Pagels, Elaine - Henry Chadwick (review date 21 March 1990)
Henry Chadwick (review date 21 March 1990)
SOURCE: "The Paths of Heresy," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4017, March 21, 1990, p. 309.
[In the following review of The Gnostic Gospels, Chadwick discusses Pagels's efforts to address modern problems in Christianity by considering the early church.]
In December 1945, an Egyptian peasant made, with his mattock, an archaeological find that has coe to generate a substantial industry among students of early Christianity and of its pagan environment of high mysticism, low magic, and religious syncretism. The find consisted of a cache of Coptic codices buried in the second half of the fourth century a few miles from Nag Hammadi, containing fifty-two texts most of which were either gnostic in origin or congenial reading in gnostic circles. That is, they represent a broadly theosophical doctrine divergent from and at times severely critical of main-line Christianity as that emerged out of...
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