In the pages of the New York Sun, New Testament scholar Bruce Chilton subjected Elaine Pagels’ 1979 bestseller The Gnostic Gospels to a bright-light re-evaluation. Among his conclusions:

Ms. Pagels’s … anachronisms have undermined public understanding of early Christianity. Gnosticism proved to be the most powerful philosophical and religious movement of its time because it insisted without compromise that the only truth that matterstranscendsthiscorruptworld. Gnostics often denigrated women as creatures of corruption, condemned any disagreement with their teaching as materialist fantasy, and denied that sexuality had any place in the realm of spirit. Trying to turn this orientation into existentialism, or feminism, or an embrace of the world’s physicality, will only work with an extremely selective handling of the evidence, and deploys a laundered view of its subject … Gnosticism is a deeper and darker force than the revisionist scenario that makes it the prop of modern liberalism. After 30 years, it is time to move beyond the anachronism of The Gnostic Gospels.

He’s right, of course. Still, I have a soft spot in my heart for The Gnostic Gospels. I read it first when I was an undergrad at Penn State and it was hot off the press. The writing was so engaging — and the Nag Hammadi discovery itself was so sensational — that I undertook an independent study on gnosticism (with Gary T. Alexander, a very patient man, who’s now deputy director for academic affairs for the Illinois Board of Higher Education). It was my first exposure to Irenaeus, my first dip into patristics.

Jesuit Father Paul Mankowski, of Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, said it all very well a couple of years ago, in his brief essay The Pagels Imposture. Mankowski, who was once a boxer, took the gloves off for this round.

Hat tip on the Chilton: PaleoJudaica.