I thought her stuff was garbage anyway
My brother-in-law, the pastor, occasionally gets a kick out quoting "Biblical scholar" Elaine Pagels to me. He knows that she's got her theology all out of whack, but Pagels and I have a history.
You see, in one of my upper-division English courses at Cal Poly, I made a mistake. I unwittingly got a professor (whose name is lost in the mists of time) who was practically a caricature of your raving, left-wing, feminist, post-modern loon. One of the books on the reading list that quarter was Pagels' "Adam, Eve and the Serpent." Pagels' "scholarship" may go over well with the Jesus Seminar, but it was something more akin to a lead weight with me. In the essay I wrote on Pagels' book, I ripped into her book. I almost wish I still had the paper, because it was the non-electronic equivalent of a most-vicious fisking.
The professor had an interesting grading method -- she outsourced it to the class. At the end of the quarter, you took everything you had written and packaged it together along with five blank pieces of paper. The portfolios were then assembled into groups of five or six and then put on reserve at the library. During finals week, students would go in and check out their fellow students papers and assign grades. The professor would then average the grades given you by your fellow students, and that was your grade.
Those five blank pieces of paper? Those were there so your fellow classmates could (anonymously or not) comment on your work. Needless to say my conservative Christian views which were revealed in my Pagels essay and another on Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," were unpopular with some. I had two or three comments -- anonymous of course -- in my packet calling me names not suitable for publication on a family Web site. Others I know wrote innocuous comments or faint praise and then gave me "Ds" or "Fs." How do I know this? Because some of them weren't smart enough to hide their "grade sheet" when they're sitting at the same table as you are.
Needless to say, that was the only college English class I took that I got less than an 'A' in. I should also note, and I know this because I read everything everyone in the class wrote, that I was one of the better writers in that class -- if I was getting a B, then there was maybe one person who deserved an A. Maybe.
Anyway, I told you that story so I could point you to this story by Father Paul Mankowski on one Elaine Pagels. The key sentences:
To recapitulate: 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.
Think about that for a second, she created a quote that required her to start the sentence one place, and then rewind thirty-four chapters back to grab the second part of the sentence.
Mankowski says he only wants people to stop calling Pagels a "scholar" and instead refer to her as a "fiction writer." I'm a little more career-thirsty, I want Pagels tossed out of academia.
Yes, the 'B' still burns.
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"The professor would then average the grades given you by your fellow students, and that was your grade." What an inventive way for the professor to get out of doing her own work. I don't suppose she ended up being dean / VP / president at that institution? 🙂