Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by ElainePagels (review)

Daniel Boyarin

Common Knowledge, Volume 19, Issue 3, Fall 2013, p. 576 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ckn/summary/v019/19.3.boyarin.html

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76 bibliographical classic, Allan Stevenson’s The Problem of the Missale Speciale (1967),

another full- length treatment of a single book. Even the sense of humor displayed by Stevenson has its counterpart here: when, for example, Needham explains two hypotheses as to when the printing of Galileo’s book began, he calls the one that postulates a later date “the dilatory view.” At the end Needham praises the many nameless actors, such as papermakers and printing- shop workers, who played roles in the story; and he closes with “the mules and oxen whose humble labor moved sheets of Sidereus Nuncius across the face of Europe, under the eyes of the boundless sky.” This passage, occurring in a work of bibliographical analysis, epitomizes the work’s unusual accomplishment: it breaks new ground in the study of a major book, sets forth its discoveries in an engaging narrative, and in the process shows how bibliography can be essential to intellectual history.— G. Thomas Tanselledoi 10.1215/0961754X-2282044

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 read-ing 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 sec-ond 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 Ham-madi 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!).— Daniel Boyarindoi 10.1215/0961754X-2282053