Lies and Slander

A few days ago, a comment was posted by a reader who accused me of “lies and slander” because of my completely accurate remarks about deceptive statements by Elaine Pagels. Her works belong to a new category of scholarship that does not have at its heart a desire to learn facts, to research all of the relevant available documents, and try to understand real history. It belongs, rather, to this new kind of scholarship (new as in about 100 years old) that is more akin to a legal brief than to anything truly scientific. Just enough facts are gathered for an advocate to make a case, and all opposing facts are completely overlooked.

The first time I witnessed her ability to distort history was on television several years ago, and what I heard was quite astonishing. She stated her own history of the ancient Church, one in which women had all the authority. This, in itself, is not only a false history, but a demonstration that her mind works along political lines that would have been alien to the ancient Christians. She went on to say that Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote his epistles that placed emphasis on the authority of bishops (more than simple authority was taught by Ignatius), because he wanted to strengthen his own power. Of course, the truth is that Saint Ignatius wrote all of those epistles after his death sentence, as he was being taken by soldiers to Rome where he was to die in the arena, and after he had left behind all of the authority and responsibility that he had in the Church in Antioch to a new bishop, being led away as a prisoner in chains. Whether or not a person like Elaine Pagels wants to agree with the teaching about the epicopal office contained in his letters, he could not have furthered his “power” in any possible way, because he was going to be killed in a very short time, executed as entertainment for a crowd of Roman pagans.

Pagels’ writings about Saint Irenaeus (c.132-202) portray another ancient bishop as a man trying to strengthen his own power, as a rather nasty fellow who suppressed the truth just to amplify his own position. The truth is, every time a bishop held his head up during the days of the Roman persecution, he took his life in his hands. Every time he drew attention to himself he risked death. As Saint Gregory the Great reminds us, early on in Pastoral Care, the bishops of the early centuries were the first in line to be martyred.

How tragic it is that a modern feminist, thinking in worldly terms, ascribes mean motives to great saints who faced the penalty of death every day of their lives. The idea that their service was about power is rather ridiculous, because they had no power in a time when they were living like fugitives, always subject at any moment to someone’s whim to denounce them to the authorities to be killed. Their lives were spent on the altar of sacrifice every day. It was not about power.

Saints Irenaeus of Lyons and Ignatius of Antioch are not here to defend their own reputations. Talk about lies and slander.
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By the way, here are the two relevant comments, the first by my detractor, the second my reply:

Jordan Stratford+ said...
Her claim was that she discovered these ancient writings and that the Church has been hiding them away from the world, due to their fear that the Gnostic writings would be discovered, and prove that there were different versions of Christianity from the start. (quoting me)

Dr. Pagels has never claimed to have discovered anything. You are no doubt aware of this. So why say what you know is not true?

She made up a few fictional items to elaborate on genuine history in the process, such as making up entire passages from her own mind and attributing them to one of the Church fathers. (again, quoting me)


While she has been accused of taking some passages out of context to support her thesis, your claim that she "made up a few fictional items" is bearing false witness. Shame on you.And your use of the term scholar in quotes to somehow imply that Dr. Pagels is not one is simply an ad hominem attack - uncharitable and un-Christian.Lies and slander. This is what you preach for the first Sunday after Christmas?
7:06 PM

I replied with the facts, as follows:

Fr. Robert Hart said...
About Pagel’s claim to have discovered suppressed writings, here are her words from Beyond Belief), p.31 ;

"When I entered the Harvard doctoral program, I was astonished to hear from the other students that Professors Helmut Koester and George MacRae, who taught the early history of Christianity, had file cabinets filled with 'gospels' and 'apocrypha' written during the first centuries… When my fellow students and I investigated these sources we found that they revealed diversity within the Christian movement that later, 'official' versions of Christian history had suppressed so effectively that only now in the Harvard graduate school, did we hear about them."

But, the "suppression" she wites about never occurred, and one did not have to explore file cabinets in Harvard to find these Gnostic works. One needed only to read some of the Fathers of the Church, which makes her ignorance until that time (as a Doctoral student) rather puzzling. First I quote Pagels herself, and then a comment by Matthew Gross (I will prvide the link to the full work by Gross).

On page 97 of Beyond Belief, Pagels has simply invented a lie, or fiction if you prefer, which she repeated later in the book (on p. 176):

“But in 367 [AD] Athanasius, the zealous bishop of Alexandria––an admirer of Irenaeus––issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all writings, except for those he specifically listed as 'acceptable,' even 'canonical' …But someone––perhaps monks at the monastery of St. Pachomius––gather dozens of the books Athanasius wanted to burn, removed them from the monastery library, sealed them in a heavy, six-foot jar, and intending to hide them, buried them on a nearby hillside near Nag Hammadi.”

Gross says it simply:
“In this section of the chapter, Pagels continues her claim that Irenaeus and later Athanasius acted in an authoritarian manner, demanding that certain writings be destroyed. Pagels evidence for this is Athanasius’ Easter letter of 367. However, Athanasius letter of AD 367 does not contain any demands that any writings be destroyed. It does not address Egyptian monks at all. It does not name any specific writings other than ones that are acceptable or canonical. At this critical point it appears that Pagelian orthodoxy has slipped into the realm of falsehood, of myth, and of speculation in an attempt to bolster its plausibility.”

Gross further writes: "Pagels was forced to mischaracterize the writings of Athanasius and actually resorted at one point to fabricating a quote in order to make her point.”

Here is the Link: http://www.thirdmill.org/newfiles/mat_gross/NT.Gross.Matthew_BeyondBeliefbyElainePagels.html

Other such critiques are available, and here is a link to one more:

http://www.friesian.com/pagels.htm

For now this should keep you busy.

10:31 PM