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7db54e4
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If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
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Elaine Pagels |
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d9c2fe8
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When John accuses "evildoers" of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether--or how much--to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as , but as they saw themselves--as --we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God'..
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apostles
gentiles
pauline-epistles
sectarianism
revelations
apocalypse
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Elaine Pagels |
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5889eb1
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The gnostic understands Christ's message not as offering a set of answers, but as encouragement to engage in a process of searching: "seek and inquire about the ways you should go, since there is nothing else as good as this."48 The rational soul longs to see with her mind, and perceive her kinsmen, and learn about her root ... in order that she might receive what is hers ...49 What is the result? The author declares that she attains fulfil..
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Elaine Pagels |
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7f5641b
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What interested these gnostics far more than past events attributed to the "historical Jesus" was the possibility of encountering the risen Christ in the present.49 The Gospel of Mary illustrates the contrast between orthodox and gnostic viewpoints. The account recalls what Mark relates: Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene ... She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned..
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Elaine Pagels |
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8f144d1
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What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.
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religion
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Elaine Pagels |
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c244752
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By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil. [...] By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth.
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Elaine Pagels |
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9c38c2c
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I did not want to die, but desperately wanted to be anywhere but there; the pain was unbearable. Yet in that vision, or whatever it was, I felt that the intertwined knots were the connections with the people we loved, and that nothing else could have kept us in this world.
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mourning
grief
loss
death
religion
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Elaine Pagels |
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38b3956
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Why do we feel guilty, even when we've done nothing to bring on illness or death--even when we've done everything possible to prevent it? Suffering feels like punishment, as cultural anthropologists observe; no doubt that's one reason why people still tell the story of Adam and Eve, which interprets suffering that way.
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mourning
illness
grief
loss
suffering
death
bible
punishment
guilt
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Elaine Pagels |
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9673a85
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Shaken by emotional storms, I realized that choosing to feel guilt, however painful, somehow seemed to offer reassurance that such events did not happen at random.... If guilt is the price we pay for the illusion that we have some control over nature, many of us are willing to pay it. I was. To begin to release the weight of guilt, I had to let go of whatever illusion of control it pretended to offer, and acknowledge that pain and death are..
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mourning
pain
grief
loss
suffering
nature
death
guilt
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Elaine Pagels |
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37fcf01
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What clear is that meaning may not be something we . We found no meaning in our son's death, or in the deaths of countless others. The most we could hope was that we might be able to meaning.
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mourning
grief
loss
meaning
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Elaine Pagels |
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d7a05f3
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No longer married, suddenly I was . From Latin, the name means "emptied." Far worse; it felt like being torn in half, ripped apart from the single functioning organism that had been our family, our lives. Shattered, the word kept recurring; the whole pattern shattered, just as the mountain rocks had shattered his body."
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mourning
grief
loss
relationships
widows
families
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Elaine Pagels |
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3d8f8b1
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So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.
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Elaine Pagels |
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84240c4
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Are we to believe that Adam and Eve actually heard God's footsteps rustling in the garden of Eden, as the text suggests, when it says that Adam and Eve hid themselves,
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Elaine Pagels |
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cdf7de8
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Rediscovering the controversies that occupied early Christianity sharpens our awareness of the major issue in the whole debate, then and now: What is the source of religious authority? For the Christian the question takes more specific form: What is the relation between the authority of ones own experience and that claimed for the scriptures, the ritual and the clergy?
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Elaine Pagels |
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13b39b1
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This debate over Genesis revealed a major disagreement among second-century Christians, a disagreement whose outcome would shape church doctrine ever after.
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Elaine Pagels |
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95a30cd
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The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself--or God--can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with th..
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Elaine Pagels |
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dabd80b
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The Gospel of Philip takes up the same theme: Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not reveal himself in the manner [in which] he was, but in the manner in which [they would] be able to see him. He revealed himself to [them all. He revealed himself] to the great as great ... (and) to the small as small.69 To the immature disciple, Jesus appears as a child; to the mature, as an old man, symbol of wisdom. As the gnostic teacher Theodotu..
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Elaine Pagels |