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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Decades ago, in fact, 30 years ago, precisely, I published a piece in the New Yorker with the title, The Devil Problem.

It was a profile of Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity,

who would also improbably become a best-selling author.

Pagels' 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels, was scholarly and rigorous,

but also accessible outside the academy and widely read.

She changed how a lot of people, Christian, and those we might call Christian curious, how they thought about the Bible itself. Pagels went on to write

The Origin of Satan, as well as works on Adam and Eve in the Book of Revelation. Her new book,

out next week, a kind of culmination of her career, is called Miracles and Wonder.

It takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the

story's immaculate conception and the resurrection.

Meeting Pagel's again 30 years later, I was struck by just how focused she is on the topic of belief in Christian

history and how the world of two millennia ago and the historical landscape, the world of the

Jews and the Romans and Jesus, is to her so vividly alive.

We first met, you're not going to believe this, 30 years ago, and shortly thereafter

you published a book and I decided to write about you. You had suffered unimaginable loss.

First, one of your children had died after a long illness and then your husband, Heinz Pagels, had an

accident and died while hiking. And you told me, and this is a quote from you at that time,

I found that in times of grief, the church has little to say. It's just too remote. How did that

loss of those losses affect your relationship to faith at that time?

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