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Adam, Eve, and the Serpent
Paperback, 189 pages; Published by Vintage Books; Publication date: September 1989
Synopsis:
Bestselling author Elaine Pagels examines how the founders of the Christian church permanently revolutionized the meaning of sexuality.

The Gnostic Gospels
Rei Edition; Paperback; Published by Vintage Books; Publication date: October 1989
Amazon.com: ...provides an effective introduction to the difficult, almost oxymoronic notion of a Christian Gnosticism. She is always readable, always deeply informed, always richly suggestive of pathways her readers may wish to follow out for themselves...Like many other readers, I am indebted to Professor Pagels for her devoted and sound scholarship, and for her clarity of exposition. -- Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University

The Gnostic Paul : Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters Reprint Edition; Paperback; Published by Trinity Pr Intl; Publication date: March 1992The Origin of Satan
Reprint Edition; Paperback; Published by Vintage Books; Publication date: May 1996

Card catalog description: Who is Satan in the New Testament, and what is the evil that he represents? In this groundbreaking book, Elaine Pagels, Princeton's distinguished historian of religion, traces the evolution of Satan from its origins in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan is at first merely obstructive, to the New Testament, where Satan becomes the Prince of Darkness, the bitter enemy of God and man, evil incarnate. In The Origin of Satan, Pagels shows that the four Christian gospels tell two very different stories.

The first is the story of Jesus' moral genius: his lessons of love, forgiveness, and redemption.

The second tells of the bitter conflict between the followers of Jesus and their fellow Jews, a conflict in which the writers of the four gospels condemned as creatures of Satan those Jews who refused to worship Jesus as the Messiah.

Writing during and just after the Jewish war against Rome, the evangelists invoked Satan to portray their Jewish enemies as God's enemies too. As Pagels then shows, the church later turned this satanic indictment against its Roman enemies, declaring that pagans and infidels were also creatures of Satan, and against its own dissenters, calling them heretics and ascribing their heterodox views to satanic influences.