Pagels in National Catholic Reporter

National Catholic Reporter has an article / interview on Elaine Pagels, "Scholar stirs controversy with views on early Christian development". It's only available to subscribers, but this extract courtesy of Maurice A. O'Sullivan:

"Oh, this was gentle," she said of the stinging rebuke of one critic, a fellow scholar who, to put it charitably, did not like her latest book, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas. The critic, Luke Timothy Johnson, said Pagels adhered to a "stunningly simple argument." . . . .

. . . . Pagels argues that early authority figures within the church, particularly Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, concluded that the writer of the Gospel of Thomas erred in suggesting that Jesus taught "that we have direct access to God through the divine image within us," Pagels writes. In contrast, the majestic Gospel according to John -- which Pagels believes was probably written in response to Thomas, with the two texts "in dialogue" but also often in conflict -- took a far different view of Jesus and his ministry and proved more useful in uniting the growing Christian movement.

If Thomas believed humans should try to emulate Jesus as a way of discovering inner divinity, John's Gospel "succeeded ever after in persuading the majority of Christians," Pagels writes, that "only by believing in Jesus can we find divine truth." . . . .

. . . . "The history of Christianity is not a triumphal march of ideas but a series of intense arguments and conversations," Pagels said. "I love that side of it."

Others are less enthusiastic. In a review for the independent Catholic magazine Commonweal, Johnson, who teaches New Testament and Christian origins at the Candler School of Theology, took Pagels to task for needlessly defending noncanonical texts that honor spiritual experience over "the rule of faith (or creed)."

"Welcome to another exercise in revisionist history," Johnson wrote, adding that Pagels' "historical point is that the good stuff lost out. Her normative point is that Christianity has to claim its inner Kabbalah [Jewish mysticism] if it is to appeal to people like Elaine Pagels."

Pagels understands Johnson's critique, but maintains she is not so much saying that "the good stuff lost out" as arguing that contemporary Christianity is richer by having a wider range of early texts from which to draw. . . . . .