Elaine Pagels Quotes

The learned are not agreed as to the time when the Gospel of John was written; some dating it as early as the year 68, others as late as the year 98; but it is generally conceded to have been written after all the others.

The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.

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 earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.

There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all.

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament.

The Gospels were written to present the life and teachings of Jesus in ways that would be appropriate to different readerships, and for that reason are not all the same. They were not intended to be biographies of Jesus, but selective accounts that would demonstrate his significance for different cultures.

Of the sayings of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels that can be compared to those in the fourth Gospel, there are one or two which I venture to think can only have been recorded on the authority of St. John.

I know all the books of the Bible.

[My approach to the Bible, history does really matter.] Everything matters. But I have priorities. For instance, for me to know whether there were two Isaiahs or one is less important than the text itself. Of course I read the arguments for and against. But it's not my task in life to say there were two or three authors of Isaiah's book, or how many authors there were of Deuteronomy. This is not what I'm doing.

It is the simple truth to say that the New Testament books became canonical because no one could stop them doing so.

Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me.

If we believe that he [Jesus Christ]really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New Testament]father upon him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor.

We read the whole Bible, cover to cover, over and over again... It wasn't that we read selective parts of the Bible. It was that we interpreted it in this very selective way.

The fascination with Judas has persisted despite the fact that there is no evidence of the hard facts of his life. Even the 'Iscariot' attached to him may be nothing more significant than a corruption of the name of the town from which he came.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.

The Gospel of John opens with Jesus Christ in the bosom of God, and closes with the sinner in the bosom of Jesus Christ.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

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

Hebrews . This book is much superior to most of the writings attributed to St. Paul, though passages in the other books are very admirable.

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

The most superficial fact regarding the 'Discourses,' the fact that the number of its chapters equals the number of books of Livy's 'History,' compelled us to start a chain of tentative reasoning which brings us suddenly face to face with the only New Testament quotation that ever appears in Machiavelli's two books and with an enormous blasphemy.

Deconstruction: peering suspiciously at the text, I wait for it to make a slip and betray itself.