A letter-writer asked me to look into this classic book in the field and check it for accuracy. Here's the scoop: Though it was written some time ago, it lives up to its future lineage as quite the usual mix we've come to expect from the modern Jesus Seminar crowd -- a mix of accurate information mixed in with speculation of varying degrees being passed off as accurate information. You'll have to discern which is which yourself, but this may help you decide.

A good cautionary premise: Pagels is one of those critics infected with that naive sort of universalism that supposes that every religious belief is valid if it is valid for the holder. Now The Gnostic Gospels is admittedly an excellent primer for the history of the Nag Hammadi texts, the beliefs and writings of the Gnostic movement, and some aspects of church history. You can trust Pagels on these accounts, certainly, for information if not for critical evaluation. Where you have to watch out with this text is where the typical line on the dates of the Gospels is uncritically accepted, and where it seems that the heretics are given favor just because their beliefs are preferred by Pagels over Christianity's intolerant exclusivism -- her profession of neutrality as to who is "right" or "wrong" notwithstanding. Case in point: Pagels' treatment of the differences in belief over the resurrection of Christ -- orthodoxy's physical body versus the intangible ghost and spiritual "resurrection" of the Gnostics. The orthodox view is misrepresented by both bad data (the same misinterpretation of "flesh and blood" we have found Robert Price guilty of) and by unwarranted speculation (it is supposed that Luke's Emmaus road story suggests a "different view" of resurrection, when there is no grounds at all for saying that it does), and is not even described with reference to Jewish views of resurrection, which were ALWAYS physical and would seal the matter clearly in favor of the orthodox view. Pagels can hardly be trusted for a fair evaluation of the data when not all of the data is presented.

On the other hand, the Gnostics are given every possible break: Their cowardly avoidance of persecution by adaptation of syncretism is seen as a case of independent and worthwhile thinking (hard to believe, when that sort of attitude was normal for the period in Rome); their self-authenticating internal witness to "truth" is described in sympathetic terms; likewise their appeal to having had "secret wisdom" or knowledge, certified only by the claim that the giving of the knowledge to them was secret as well! A critical thinker would not give such claims the time of day, but Pagels is not interested in determining who is right or wrong; she thinks only that the differences were matters of power and politics, where only might made right and the history was written by the winners who were only interested in making the losers look bad rather than in truth versus fiction. Subjective and personal interpretation is all. And postmodernism had its early predecessors.

Of the rest of the work, little needs to be said; the basics are the same, and there are those few outrageous statements you can easily pick out. (Did Martin Luther really mean the same thing as the Gnostics when he said that the true church was "invisible"??) The Gnostics, like Pagels thought that mixing truth with error was just no big deal; but a wiser authority than Pagels tells us that broad roads lead inevitably to destruction.