you know glenn if you look at jewish tradition hindu tradition buddhist tradition um any religious tradition you you consider there would be uh an exoteric version for for the primary things you learn first and there would be an esoteric tradition in in judaism it's kabbalah the mystical tradition in islam it's sometimes do they call it uh is it sunni that there are secret traditions in hinduism and buddhism in buddhism there's tantra so these are usually mystical traditions and they're considered advanced level and you're not supposed to learn those things until you've been thoroughly schooled in the others because the others are meant for basic teaching about what you believe and about how to act and that makes sense these mystical teachings in jewish tradition you're not supposed to read any of that stuff until you're 37 and then presumably and only then if you're a man um so by then you're supposed to have enough sense to discriminate right um but in christian tradition there was a taboo yeah on talking about mystical tradition the orthodox christians like orthodox greek churches orthodox ethiopic coptic in egypt they speak about secret traditions which say catholic tradition rejected and protestant tradition grows out of that which has a kind of taboo on what you think of as mystical teaching i mean you could have a mystical experience but if you're in a catholic church it has to agree with the church's teaching completely and it and the clergy will pass on it and the same is true in protestant churches so the trouble with secret teaching is it can be quite diverse and you have to discriminate yeah and orthodoxy was made to sort it out for you yeah and i guess i guess it would be easy like if the church is trying thinking back like in the early early church when the church is really beginning to form and it becomes you know constantine makes you know christianity you know makes it okay in the roman empire and i'm assuming and correct me if i'm wrong but it'd be much easier for church leaders and bishops and things like that to really push the exoteric tradition because you can control that you can control what people do you can kind of manipulate people to do certain things but the esoteric gives people maybe too much freedom if they're going to be going internal to do their own discovery so i would think it'd be easier to build a institution or a system so to speak on an exoteric tradition than an esoteric tradition am i onto something there exactly and and constantine knew that i mean when he became a christian he asked his his right-hand man the bishop eusebius get me copies of the scriptures and eusebius had to sort of figure out which which ones to use and he he chose the ones that were most familiar the gospels that were read a great deal these the gospel of thomas was also read a great deal but it claimed to be a secret text so that was out um and then he said okay you know as you know all the bishops have to come to my summer palace in nicaea and make a decision what do we believe what are we going to talk about so they create the nicene creed and then the two people who refused to sign it i believe in one godfather almighty maker of heaven or you know the whole creation catholic catholics lutherans episcopalians all use um those who refuse to sign it were excommunicated not only from the church but they were told they'd be in eternal hell and and that's that's rather the way many christians have played it ever since i mean one bishop who really wanted to preserve a certain orthodox tradition said outside the church there's no salvation and that's why it's dangerous to talk about these others because well they're just untested products right right and some could lead you astray and and and they're diverse so there's a problem there but i think many scholars now would say well if you want to understand how the early christian movement developed excluding those many other sources we now know about gives you only a sort of narrow stream of what christi the christian movement was sure now we we need to expand it because it's much you can embrace orthodox tradition but if you know what the other alternatives were it makes much more sense actually yeah so what happened then like why i mean i'm sure you there's books on this but what what what what happened to these like the gnostic branches like why did orthodoxy what was the big reason why orthodoxy kind of won the race so to speak like what what made that get such so much stronger whereas the others seem to have just disappeared well the orthodox answer to that is because it's true and truth lasts longer however there's another way of looking at it when constantine became a christian and he found which scriptures to read and he had a a list of doctrines he then opened the imperial treasuries of rome to the bishops of the orthodox church they then built the vatican church they built the church of the holy sepulchre in jerusalem they built hagia sophia which means holy wisdom and constantinople magnificent beautiful churches enormously wealthy and the others got no financial support they were they were blocked in many ways their places of worship were confiscated they were it was complete shutdown on the government's part against the groups that were not part of the orthodox church so basically it's like if i'm hearing you're right it's like if you don't come in line with this way of understanding or these doctrines whatever you don't get the money we cut you off well if you were the bishop of egypt say alexandria as athanasius was um when suddenly you as a christian are not being persecuted and and your life in danger because you're a christian suddenly you're an orthodox bishop of alexandria you you have an enormous influx of money in your treasury and you have all political power you can be a judge in civil cases you can be part of the administration it's now the holy roman empire so you can become politically powerful in alexandria you could be the most powerful man in the entire city and the richest but if you're a member of those other groups you're frozen out you're you you are taxed enormously uh and you can be a fugitive so that's that's how you encourage orthodoxy it's one way wow that's something that you just don't i mean like i said when i you know growing up i just heard it was orthodoxy was just what was handed down from the apostles and you know the holy spirit the holy spirit you know kind of inspired everybody along the way and here we are and that's it absolutely and and there are other versions of that because yeah some of those groups that were excluded for example these heretics they they they don't believe in one god they they have all kinds of weird ideas about they they hate the body well that's not the case for a lot of these sources these are just as monotheistic as any others and some of them are quite consistent with uh with orthodox sources if you read the gospel of thomas along with matthew along with mark along with luke you can see them as a as as an expansion of your access to teachings of jesus and they're not contradictory but uh there are some texts because it's a very mixed collection they're not all gospels at all some are texts of people who said that have revelations that are different um some of these texts are different but anyway the orthodox church just said basically don't touch any of that stuff it's just too um it raises too many questions and one famous father of the church one of my favorites tertullian said well just don't ask questions question questions are what make people heretics he said right he would hate this podcast he would hate those questions are dangerous he wouldn't approve of you at all no that's what make people heretics asking questions like those yeah that's right so uh you talk about how these these texts that were considered dangerous so one of the big ones um that's really recently come to my attention is the gospel of judas and uh you wrote a book with with karen king about this and if i'm not mistaken the gospel of judas is a relatively new find right a relatively new discovery in the 2000s am i correct on that it was well or made available i should say yes because we knew there was a text called that yeah as early as 100 years after the death of jesus approximately but somebody called something the gospel of judas or the gospel of thomas or the gospel of philip or the gospel of mary magdalene we didn't know what they were right um but only fragments of that were discovered and came to light in 2005 and after and i was part of a team and so was bart airman and karen king and others that the national geographic who bought this text um probably bought illegally on the on the black market because i don't think national geographic did it illegally they were told something different sure anyway um that came on the market now the gospel of judas is a is a gospel that suggests that jesus himself who appears in the gospel is critical of the 12 apostles because they're encouraging martyrdom they're encouraging you if you have children not to prevent your children for from getting killed because they're christians i couldn't help thinking glenn about muslim parents who might be told by some imams radical imams that your 15 year old should put on a suicide vest and and and become a martyr because that's what god wants and you know and and some people would say well all right if that's what god wants and and when those young people go into a market and blow themselves up and kill 20 people their lives their families are not to mourn they're supposed to celebrate they get money from from the group that supports this that happens today right but this was a that was a text that i think was concerned about bishops encouraging young people to get martyred and it's probably a late text and it pictures the 12 apostles some of whom of course did die as martyrs encouraging that i don't think it's a very interesting text um spiritually speaking i think it had a purpose at the time so it's important to read it in the context that it was like what was going what was the big question i guess in the end at the time yeah i mean that's as close as karen king and i could come to what was going on in the mind of the writers it wasn't written by judas iscariot but then you know none of the gospels that we know we don't know who wrote them actually they're you know the titles aren't meant to be author this the gospel according to matthew could be matthew is your teacher and so you say well this is what our teacher taught right this is the gospel as matthew taught it this is the gospel as luke taught it and they have variations as you know but they're not they're not totally different you could equally take the gospel as thomas heard it from jesus um and that particular gospel as i say i go back to that one because i find it deeply congruent with the teachings of the gospels in the new testament and yet it goes further but just as you say what makes it offensive to orthodox christians and bishops who are trying to control the flow of information and say this is the church this is the only way just believe what we tell you um is this the idea that what you find within yourself is a connection with god because you're created in his image and therefore you could you can find your way back to god by seeking within yourself yeah um and that is a teaching that bishops don't like because they want to be in control of the message yeah and it means you can kind of freelance spiritually and find your way back to god that is not a message that a leader of any church or most churches would endorse yeah that's it's so funny because like i feel like i'm on this journey now where i'm honest in this place of self discovery and i feel like i've i've looked inside a lot to really ask myself what has my experience with god taught me about god yeah and a lot of that stuff has taken me in places that are much different than how i was raised in a very conservative evangelical tradition and that's received a lot of the a lot of the kickback but in these in this time that i'm in i feel almost closer to god than like i've ever felt before like i feel like i've evolved to places with god that i just i i just i didn't have access to when i was just going by the book so to speak like i was just trying to stay in line with the boundaries and stay in line with the certain things i was allowed to read and wasn't allowed to read and was allowed to think about not allowed to think about and now that i've kind of blew up that box so to speak uh it's just taking me to these wonderful places yeah well actually glenn that is the experience of many people and when i encountered the gospel of thomas i've and many people have said to me now i can really be a christian because it's not just a matter of believing yes a bunch of statements in a creed because these texts are not so much about what do you believe do you believe in god you believe that jesus is the son or do you believe that jesus was born of a virgin it's not those aren't the questions the question is what is your experience who are you how do you understand who you are do you sense a connection with a divine source and that's what you're talking about now you know and i know and everybody knows that some people say well i hear the voice of god and it told me to kill my family you know i mean there are people who claim revelation for atrocious acts right yeah and so that's why it is it's not without risk yeah it's like you can look at these other sources yeah it is danger like you said it is dangerous i think you said in the email it is dangerous you're worried i said it's dangerous and that's why it matters because that's why it matters because it opens up yeah it can open you to your own experience but there are people for whom that can be dangerous yeah and and yet for so many others it means that i can love the christian tradition in a way that i couldn't if i thought it was limited to that narrow stream that calls itself orthodox i go to a wonderful episcopal church which i love which says the creed and follows the traditions um these traditions are inherently conservative i love a lot about that church but it's not closed to these other sources as i understand it but there are many churches that are and that people are genuinely afraid of going out of the boundaries right because um there are unknown territories and dragons and and they they they drag you down into hell i mean that's the kind of threat that's been part of the tradition forever yeah yeah i've heard a lot of those a lot of those threats for sure um so how is this like you talk about how you said an email exchange that we had that you speak of these things not as an outsider but as a participant and i think that's super fascinating to me because a lot of the people that i have come across in these conversations are on the outside maybe they were part of the faith they left the faith now they just kind of look at this strictly in a historical way but i think that you're so unique because especially reading like your memoir and things like that you really look at it from a very personal place and it seems like it's really formed your faith so i'm curious like what are some of the bigger things that your personal work and study and the gnostics and gnosticism and the texts what are some specific ways that your faith has been formed or deepened as a result of your own personal study well i've put the word gnosticism aside and just i talk about other christian gospels and some of them i find very powerful and compelling and others not and i'm sure you would find that too if you look at all of those texts from that were found with these sources um they're not of equal value it seems to me um but some of them do speak and they you can see for example why the gospel of mary magdalene would be shunned by orthodox teachers because they haven't allowed women to have positions of preaching or teaching within christian churches for nearly two thousand years and the idea that mary magdalene might have been such a person had to be rejected what would we ever do right oh no and you know in that text peter says well i don't believe jesus ever spoke to her this way i think she's just talking strange ideas and she says my brother peter do you think i just made this up do you think i'm just lying about the lord and he basically does and the others say peter you're always getting we just stop it and and she goes out to become an evangelist with him and that is why it's not in the new testament but so that has changed my view about women in the early christian movement but more deeply it it suggests that spiritual life is is not simple it's not easy it's good to have guidance about how to start and that's what the orthodox tradition was meant to do and what that's what regular tradition does for jews and muslims and buddhists it gives you guidelines okay you need guidelines sure but then they stop and say okay now stop as you know one of the heresy hunters says well if you found the faith what else do you need just stop stop asking a question right there okay we've got the answers just stop yeah but these encourage you to keep on a spiritual search because it is hard and there is more to discover yeah and i find that very compelling and what it does to me is what it's done to you it leads you into your own questions and your own experiences to say what is valid for you that's right what what really deeply resonates is true and some of these sources deeply do and i feel they they are enhancing and and deepening what i understand about the faith but that it's not just belief it's more about experience synosis is not it's not about believing believing is beginning on the path gnosis is about insight which means that's what happens to you as you develop spiritually so it's it's meant to be a different level and it's not for beginners [Music] so you begin in one place but then you go a little bit deeper you can go further and it's just as in jewish tradition you don't start with mystical tradition you start with with uh dietary laws and sexual laws and and and basic beliefs the lord your god is one god i mean and then later maybe you go into these very powerful sources that can lead you into very different kinds of spiritual experience but it's so that's what i think is possible and i think it's the other thing glenn is that so many people like you and like me feel they have to leave christianity because it tries to put blinders on them or tell them what questions they should never ask right i've heard people say my minister said don't ever ask questions like that or no you know you can't read that sort of thing so when they have that experience they say okay well christianity is just a bunch of things that the church makes you tells you you have to believe yeah i don't want to have anything to do with it my father left it because he felt that it was contrary to um to science and of course it's not but but it but what he was dealing with was a kind of church that would not allow him to think about darwin or scientific discovery yeah so and and that's to me a tremendous loss because i can't now imagine living without a spiritual dimension in my life especially because of the events that i wrote about in that book yeah without a spiritual dimension i mean i i feel i would feel unmoored and many people i know most of my colleagues in the university have no use for what you're calling a spiritual dimension or what i'm calling a spiritual but they don't know what they're talking about yeah why who needs that yeah religion is for people who have to have a bunch of answers thrown at them for things that are hard to understand yeah um it's like we have the system we have the answers we have every why do you need this why do you need that yeah over there yeah and and and a lot of people will say well that's pretty limiting you know yeah and so they just reject the whole thing and i think that's a great loss so that's why i think opening up these sources and saying well take a look at them you don't have to accept them you can say no i don't that one sounds wrong to me right um this one this one sounds right when i read one that talks about jesus as it's called um they they one of the text calls jesus a psychiatrist but in in greek iatros means a healer of the soul and he gives medicine to heal hearts he's seen the image of jesus there he's a physician yeah um with medication to heal your heart now i find that a very powerful image yeah because that's what psychiatrists are supposed to do but they really can't they stop short of that very often they could give you maybe medications but healing the heart is another matter yeah and that's what spiritual teachers claim to do some some might be able to help and others may really lead you astray yeah so it takes discernment and that's hard discernment of in the early church they talked about the problem of discernment of spirits that is they ask spiritual masters how do you know when a vision is from god or when it's leading you astray when it's from satan and one of the great spiritual teachers anthony of egypt said well a demonic spirit may may look wonderful at first but after a while it will leave you depressed and anxious and fearful and a and a spirit from god may terrify you at first but later it will bring you calm and peace in your in your soul and he said that's how you can tell what is from god and what is not wow that's interesting i was thinking of that parallel in relation to a lot of these texts because some of the times there it is terrifying like when i first opened up some of these somebody's text i was like my goodness you know like what am i reading and then to your point there is a sense of peace that oftentimes comes a little bit later yeah well the gospel of thomas opens by saying let the person who's seeking not stop seeking until he finds when he finds he'll be astonished and troubled trouble yeah and and then he will come to to to be master of it i mean then he will come to a place of acceptance and understanding after being troubled and disturbed but not without that and and some people get very unnerved by the deep waters of spiritual exploration and and rightly so yeah we want to avoid all the i mean we like to avoid those things because we want the very simple we want to be able to follow the path and know where we're going and have the answers and it's a sense of comfort and i think when you encounter these internal things these esoteric things like you said before it can be very unnerving because you don't know where it's going to lead you yeah and i think that answer of saint anthony um has some truth in it that you can be troubled at first and anxious and unsettled and unnerved and then eventually it brings you to a place of greater resolution in some way yeah absolutely or not yeah yeah definitely so last question for you because um i i don't want to keep you too long because i know you you have a life you have to go and you have a lot of things to do oh and and let me just say too that this has allowed me to enjoy and love participating in my church because i don't feel confined by it as i did in that church where they gave me an answer that sounded to me contrary to what what they always talked about the love of god yeah i think that's the match sometime that's freeing for people because i mean i even think of the listener of this podcast like a lot of them i haven't been to church in a long long time i just because of that part of it's that very reason that just questions are not welcomed and when you start to think outside of the certain boundaries that are set up for you you know you're frowned upon and i just i experienced that was so much of my experience for so long i just felt like i needed a break from that but i think that going back to church i think would be thinking about what you're talking about with this and just you know i feel like it's just it it gives more freedom to operate within the institution that feels like it hurt me for so many years i don't know if that makes any sense but i'm trying to piece together what i'm trying to say here but i feel like a lot of what you're saying gives me more freedom to step back into the institution with a much different perspective than i had when i came out of it well it makes a lot of sense because many as students even at princeton say well if i take a course in in early christianity and i learned that say the gospels weren't all written at the same time and they weren't dictated by an angel they were written by people um then then i realized that they're not important anymore i'll lose my faith um and they realize after they study this that very often the opposite is true some people do opt out and some scholars do and they say well you see that's just because people in churches are just naive and and afraid they want somebody to tell them all the answers but some other people see it quite differently and most of my students understand if you're not hostile to the christianity you're not trying to debunk it um you're trying to open it up yeah yeah and that's what these texts were originally for yeah yeah that's really good so last question for you most of our listeners a lot of our listeners were brought up in the conservative evangelical world they're in this place like i said before we hit record they're deconstructing they're asking a lot of questions they don't want to leave the faith but they're rethinking the faith the bible the cross the atonement all the things and a lot of them have come up against some really harsh kickback critique from their former tribe many have been outcasted all together so my question is like i'm sure that you've experienced that kickback i imagine and i've read some articles of people's critique against your words yes yeah like i know you've been called heretic blasphemer things like that but what is your advice for the person who's in that place where they're they're trying to be a good steward of their spiritual journey they're trying to widen the scope of their reading the scope of their understanding break through those those boundaries that have been set up for them but they're coming against that kickback and everything in them wants to stop but at the same time everything and then wants to keep going what is your what is your advice to that that person well that's that's a good question and you're right i mean somebody told me that on some websites i'm called elaine pagan um and they just they just think that one of them who's a respected new testament professor in atlanta basically said my mission is to destroy the church and i thought that's so ignorant yeah um it just seems to me that it's useful to see to what extent your own feelings are validated and talk to people you can trust who aren't going to say well you know you're going to go to hell um if you read that because there's nothing in the teachings of jesus that talks that way at all that's right is there no nothing no i mean the creed you know there were 300 years of a very vibrant early christian community before there was a creed and before there was a a new testament that was closed [Music] they didn't have a creed they didn't have a new testament it was called the way the christian movement was called not a church well ecclesia means an assembly but it was called the way hadas in greek a path and it was a path of experience that you on which you can explore and test and and go slowly if you want yeah and and i i would think only speak to people whose intuition seems to use sound and wise and and that you trust um and some of them may be [Music] appalled that you're reading things they think you shouldn't read and they're very well meaning and they're doing the best they can but they may have different spiritual needs than than others i think people are very different do you you know the book of william james the varieties of religious experience have heard of it now you've heard of it oh i haven't no yeah i'm going to write it down what was it again well read it yeah this is a very famous book by william james william james was a psychologist he was the brother of the writer henry james he was in 1910 1912 he was a psychologist brought up christian and he fell into a very deep depression at one point when he was young and he said he just didn't know how people could go on living being aware of death and being aware of annihilation and and the darkness in the world and he came out of the depression by holding on to sayings he'd learned like the lord is my refuge he said it was like being in the ocean and you're about to drown and he was holding on to these phrases like logs that keep him afloat the lord is my refuge the lord is my refuge in a time of trouble and he said he came out of the depression and after that he he wrote a book about called the varieties of religious experience talking about the fact that people have different spiritual needs and different ways of approaching a spiritual life [Music] some follow the way of catholic saints some like the way of of people who spontaneously have religious experience that book is so powerful um and he disguises his own experience in it he doesn't admit that he had a mental breakdown but he came to understand that there are many ways of experiencing conversion and spiritual life and it's a it's a very important book another one that i like very much is the one by um is the one called how god becomes real by tanya lerman anthropologist so these are about spiritual experience and and i think exploring those is very important yeah that's good that gives gives a lot of freedom that cuts off a lot of the a lot of change people feel elaine so hey thank you so much this has been amazing uh but we are just about out of time and i wish we weren't because i could talk to you literally all day so maybe maybe we could do this again sometime i would really like that i would enjoy that too glenn thank you yeah and real quick uh where can people go what's the best place to go to interact with you and your work online anywhere in particular i you know i have not really done social media much because i get so many so much email but i often do respond to people on email you responded to me yeah and i do because it matters to me when people are seeking i mean i'd be happy to talk to a lot of people or just i'm going to write another book um which is about jesus what do we know and what don't what don't we know about jesus of nazareth how do we know what we think we know um and how is it that there are so many different ways of understanding who jesus was and then i i hope to do a podcast or something like it i just i'm not tech savvy enough to do it yet but but i would like to do something like that why they don't do it together i think that would be wonderful i'd be more than happy to do it with you well you know that's that that might be something to actually consider there you go we'll email me we'll figure it out for sure all right elaine well i'm going to uh end our recording here but this is a lot of fun and uh thank you so much good talking with you

Channel: What If Project

Views: 34,676

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Id: am_99wCMfXQ

Length: 55min 11sec (3311 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021