Reedings.com

Paul Mankowski discredits Pagels' scholarship

In the May 2006 issue of The Catholic World Report, Paul Mankowski, SJ, a professor at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, writes of "The Pagels Imposture" taking to task Elaine Pagels for her devious "scholarship." Since Pagels is an academic luminary, long established as a professor at Princeton University "and since her The Gnostic Gospels underlies Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code "calling attention to her errors is quite important.

Mankowski notes that "Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels is in large measure a polemic against St. Irenaeus" (p. 38) of Lyons and the patriarchal theology of the second century he represents. Looking carefully at her citations, however, it is distressingly clear that she conflates quotations and deletes passages to tailor Irenaeus so as to justify her own Gnostic approach to Christianity. Mankowski provides the Latin text to show how Pagels distorts Irenaeus. "Put simply," he concludes, "Irenaeus did not write what Prof. Pagels wished he would have written, so she made good the defect by silently changing the text. Creativity, when applied to one's sources, is not a compliment. She is a very naughty historian" (p. 39). Indeed, he concludes: "Pagels should be billed accurately "not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist. Her oeuvre is that of fiction "in fact, historical romance" (p. 39).

Evaluating a Christianity Today review of Ridchardson's Secrets of the Koran

In the June 2006 issue of Christianity Today, Warren Larson, director of the Zwemer Center for Muslim Studies at Columbia International University, reviewed seven books by American evangelicals that evaluate Islam. Three of the seven he finds sorely deficient and is especially critical of books by John MacArthur and Don Richardson, the veteran missionary and author Peace Child and Eternity in Their Hearts.

I've read many books that are critical of Islam, but very few of them were written by evangelicals. Having read Don Richardson's Secrets of the Koran: Revealing Insights into Islam's Holy Book (Regal, 2003), however, I was struck by Larson's harsh judgment of it. He denounces Richardson's "art of vilification," the "lack of integrity" in his alleged "fact-based commentary, his "unfair assumptions" and generally negative view of Mohammad. So I've gone back to Richardson's book to see if Christianity Today treats him fairly.