Dragging Elaine Pagels with other early Christianity nerds is fun.

It's a bonding ritual. Where two or three are gathered in learning early Christian history, Elaine Pagels spite will be among them.

More seriously, I would really like and respect Pagels if she weren't a terrible historian.

I have deep empathy for Pagels. Reclaiming one's faith (or at least the texts of it in Pagel's case) after suffering deep spiritual trauma is a massive undertaking. Endeavoring to revive the revolutionary potential of early Christianity is also vital.

Then Pagels just... gets it wrong. She interpolates an anachronistic 20th century "triumph of liberalism" narrative onto Gnosticism and proto-orthodox Christianity, which she erroneously paints as monoliths.

"Gnostic" wasn't a dirty word in the patristics. Everyone liked to claim they were gnostics as part of a bold claim to the truth. And there was simply not an institutional Christian church in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

Irenaeus was actually as horrible and unpleasant as The Gnostic Gospels says. But his unpleasantness was rooted in the fact he thought he was fighting a losing battle, not that his vision of Christianity became the orthodox form centuries down the line.

I have a huge amount of sympathy for writers who wrestle with their spiritual trauma by dedicating their lives to Scriptural exegesis. But some secular historians endeavor to bowdlerize the spirituality from the texts, and it simply doesn't work.

Which isn't to say that atheists shouldn't write about religion. Much of the best writing about Christianity is penned by atheists. But sometimes you run into the quintessential problem of "welp, we've exhausted the materialist reading. There can't be anything more to it."

(Even Bart Ehrman, who I quite like, struggles with this. But at least he writes genuinely fun and well-structured non-fiction thrillers about how Scripture came to be. Unlike Pagels, who just puts an anachronistic narrative structure into Valentinian Gnosticism.)

Someday I'll write my deeply personal treatise on faith and queerness which will basically say "here's how you can use the Bible and the patristics for a queer-affirming theology." With materialist history and Eastern Orthodox metaphysics. It'll be fun.

I feel like there should be a literary reconciliation of radical faith and lived experience. It can be done, and I'm sure it exists (and I should read some of that). Like, taking the early church as the hugely flawed artifact it is and learning the right lessons from it.