Tuesday, April 25, 2006
ELAINE PAGELS CREATES HISTORY
According to Catholic World News, Elaine Pagels has taken such liberties with Irenaeus' text that she has essentially created new history rather than reported on the history of which we have records. According to Pontifical Biblical Institute scholar Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J.:
Pagels has carpentered a non-existent quotation, putatively from an ancient source, by silent suppression of relevant context, silent omission of troublesome words, and a mid-sentence shift of 34 chapters backwards through the cited text, so as deliberately to pervert the meaning of the original. While her endnote calls the quote "conflated," the word doesn't fit even as a euphemism: what we have is not conflation but creation.
Pagels is THE source for commentary on the Gnostic Gospels, but if this article is accurate, she should not be. Mankowski says:
The Gnostic Gospels, like those portions of Pagels's later work with which I am familiar, is chock-full of tendentious readings and instances where counter-evidence is suppressed. The example of "creativity" here discussed may fairly be called a representative specimen of her methodology, and was singled out not because it's the worst example of its kind but because it's among the most unambiguous. No one who consults the source texts could give Pagels a pass, and that means she forfeits the claim to reliability as a scholar. Attractive as her ideological sympathies may be to many persons -- including many academics -- she does not deserve to be ranked with serious textual scholars like Claremont's James Robinson, and her testimony on the accuracy of inventions such as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code cannot be solicited without irony.
I am not calling for academic sanctions but, more simply, for clarification. Pagels should be billed accurately -- not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist. Her oeuvre is that of fiction -- in fact, historical romance. Had New York Times reporters sought Barbara Cartland's views on discoveries in Merovingian religion or paleography, most of us would find it odd, but we'd expect them to make it plain that was romance, not history, in which she had the right to an opinion.
There's a discussion of this at Bettnet as well.
