Somebody else who can tell that Elaine Pagels is a fraud...
...can be found doing a brief but devastating little number on her here. Best quote:
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.Her scholarship is actually much worse than Fr. Mankowski presents it. Just complete crapola. If she hadn't written The Gnostic Gospels, and I had, and I had turned it in to the Princeton classics department as my senior thesis, they would have absolutely crucified me. But the Princeton Department of Religious Studies gave her tenure...then again, Harvard's Department of Religion hired John Shelby Spong as a professor, Spong being the guy who (if memory serves) once issued an opinion about Neanderthal customs and cited as his authoritative source The Clan of the Cave Bear. If what you want is serious professional standards, an American Department of Religion is not the place to look.
posted by Ken Pierce @ 3:20 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Dear Kenny,
Very perceptive of you to have remarked this from outside of academia. At Harvard everybody knew that the "Department for the Study of Religion" was an embarrassment- real scholars went to study things the religion of their interes in either Eastern Languages and Civilizaion or in the History Department.- Guest
Well, it doesn't really require all that much perception. You read David Hackett Fischer, and then you read J. B. Bury's History of Greece, and then -- exactly as you were saying -- when you want to know something about religious history specifically, you start with a classics scholar writing about religious history, say, Walter Burkert's Greek Religion. And then you read Elaine Pagels. And it just stinks to high heaven.
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