When her infant son is diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, award-winning author Elaine Pagels is moved to explore her faith. In Beyond Belief, her spiritual journey prompts her to re-examine the faith of early Christians. She looks at faith before there was doctrine and discovers that Christianity as we know it could have been radically different. Pagels compares the traditional New Testament Gospel of John with the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and uses the contrasting gospels to investigate the politics of Christianity. In the process Elaine Pagels shows how Christians found in the early gospels stunning new interpretations of 'virgin birth', the creation of Eve and the nature of our relationship to God. As a result, she argues, alternate versions of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ have been lost to the world. In Beyond Belief, the most personal of Pagels's books, her scholarship is accessible and alive. As she did with The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels will challenge and transform what you know of Christianity.
