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redflagfly's review
informative
medium-paced
5.0
A fascinating work of scholarship that manages to analyze and inform without sacrificing the reader's joy at the altar of dryness. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone who wants a better understanding of the evolution of Christian beliefs.
mementomaggie's review
5.0
I consistently love Elaine Pagels ability to provide enough context so that even outsiders like myself raised in a very different tradition can still come to understand the full magnitude of the infighting, politicization, and shade throwing going on in the first five centuries of Christianity.
lauren_endnotes's review against another edition
3.0
Studying classics and religion as an undergraduate, I read a lot of Pagels. Gnostic Gospels was a textbook for a class, and I read many of her articles about the Nag Hammadi texts, etc. Reading Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, a book that has been on my shelf for about 16 years, transported me back to those days of pouring over the texts. It also reminded me of how entire belief systems - institutions - and civilizations are built on the interpretation of a few words. And those few words in this case are the early chapters of Genesis. You know the ones: with the fruit, and the pronouncements of pain, death, and sin.
The book is not an introductory text, and it gets pretty dense. The final two chapters were hard for me to get through as it was a lot of textual analysis and discourse/dialogue between early church fathers. It is frustrating to read, because the realization comes that so much of this discussion and infighting formed ideologies that are clung to today, thousands of years later.
Chapter 4 "The Paradise of Virginity" Regained was the strongest (and most readable) chapter. It set the stage for the later chapters with the debates with Augustine and John Chrysostom, and later between Augustine and Julian.
In the end, Pagels states it flat out: WHY did the Church adopt Augustine's ideas of original sin, asceticism/virginity/chastity above all, loss of liberty and free thought (things that were not part of Jesus's original teachings)??
Simply put, it bolstered the Church. How can people govern themselves if they're innately sinful? if they are sullied by sex and marriage? Only the Church can govern them. (Because they are clearly without sin...)
3.5 stars overall
The book is not an introductory text, and it gets pretty dense. The final two chapters were hard for me to get through as it was a lot of textual analysis and discourse/dialogue between early church fathers. It is frustrating to read, because the realization comes that so much of this discussion and infighting formed ideologies that are clung to today, thousands of years later.
Chapter 4 "The Paradise of Virginity" Regained was the strongest (and most readable) chapter. It set the stage for the later chapters with the debates with Augustine and John Chrysostom, and later between Augustine and Julian.
In the end, Pagels states it flat out: WHY did the Church adopt Augustine's ideas of original sin, asceticism/virginity/chastity above all, loss of liberty and free thought (things that were not part of Jesus's original teachings)??
Simply put, it bolstered the Church. How can people govern themselves if they're innately sinful? if they are sullied by sex and marriage? Only the Church can govern them. (Because they are clearly without sin...)
3.5 stars overall
davidshq's review against another edition
3.0
Pagels work is hard to define much less analyze and provide a rating of. Pagels at the end of her work notes that "In the present book, I set out to see how Christians have interpreted the creation accounts of Genesis." (pg. 152) But the work ranges broadly across the first several hundred years of Christian history with a pervasive interpolation of quotations and insights both ancient and modern. What many may find most objectionable is the questions she raises regarding Augustine's theology, and by implication the Western Church's theology.
kbc's review against another edition
3.0
This is hard to rate because I still have a very Augustinian view of human nature. So I'll leave it here for now.
raehink's review against another edition
4.0
Fascinating commentary on original sin, Stoicism and other religious matters. At least as the worldly scholars understand it. This is deep stuff and it made me examine more closely the doctrines I espouse.
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