Adam, Eve, and the Serpent Quotes

“What Christians see, or claim to see, in Genesis 1-3 changed as the church itself changed from a dissident Jewish sect to a popular movement persecuted by the Roman government, and changed further as this movement increasingly gained members throughout Roman society, until finally even the Roman emperor himself converted to the new faith and Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“By the beginning of the fifth century Catholic Christians lived as subjects of an empire they could no longer consider alien, much less wholly evil.
[...] By the beginning of the fifth century few who dealt with the government firsthand - certainly not Chrysostom and finally not Augustine either - would have identified it with God's reign on earth.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“So long as Christians remained members of a suspect society, subject to death, the boldest among them maintained that, since demons controlled the government and inspired its agents, the believer could gain freedom at their hands only in death.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“[W]hat made Christians especially dangerous to the Roman order was their refusal to pay what Romans regarded as ordinary respect to their Roman rulers; and this brought some of them into direct and total opposition to the temporal as well as the divine authorities - to the emperors and to their divine patrons, the gods.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Are we to believe that Adam and Eve actually heard God’s footsteps rustling in the garden of Eden, as the text suggests, when it says that Adam and Eve hid themselves,”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Augustine reflects that “what made me a slave to it was the habit [consuetudo] of satisfying an insatiable lust.”31”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Excessive wealth, enormous power, and luxury, Chrysostom charges, are destroying the integrity of the churches. Clerics, infected by the disease of “lust for authority,” are fighting for candidates on the basis of family prominence, wealth, or partisanship.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Christians who remain faithful to their baptismal vows can expect the same heavenly reward: heaven is not arranged in first-class, second-class, and third-class compartments, according to the degree of renunciation one has practiced in this life.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Ptolemy’s disciples told the story, before the beginning of time there existed in the primal aeon only the primordial Source of all being, what they called the abyss, the depth, or primal origin, progenitor of all that was to come into being.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“This debate over Genesis revealed a major disagreement among second-century Christians, a disagreement whose outcome would shape church doctrine ever after.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“In the beginning, God created humanity. But now humanity creates God. This is the way it is in the world—human beings invent gods and worship their creation. It would be more fitting for the gods to worship human beings!38”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Even Tacitus admitted that “whatever their origin, [the Jews’] observances are sanctioned by their antiquity,”64 and the Romans respected tradition. Christians, however, had no such excuse.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Only the Jews, of all the nations under Roman rule, had won the right to separate their political obligations from religious ones, to obey Roman law as subjects of the emperor but to worship their own God.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Jesus—for example, his categorical rejection of divorce, or his statement that “if anyone does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26)?”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Among Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries no one questioned the legitimacy of divorce. The only question was what constituted adequate grounds;”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Both polygamy and divorce, on the other hand, increased opportunities for reproduction—not for women, but for the men who wrote the laws and benefited from them.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“Many pagans who had been brought up to regard marriage essentially as a social and economic arrangement, homosexual relationships as an expected element of male education, prostitution, both male and female, as both ordinary and legal, and divorce, abortion, contraception, and exposure of unwanted infants as matters of practical expedience, embraced, to the astonishment of their families, the Christian message, which opposed these practices.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“thus the story of Eden was made to reinforce the patriarchal structure”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“[W]hen the emperor Constantine abruptly changed Roman policy from one of persecuting Christians to protecting and favoring them with massive gifts of money, tax exemptions, and enormous prestige, the bishops, now in political favor, sometimes used these new resources to promote unanimity; thus in 381, the Christian emperor Theodosius made "heresy" a crime against the state.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“The great majority of Christians of the first few centuries did not advocate - and probably did not imagine - that such moral equality could be implemented in society. Most assumed, no doubt, that they could realize such moral equality only in the coming Kingdom of God.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“No intelligent person, the sophisticated pagan might have explained, actually worshiped images of the gods, or worshiped living emperors; instead, the gods' images - and the images of the emperors themselves - provided an accessible focus for revering the cosmic forces they represented.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“What would prevail in Christian tradition was not only the stark sayings of the gospels attributed to Jesus and the encouragements to celibacy that Paul urges upon believers in 1 Corinthians, but versions of these austere teachings modified to suit the purposes of the churches of the first and second centuries.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“What each of us perceives and acts upon as true has much to do with our situation, social, political, cultural, religious, or philosophical.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“I an not saying that religious ideas are nothing but a cover for political motives [...]. Instead, I intend to show that religious insights and moral choices, in actual experience, coincide with practical ones.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“[T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“we, who valued above everything else the acquisition of wealth and possessions, now bring what we have into common ownership, and share with those in need; we, who hated and destroyed one another, refusing to live with those of a different race, now live intimately with them.”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“American revolutionaries would invoke the same creation story against the British king’s claim to divine right, declaring: We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights …”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity

“But what made Christians especially dangerous to the Roman order was their refusal to pay what Romans regarded as ordinary respect to their Roman rulers;”
― Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity