Elaine Pagels celebrated her seventieth birthday in 2013 and this volume constitutes a kind of Festschrift honouring her work by seeking to build upon it. Pagels, of course, is one of those rare academics whose career has seen the combination of works of scholarly akribeia, which have had real influence in the narrow corridors of her discipline, with works of what might be termed haute vulgarisation, applying that term positively, which have ‘impacted’ (to use the speak of modern British academia) very significantly upon the world extra muros academiae. In fact the title of this multi-authored volume cites probably the most important of those latter works, The Gnostic gospels of 1979, in its title rather than any of her more conventionally scholarly works.

Pagels's contribution to the study of early Christianity is considerable, as Philippa Townsend makes plain in her opening essay devoted to Pagels's work. While not straightforwardly a pioneer (Walter Bauer's work of the 1930s, Orthodoxie und Ketzerei, translated into English in the early 1970s, at least in part, as well as the work of her teacher, Helmust Koester, anticipate much of what she has had to say), she has done more than anyone else to reintegrate texts previously conceived as Gnostic and heretical into a proper account of early Christianity, an undertaking which has involved both an attempt to reveal the tendentious character of the writings of heresiologists, as well as to read the works of their apparent enemies with a greater sympathy towards and awareness of their own aims and religiosity (reading them on their own terms). This in turn has involved, inter alia, a greater sensitivity to issues of early Christian diversity, to the importance of rituals as well as doctrine in an assessment of early Christian identity, and a sharp scepticism towards the terminology (for example, heresy/orthodoxy, Gnostic/Gnosticism), which Pagels inherited as a student Christian origins. These essays build upon that legacy, which, though in its specifics contested by some, in its more general concerns and in the manner in which it has sought to frame the debate about early Christianity has come to be taken for granted.

The volume, consisting of nineteen essays after Townsend's introductory piece, divides into five parts, all of which, as the title suggests, reflect parts of Pagels's oeuvre: ‘The social world of early Christians’; ‘Creating orthodoxy and heresy’; ‘Ritual and myth’; ‘Christianity in Egypt’; and ‘New Testament studies’. The contributions are in the main solid and thoughtful. Given their number, one can only pick out a few for comment. Michael Williams argues forcefully for a questioning of the idea that those who have been dubbed Gnostic were haters of the world, pointing up places in their works where beauty and the life of the community are emphasised. Karen King emphasises the complex ideological commonalities between a number of Christian texts, including those traditionally termed ‘gnostic’, on the question of martyrdom and persecution, furthering her frequently articulated view, itself reflective of her colleague Pagels's concerns, that early Christianity needs to be remapped in ways which better take account of complex ideological criss-crossing. Einar Thomassen shows how the supposed Valentinianism of the Apocalypse of James is imported and consists in the Valentinian ritual instructions for the dying, which were more widely known. April de Cornick, while paying tribute to Pagels, disagrees with the latter's view that Gnostics were not a definable group, providing a set of possibly questionable arguments as to why the so-called orthodox opposed them. Nicola Denzey Lewis, in an essay which contrasts with that of de Cornick, attempts to point up the similarities between the idea of baptism in the Gospel of Philip and the works of other Christian authors. Eduard Iricinschi writes interestingly about the way in which Nag Hammadi Codex II can be seen as written to resolve tensions between Genesis i–iii's apparent advocacy of the need to procreate and the commitment of the monastic community, which was responsible for copying the manuscripts, to certain ascetic ideals. In an essay with a certain polemical edge, Ismo Dundeberg attacks the recent attempts by scholars to defend the historicity of John (represented especially at the Society for Biblical Literature by the John, Jesus and History Group) and to do so by suppressing well-known arguments which have usually been used to support an opposite position (for example, arguments which would claim the disciple whom Jesus loved as the author of the Gospel and as an eye-witness of the events he describes). Dundeberg sees such approaches as recidivist and an affront to more diverse understandings of Christian origins. Harold Attridge makes some interesting remarks on the relationship of John's account of the Last Supper and accounts of symposia in Greek, especially Plato's Symposium, not least in relation to questions of love, but avoids an outburst of parallelomania. In a typically stimulating essay John Gager looks at the whole issue of Paul's passionate character, seeing this as something which links the pre-Christian Paul with the Christian version. In the course of the essay he also defends the view that Paul had been a Jewish missionary before he became a ‘Christian’ one, and outlines the reasons why Paul was persecuted by his fellow Jews. In discussing the reception of Paul, a particular concern of Pagels, he shows how Paul's supposed friends, in their particular understandings of the Apostle, could equally be conceived as his enemies. In the final essay of the volume, on 6 Ezra (what passes normally as 4 Ezra xvxvi), John W. Marshall makes a spirited case for seeing the work as Jewish, and hence an important witness to a more apocalyptically-orientated Judaism in Asia Minor, which may itself have influenced the Montanists.

All in all this is a helpful collection of essays, although it is difficult to see quite how their content goes ‘beyond the Gnostic Gospels’ in any sense other than that they are written in a period after that publication of that important popular work (the editors make little attempt to gloss the title save to say that the essays build upon the work of Elaine Pagels, which is not quite an adequate explanation). Moreover, the volume might have benefited from an analysis of more critical approaches to the work of Pagels (Dundeberg does that in part but not as a critic himself) and through an assessment of the present scholarly map of the study of Christian origins in the light of Pagels's work. But these are small criticisms, and by and large we can be grateful to the editors for putting together such a work in celebration of one of early Christianity's most influential students.