Elaine Pagels’s Expertise?

Apr. 25 (CWNews.com) – Two weeks ago, at the height of the Gospel of Judas mania, a Google News search of “Elaine Pagels” plus “expert” scored 157 hits; she was the media’s prime go-to person for a scholarly read on the import of the Coptic manuscript …

The Gnostic Gospels, like those portions of Pagels’s later work with which I am familiar, is chock-full of tendentious readings and instances where counter-evidence is suppressed. The example of “creativity” here discussed may fairly be called a representative specimen of her methodology, and was singled out not because it’s the worst example of its kind but because it’s among the most unambiguous. No one who consults the source texts could give Pagels a pass, and that means she forfeits the claim to reliability as a scholar. Attractive as her ideological sympathies may be to many persons — including many academics — she does not deserve to be ranked with serious textual scholars like Claremont’s James Robinson, and her testimony on the accuracy of inventions such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code cannot be solicited without irony.

Whole story.

Thanks to FWD from Fr Victor Potapov.