Elaine Pagels is perhaps best known for The Gnostic Gospels, a
groundbreaking popularization of the contents of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, but she is also the author of several other works that deal
with the historical and cultural roots of modern Chris
tian faith. The Origin of Satan, her most recent book, traces the
development of the devil as a figure of evil as seen in the four
Gospels of the New Testament.
RH: What initially attracted you to this field
of study?
EP: I got interested in the history of religion
because...I was brought up somewhat outside Christianity, in
a not-very-religious Protestant family, so I became very
interested in religion and spirituality, things that I
thought were missing in my life, so I began to explore them.
Then I realized I would have to learn more about the origins
of Christianity, because I was dissatisfied with the
institutions I found around me at that time, so that I could
begin to understand the religion for myself.
RH: When did you first come across the Dead Sea
Scrolls and the material that led to your first
popular book, The Gnostic Gospels?
EP: In graduate school, when I was trying to uncover
the origins of Christianity, I discovered that my professors
had filing cabinets full of ancient gospels that I had never
heard of. That was startling enough, then I found that I
really liked these texts, and wanted to work with them
extensively.
RH: How about the new book? What made you decide
to examine the treatment of Satan in the New
Testament?
EP: It's always struck me that the Gospels,
especially the Gospel of Mark, have a sense of evil spirits
as a real part of the world. But I was originally thinking
about the ways that different religions imagine the
invisible world. When my husband and son both died within a
short period of time, I often thought of them as being both
with me and not with me at the same time. Later, when I
could think about the subject more abstractly, I considered
how the people of the ancient world believed that there was
an invisible world that impinged on this world, and the
different ways cultures pictured the angelic and demonic
beings of that world. I was looking at angels and demons,
spirits and daimons.
RH: The deeper you go into that conception of
the invisible world, the clearer its political and
social role in the formation of Christianity as a
separate religion, a movement distinct from its
Judaic origins, becomes.
EP: That's what surprised me during my research; it
was not something that I suspected at all. So of course it
also interested me greatly. There's a lot of ways that you
can talk about this topic. You can discuss questions of
theology and God, of the social and cultural origins of
these figures, what they mean psychologically. But I decided
to focus on what this subject matter had to say about the
way that we see ourselves and other people, about the
cultural identity... and group identity... of
Christianity.
RH: Obviously, there are many cultural
differences between first-century Judea and
twentieth-century America, but the basic theme or
situation of group identity that you describe in
the book could apply to many different
historical/cultural moments.
EP: But it's curious, because I realized that people
raised in the Jewish tradition, for example, have a highly
monotheistic conception of God. The conviction is that the
Lord is in heaven, unopposed by any other being. There is
no other being; the Lord your God is one God. That's
really very different from the Christian tradition that sees
the world split between the forces of God and the forces of
evil.
I never thought much before about this figure (of Satan)
because if you are around liberal forms of Christianity, as
I am, one doesn't hear a lot about the devil. It's almost
something of a relic. But the concept of the devil is
integral to the way that Christians understood their lives,
and the conflicts of the world in which they lived, as well
as the death of Jesus. And, in many traditions, continue to
understand the world today.
RH: It's fascinating to see the contrasts in how
different branches of Christianity view Satan, even
liberal and conservative tendencies within the same
tradition, such as Catholicism, where many
Catholics vocally blame Satan for starting the wars
in Eastern Europe in order to silence the Virgin at
Medjugorje.
EP: Even if they don't take Satan literally, it
provides a way of thinking about opposition, for people who
aren't Christians, or who were raised Christian but
abandoned much of their faith. It's like an architecture in
the mind, a cultural construct that becomes the way that
people think. When Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil
empire", or Bush called Saddam Hussein "the devil", people
might have said that they were merely using silly political
rhetoric, but it resonates quite deeply in the American
psyche, and one wouldn't have to believe in Satan for those
images to work powerfully in his or her mind.
RH: One of the things that has fascinated me
about your work over the years is the rigorous
scholarship you apply to matters of faith, showing
their cultural and historical contingency, but
treating the faith itself with respect -- leaving
room for belief even within the knowledge of where
that belief developed in the past.
EP: My questions when I started out as a scholar were
primarily religious questions, and in many ways they still
are. I soon discovered that you can't answer those questions
with historical means. History will tell you when a gospel
was written, give or take thirty years, but it can't tell
you if that gospel is true. That's a religious question, a
very different question. I have friends and colleagues who
teach religion and see their work as a form of debunking;
they show how totally historically contingent it all is.
Now, I think a lot of it is historically contingent,
but it's still compelling. How is it that these archaic
images still work as powerfully as they do, become reference
points for the way that we interpret our lives, even if we
don't acknowledge them consciously?
RH: If it isn't prying to ask, can you talk
about how you resolve any conflicts between your
academic work and your personal
spirituality?
EP: One's own spirituality is always hard to
define...I came to an understanding that there is a
spiritual dimension to life, and it is something that I deal
with in my life. Some people can avoid dealing with it, but
sometimes people's lives just come up against it, and they
can't excuse it as unresolved political or sexual or other
kinds of issues. There's another dimension one needs to
consider. My work informs the way I think about that, but
it's not a direct correlation... I believe it should matter
to us to know how the image of Satan has played itself out
in Western history, and it matters to me, but it's not a
direct religious answer to my questions.
