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They include ''The Secret Book of James,'' ''The Apocalypse of Peter,''+ ''The Gospel of Philip'' and other evidently ''illegitimate'' books, including ''The Gospel of Thomas.'' Although the manuscripts can be dated to the fourth century they are probably translations of Greek originals possibly 300 years older than that - or perhaps even more ancient. John's Gospel.įifty-two in number, the Nag Hammadi writings are a mixed bag.
Briefly, she has come to believe that over the centuries the outlawing of texts like ''The Gospel of Thomas'' has impoverished the Christian church and led to a constricting dependence on St. Now, after more years of research, Pagels offers a kind of supplement, based on her own thinking about the Nag Hammadi evidence and its relevance to modern Christianity. The clarity and unobtrusive scholarship of that pioneering account won deserved praise.
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But by the time she wrote her book Pagels had long been involved in fundamental research, and had grown ever more confident of the importance of the find, which some claim rivals that of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
SECRET BOOK OF JAMES PROFESSIONAL
Ignorance, commercial greed and academic rivalry ensured that it took a long time for the manuscripts to reach professional scholars. Written in Coptic, the documents expounded what appeared to be secret and deviant versions of early Christian teaching. They broke it open, destroyed some of the disappointing contents and sold the rest. The peasants who found the jar containing the manuscripts feared that it might house a jinni or spirit, but hoped it contained gold. ELAINE PAGELS'S ''Gnostic Gospels,'' which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award in 1980, introduced the general public to the discovery in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt of an extraordinary cache of ancient papyrus books.