Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Pagels, Elaine - Leslie Houlden (review date 18 June 1995)

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Leslie Houlden (review date 18 June 1995)

SOURCE: "The Prince of Darkness," in New York Times Book Review, June 18, 1995, pp. 9-10.

[In the following review of The Origin of Satan, Houlden states that while Pagels's arguments are single-minded and do not always have documentary support, she has written a compelling book that connects the concerns of the early church with contemporary issues.]

Satan, Elaine Pagels says, has a much more tenacious grip on the world than many people suppose; his power over the human imagination has grown for 22 centuries, and in the West even people who deny his existence, or who have no religion at all, live in a culture in which he is a large presence This demon will not go away

If that sounds like a promotion for fright films, Ms. Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University and the author of several volumes on the Gnostics among the early Christians, did not write The Origin of...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. B. Cobbey Crisler (review date 3 December 1979)
   2. Raymond E. Brown (review date 20 January 1980)
   3. Hyam Maccoby (review date June 1980)
   4. Kathleen McVey (essay date January 1981)
   5. Robin Lane Fox (review date 21 August 1988)
   6. Thomas D'Evelyn (review date 14 September 1988)
   7. Judith Ochshorn (review date April 1989)
   8. James Finn Cotter (review date Spring 1989)
   9. Henry Chadwick (review date 21 March 1990)
   10. Leslie Houlden (review date 18 June 1995)
   11. Mary Gordon (review date 26 June 1995)
   12. John P. Meier (review date 9 July 1995)
   13. Rockwell Gray (review date 30 July 1995)
   14. Norman Cohn (review date 21 September 1995)
   15. Mary Troychak (review date September-October 1995)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright