Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas by Elaine Pagels
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Book Reviews of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
Book Review: Somewhat Disjointed History
Summary: 3 Stars
The book is really far more about a compare and contrast between the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of John, and the activities and history leading to John being included in the final canon. Pagels interweves her personal religious experiences, her scholarly work and the work of others into a somewhat disjointed, but informative look at early Church history.
If you are looking for an expose or in depth discussion of the Gospel of Thomas, look elsewhere. This is a general history of John vs. Thomas and the canon - and a disjointed one.
Book Review: short review
Summary: 3 Stars
To keep this short...this book shouldn't be named "beyond belief, the gospel of Thomas". In that it only briefly covers that gospel in certain spots throughout the book. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good book. In fact, I really liked it. It skims over the fathers of the early church and how the "gnostic" gospels came to be excluded from today's "Bible". Its a beginning for anyone interested in such study and made reading "The Nag Hammadi Library" a little easier to understand.Book Review: Perhaps a great find?
Summary: 3 Stars
Found this today at the annual library sale for 25 cents and now that I have read the reviews on Amazon I am anxious to read it.
Update: of all the books I got that day at the library sale this was the first I started and it has been interesting so far. Not nearly as "heavy" as my James Dunn.
Book Review: Good content, tough read
Summary: 3 Stars
I enjoyed what I learned from this book, but for me it was a difficult read. I hope some of Ms. Pagels other works are not so difficult to get through.Book Review: The "secret" gospel?
Summary: 2 Stars
Perhaps the reason for the variety of assessments of Pagels' latest work is that the book is itself disingenuous. She clearly agrees with the popular stereotype that the quasi-gnostic gospel of Thomas represents an older tradition which reflects the more "accurate" perception of Jesus as a very human teacher. When she repeatedly hints that the John-disciples suppressed the "real" legacy of Jesus, Pagels goes beyond the evidence by suggesting that writers like Irenaeus unfairly--Pagels moralizes about historical figures throughout the book--rejected this Thomas tradition. We historians get uncomfortable with presentist asides by authors whose books purport to be scholarly. Pagels inadvertently gives support to the wild simplifications of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, which would have power-mad bishops and Constantine conspire to turn Christ into God and manufacture a new biblical canon. Pagels concludes with a sermonette on the nature of heresy and ecclesiastical authority. Curiously she ignores some of the scholarship of the very studies cited in the bibliography.