Elaine Pagels

Religious historian Elaine Pagels is fascinated by religions’ big mysteries: what constitutes a miracle? How do religions change as they grow?  What does belief mean when gospels have conflicting stories?

Pagels may be best known for her groundbreaking scholarship of the Gnostic Gospels, a collection of over fifty early Christian texts whose 1945 discovery revealed a radically different view of the life of Jesus Christ. After working alongside an international team of scholars to edit, translate, and publish several of these texts, Pagels published her own interpretation.

The Gnostic Gospels was a national bestseller, winning both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle  Award and launching Pagels’s reputation as a writer with “the instincts of a novelist, the skill of a scholar, and the ability to sort out significances that many writers lack” (Chicago Tribune). In 1999, The Gnostic Gospels was selected by Modern Library as one of the “Top 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the Century.”

Over the next several decades, Elaine Pagels continued to publish books re-examining the history of the early Christian church, challenging traditionally held accounts of women’s roles in Christianity, the development of the orthodoxy, and how politics and power have shaped tradition and text alike. As well as her scholarly works, her other books include Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, The Origin of Satan, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, Reading Judas, and Revelations.

Pagels’s 2025 book, Miracles and Wonder: The History Mystery of Jesus, explores the mystery of how a poor young man inspired a religion that reshaped the world. The book is structured like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question: “Why is Jesus said to have had a virgin birth?” “Why do we say he rose from the dead?” “Did his miracles really happen, and what did they mean?”  Elaine Pagels turns to the gospels Jesus’s followers left behind as historical clues to the answers.

Elaine Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University, where she has taught and engaged in research for over thirty years. In 1981, she was a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Grant, and in 2012, she received Princeton University’s Howard T.  Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities. In 2015, President Obama awarded Pagels the National Humanities Medal.  She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Contact us for more information about bringing Elaine Pagels to your organization or institution.