Word: gnostic
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...Elaine Pagels. Her much honored 1979 work, The Gnostic Gospels, was one of the rare volumes of religious scholarship to find a general readership. In her new book, The Origin of Satan (Random House; $23), Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, examines how the earliest Christians made their opponents out to be the devil. First the Jews who spurned Christ, then the Romans who persecuted his followers, then other Christians who departed from the orthodoxies of the newly consolidating church -- each group in turn, she says, appears in early Christian texts not just as a philosophical contender...
...what is the fifth gospel? It is the Gospel of Thomas, which church fathers deemed unacceptable because it contained ideas of the heretical Gnostic sects. Indeed, the book ends with Jesus rebuking Peter for trying to oust a woman named Mary from the company of disciples. "Females are not worthy of life," says Peter. Jesus replies, "Look, I shall guide her to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven's kingdom." Three sentences in Thomas survive the seminar's judgment...
...glimpses of this person in the book who, despite all the self-actualization, writes as if she believes that what Julie Andrews or Mahatma Gandhi or the Gnostic Gospels have to tell us is more worthwhile than what makes her tick. Fortunately, one of the world's most interesting women is incapable of writing an uninteresting book, even when she summarizes most of the extant literature on the inner child. A $700,000 advance can buy a lot of self-esteem. But if that's not enough, if only the women whose lives were touched by Steinem were...
...tedious work writing a computer program. As a result, the business of supplying prerecorded software for the micros has grown from almost nothing in 1977 to an estimated $250 million this year, and sales of $1 billion are projected for 1985. Says Jean Yates, a senior analyst at Gnostic Concepts, a consulting firm based in Menlo Park, Calif.: "It's like having a record player. People buy one record player, but they keep buying records year after year." Currently software takes only between 100 and 150 of every dollar spent on hardware. By 1985 the proportion is expected...
Bloom could hide behind the label of allegory easily enough, and claim that his novel is only meant to illustrate a Gnostic view of the universe. But the book is ill-argued and difficult to finish reading, and will not make too many converts...