Elaine Pagels
Elaine Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University and a preeminent theological scholar.
She received Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Fellowships in consecutive years.
Her groundbreaking work, The Gnostic Gospels, analyzed 52 early Christian manuscripts from the Nag Hammadi Library discovered in Egypt, revealing the pluralistic nature of early Christianity and women's roles before orthodox canonization.
This bestseller won the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award, earning placement among the Modern Library's 100 best books of the 20th century.
Her scholarship fundamentally changed understanding of early Christian history by exploding myths of unified movement origins.
