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Reviewed by:
  • Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels
  • Daniel Boyarin (bio)
Elaine Pagels, Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (New York: Viking, 2012), 246 pp.

This quite marvelous book is marred by a terribly misleading title. It is not a reading of the Book of Revelation, of which we have, by now, many, but something much more important and interesting, namely, an exploration of the way that Revelation shaped and formed early Christianity and thence the Christianity of our world today. It would be difficult, without Elaine Pagels’s own skills, to sum up in a hundred words or so the achievement of this book. Let me just say that it is the best short account of the formation of Orthodox Christianity that I have ever come across. Among the themes that Pagels manages to address are the struggle over prophetic and episcopal versions of Christianity in the second century and into the third, the exclusion of the so-called Gnostics from the Christian fold by such figures as Irenaeus, and then later, in the fourth century, the Nicene Controversy. She argues (almost compellingly) that the Nag Hammadi Library was the library of an “orthodox” Pachomian monastery nearby. In all of these central, crucial moments in the invention of the church, the Book of Revelation was there, as Pagels brilliantly shows. Two other qualifications other than the title: the notes are very difficult to use since one has to keep paging back and forth even to find out to what chapter a given note belongs, and there is no bibliography, while books and articles are frequently listed in shortened form (all my complaints directed at the publisher!). [End Page 576]

Daniel Boyarin

Daniel Boyarin is Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity; Sparks of the Logos: Essays in Rabbinic Hermeneutics; Carnal Israel; Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism; and, most recently, The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ.

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