Deciding which religious books are going to rule your life is no small issue. In a word, it is called "canon" (kanon), the "measure" by which a religious community seeks to comply in its religious thought, ethics, life, and even discipline. Therefore, when a church discourses on such matters, it cuts to the very heart of religion.
Elaine Pagels is a professor of religion at Princeton, well known for her work on the so-called Gnostic Gospels’documents found among the Nag Hammadi Codice in 1945. They are documents that recently have received much press: a cache of more than fifty "secret books" that somehow slipped into oblivion for twenty centuries but now are supposed to receive pride of place, at least according to Pagels.
"Had it not been for Athanasius, would Revelation be in the Bible?" asks Pagels (160). Pagels is not joking when she asks this question. For her, the venerable church father Athanasius’that's right, the Athanasius who stood against the world and argued that Christ is fully God and fully man’is the man whom she has in her gun sights. That much is clear, even with a sympathetic reading of this book. Pagel's agenda, then, amounts to the following: reconsider the importance of other lost manuscripts (i.e., Nag Hammadi) only recently rediscovered, and inculcate the notion that Athanasius was a power hungry, intolerant church leader responsible for the canon.
What is less well known about Pagels is that in all of this she is popularizing the "Baur thesis" through her writings. This is a thesis on early Christian origins and the New Testament (NT) canon, which, thanks to Pagels, is now easily the most popular thesis afoot concerning what books should really belong in the Bible.
The "Baur thesis" (so named after F. C. Baur, a nineteenth-century German scholar) is essentially this: diversity, not orthodoxy, was the reigning paradigm in early Christianity. Any number of various teachings, according to Baur, could claim to be a legitimate representation of Christianity in this early period. Up until this last century, the idea was common that orthodoxy preceded heresy in early Christianity. Now a great reversal has occurred: diversity allegedly preceded orthodoxy. Pagels, whose mentor was Harvard professor and "Baur thesis" advocate Helmut Koester, applied the thesis to the recently discovered Nag Hammadi documents and claimed that Christianity became more rigid with regard to doctrine in the second century AD. Consequently, since diversity preceded orthodoxy in the earliest years of Christianity, so the logic runs in Pagels' book that Christians today should also become less rigid doctrinally by returning to the earliest forms of diversity in doctrine represented by nascent Christianity in the first century.
What's at stake in the larger debate revolves around the following question: Did orthodoxy precede diversity, or did diversity precede orthodoxy in the early church? Pagels claims that these Nag Hammadi texts slid under the radar of Athanasius's list of twenty-seven canonical NT books. What is egregious about her assertion’or the importance claimed for it’is the repetition of a false notion: the canon of twenty-seven NT books was first enumerated (allegedly) by Athanasius. Actually, it was Origen a century earlier who listed all twenty-seven books in a sermon, something uncontroversial and that should be noted by the Princeton professor. Since much of Pagels' case turns on Athanasius, here is more of the story.
Canonization was, according to Pagels, a power play in which Athanasius was trying to unify Christianity all over the empire. In Egypt, Athanasius had to deal with numerous others who did not tow the orthodox line; i.e., against Arius as denounced by the recently convened Council of Nicaea. Pagels talks about the fact that many leaders around the empire were discussing which books should belong in the canon, which is true; but then she paints Athanasius as the "bogeyman" who construed his own list of twenty-seven books as canon‘a standard of measurement, a fixed measure of orthodoxy’in order to use it as a powerful tool to subdue others.
Surprisingly, Pagels treats the Arian controversy as if it were not the big ordeal everyone seems to have made it heretofore. In fact, nearly all the assembled church leaders agreed to sign the document (the Nicene Creed), except for Arias and two Libyan bishops associated with him. These three, having been cut off from the communion with the Roman Catholic Church and ordered into exile, hastily departed. According to Pagels, at this point Athanasius and his successors came to treat the theological formulations of the Nicene Creed as orthodoxy. Presuppositions are crucial here. For Pagels, the Nicene Creed is not the crystallization of a profound theological truth but complexity in the service of power. If you don't submit to Athanasius the man, then "a pox on you," at least according to her! Pagels surmises that by the time of Athanasius's death in May 373, he succeeded in his three-pronged agenda to mandate creed, clergy, and canon.
Toward the end of her book, Pagels contrasts a compassionate Christ with the "intolerant" John, author of the book of Revelation included in Athanasius's canon. John's apocalypse conjures "cosmic war, good fighting evil until Christ crushes the dragon, through visions that can be plugged into almost any conflict. Because John more often defines 'evildoers' with degrading epithets’'cowards, the faithless, abominable, filthy . . . and all liars'’than with specific deeds, nearly anyone might claim to be on God's side, fighting 'evildoers.'" Throughout the ages, Pagels argues, John of Patmos's visions have fortified religious anger like his own, the anger of those who suffer oppression and long for retaliation against those who torture and kill their people. "Yet those who torture and kill in God's name often cast themselves into the same drama, seeing themselves not as the 'murderers' John denounces but as God's servants delivering divine judgment" (172).
In her conclusion, Pagels makes an "evangelistic" plea for her beloved Nag Hammadi texts. The upshot of all this is likely the influence of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), who thought that any grand story or metanarrative is oppressive by definition and therefore ought to be regarded with deep suspicion. He occupies a pivotal position in this discussion with his critique of the manner and nature of discourse in Western philosophy. Foucault saw language not as an interplay of signs but as a relationship of power and a "violent" interaction between interlocutors, both historical and contemporary. Foucault thinks language is a power game. Truth, for Foucault, is the result of a complex interplay of relationships’power relationships in particular. I wonder if any responsible history can be written under such categories, most of which are seen throughout Pagels' work. In short, there is little that this reviewer can commend in Pagel's revision of history as representedin this book.
