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Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe Reader 7]
eBook by Elaine Pagels
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eBook Category: Spiritual/Religion/General Nonfiction
eBook Description:  Elaine Pagels, one of the world's most important writers and thinkers on religion and history, and winner of the National Book Award for her groundbreaking work The Gnostic Gospels, now reflects on what matters most about spiritual and religious exploration in the twenty-first century. This bold new book explores how Christianity began by tracing its earliest texts, including the secret Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered in Egypt in 1945. When her infant son was diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, Elaine Pagels's spiritual and intellectual quest took on a new urgency, leading her to explore historical and archeological sources and to investigate what Jesus and his teachings meant to his followers before the invention of doctrine--and before the invention of Christianity as we know it. The astonishing discovery of the Gospel of Thomas, along with more than fifty other early Christian texts unknown since antiquity, offers startling clues. Pagels compares such sources as Thomas's gospel (which claims to give Jesus' secret teaching, and finds its closest affinities with kabbalah) with the canonic texts to show how Christian leaders chose to include some gospels and exclude others from the collection we have come to know as the New Testament. To stabilize the emerging Christian church in times of devastating persecution, the church fathers constructed the canon, creed, and hierarchy--and, in the process, suppressed many of its spiritual resources. Drawing on new scholarship--her own, and that of an international group of scholars--that has come to light since the publication in 1979 of The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels shows that what matters about Christianity involves much more than any one set of beliefs. Traditions embodied in Judaism and Christianity can powerfully affect us in heart, mind, and spirit, inspire visions of a new society based on practicing justice and love, even heal and transform us. Provocative, beautifully written, and moving, Beyond Belief, the most personal of Pagels's books to date, shows how "the impulse to seek God overflows the narrow banks of a single tradition." Pagels writes, "What I have come to love in the wealth and diversity of our religious traditions--and the communities that sustain them--is that they offer the testimony of innumerable people to spiritual discovery, encouraging us, in Jesus' words, to 'seek, and you shall find.'"
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc./Random House, Published: 2003
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2003
Available eBook Formats [Secure eReader (recommended)/Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/Adobe Reader 7 - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT (266 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT (242 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT (219 KB], SECURE ADOBE READER 7 FORMAT (641 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [328 KB]
Secure Adobe Reader 7: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Adobe Acrobat Reader ISBN, MobiPocket Reader ISBN: 9781400079087
Microsoft Reader ISBN, eReader (recommended) ISBN: 9781588363015
 
"This luminous and accessible history of early Christian thought offers profound and crucial insights on the nature of God, revelation, and what we mean by religious truth. Those who are moved by religion but who find that they can no longer accept the official doctrines of their church will find this marvelous book a source of inspiration and hope."--Karen Armstrong
"It is as generous as it is rare that a first-rate scholar invites the reader to see and sense how her scholarship and her religious quest became intertwined. Elaine Pagels calls for a generosity of mind as she takes us into the world of those early Christian texts that were left behind but now are with us. Her very tone breathes intellectual and spiritual generosity too rare in academe."--Krister Stendahl "Beyond Belief is a marvelous book--honest and engaging, discussing the core issues of contemporary spirituality with such simplicity and profundity. Elaine Pagels guides readers to enter afresh into the ancient debates over whether Christianity is better understood as a system of doctrines or a spiritual inquiry into the divine. It's a book many readers will treasure for its healing, its good sense, and its permission to think, imagine, and yet believe."--Karen King "A thoughtful and rewarding essay, as we've come to expect from Pagels."--Kirkus Reviews
venly Rest in New York to catch my breath and warm up. Since I had not been in church for a long time, I was startled by my response to the worship in progress??the soaring harmonies of the choir singing with the congregation; and the priest, a woman in bright gold and white vestments, proclaiming the prayers in a clear, resonant voice. As I stood watching, a thought came to me: Here is a family that knows how to face death.
That morning I had gone for an early morning run while my husband and two-and-a-half-year-old son were still sleeping. The previous night I had been sleepless with fear and worry. Two days before, a team of doctors at Babies Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, had performed a routine checkup on our son, Mark, a year and six months after his successful open-heart surgery. The physicians were shocked to find evidence of a rare lung disease. Disbelieving the results, they tested further for six hours before they finally called us in to say that Mark had pulmonary hypertension, an invariably fatal disease, they told us. How much time? I asked. "We don't know; a few months, a few years.? The following day, a team of doctors urged us to authorize a lung biopsy, a painful and invasive procedure. How could this help? It couldn?t, they explained; but the procedure would let them see how far the disease had progressed. Mark was already exhausted by the previous day's ordeal. Holding him, I felt that if more masked strangers poked needles into him in an operating room, he might lose heart??literally??and die. We refused the biopsy, gathered Mark's blanket, clothes, and Peter Rabbit, and carried him home. Standing in the back of that church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable. Before that time, I could only ward off what I had heard and felt the day before. I returned often to that church, not looking for faith but because, in the presence of that worship and the people gathered there??and in a smaller group that met on weekdays in the church basement for mutual encouragement??my defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope. In that church I gathered new energy, and resolved, over and over, to face whatever awaited us as constructively as possible for Mark, and for the rest of us. When people would say to me, "Your faith must be of great help to you,? I would wonder, What do they mean? What is faith? Certainly not simple assent to the set of beliefs that worshipers in that church recited every week (?We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth . . .?)??traditional statements that sounded strange to me, like barely intelligible signals from the surface, heard at the bottom of the sea. Such statements seemed to me then to have little to do with whatever transactions we were making with one another, with ourselves, and??so it was said??with invisible beings. I was acutely aware that we met there driven by need and desire; yet sometimes I dared hope that such communion has the potential to transform us. I am a historian of religion, and so, as I visited that church, I wondered when and how being a Christian...
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