Elaine Pagels

Elaine Pagels, a historian of religion, is the Harrington Pear Paine Professor at Princeton University. She received the MacArthur Prize Fellowship for creative work, and is best known for her books on the early history of Christianity, especially The Gnostic Gospels, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and The American Book Award; the critically acclaimed Adam, Eve and the Serpent, and her most recent book entitled The Origin of Satan. Dr. Pagels serves on committees at Harvard University as well as the Bioethics Committee for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in NY; and recently she has been named one of twenty-five most influential working mothers in the United States. She is also the author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, published in May 2003, and REVELATIONS: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, published in March 2012, both of which are New York Times bestsellers.