The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels was the first honest to goodness piece of critical scholarship I ever read—for a student paper at the Simon Greenleaf School of Law. If I recall correctly, it was suggested by John Warwick Montgomery as a recommended book for a student review, which was required for his History of Christianity course. Of course, we did not carry it in our Christian bookstore, but I found it at Walden Books—remember them? I almost felt like I was sinning when buying and then reading it, but then I got my dander up and gave it, let me just say, a less than stellar review. Little did I know it would be the first of many works I would read by critical scholars over the years. D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, and Ernest Renan’s, Life of Jesus were far and away the worst. Burton Mack’s (of the Jesus Seminar) stuff was pretty bad too.

Pagels argued that the famous discovery at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945, of “lost” and long buried ancient Christian writings revealed a much more diverse set of authentic Christian writings than those included in our Bibles. Her claim is that orthodox Christianity was not so orthodox after all. Those accepted and esteemed biblical texts in our Bibles were more or less the product of political and ecclesiastical power struggles among those who determined which books made it into the canon, and which groups among these diverse Christian communities were to be regarded as orthodox. In Pagels’s estimation, the various Gnostic communities and their teachings were unjustifiably excluded by those with power—bishops with political connections. If the term existed when Pagels’s book was published, these suppression efforts in opposition to the Gnostic texts and groups would be labeled the “deep church.”

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