Elaine Pagels Quotes

The Gnostics were rapidly driven out of business by the hierarchical orthodox Christians.

What is clear is that the Gospel of Judas has joined the other spectacular discoveries that are exploding the myth of a monolithic Christianity and showing how diverse and fascinating the early Christian movement really was.

The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.

I've learnt more physics from Kabbalah than I ever did in school.

If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.

I would call myself a Gnostic. Which means, I'm interested in pursuing and understanding the spiritual nature of things. A Gnostic is somebody seeking knowledge of that aspect of reality.

Religion claims to be in possession of an absolute truth; but its history is a history of errors and heresies.

When I wrote 'The Da Vinci Code,' I told myself that this story of Jesus makes more sense to me than the story I read in the Bible.

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.

To regard Christ as God, and to pray to him, are to my mind the greatest possible sacrilege.

It will be one of the tragedies of Christian history if future historians record that at the height of the twentieth century the church was one of the greatest bulwarks of white supremacy.

I am anxious to see the doctrine of one god commenced in our state. But the population of my neighborhood is too slender, and is too much divided into other sects to maintain any one preacher well. I must therefore be contented to be an Unitarian by myself, although I know there are many around me who would become so, if once they could hear the questions fairly stated.

In one sphere above all others, Anne Boleyn still had the power to influence him, and that was in the case of church reform. Anne was a passionate and sincere evangelical, the owner of a library of controversial reformist literature, and she was sympathetic to radical and even Lutheran ideas.

The holy law of Jesus Christ governs our civilisation, but it does not yet permeate it.

Every single religion that has ever been on the face of the Earth, ever, is a cult. That’s all they are.

What a nation needs more than anything else is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot.

I was in a fascinating meeting where one man had been in China recently. A Chinese professor has found evidence that Christians reached Western China before 90 AD. Before 90 AD! The idea isn't all that astonishing when we think about it. That's what the disciples thought they were supposed to do! And, I'm sure, the disciples just said, "That's it. Let's go!" And they all wound up dead. But everyone else did too!

It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius instead of those of Constantine.

Holy Christendom has, in my judgment, no better teacher after the apostles than St. Augustine.

The Christian theory of the sacredness of the Bible has been at the cost of the world's civilization.

You can recollect the sayings of great men, you treasure up verse of renowned poets; ought you not be equally profound in your knowledge of the words of God, so that you may be able to quote them readily when you would solve a difficulty or overthrow a doubt?

The Catholic Church is still very angry about The Da Vinci Code - they don't like anything that makes more money in a weekend than they do.

The whole inspiration of our civilization springs from the teachings of Christ and the lessons of the prophets. To read the Bible for these fundamentals is a necessity of American life.

The efforts of the majority to destroy every trace of heretical 'blasphemy' proved so successful that, until the discoveries at Nag Hammadi, nearly all our information concerning alternative forms of early Christianity came from the massive orthodox attacks upon them.