Elaine Pagels is a historian of religion and has enjoyed teaching generations of students at Princeton University for more than forty years. She is best known for her early research and publication involving a cache of over fifty sacred Jewish, Greek and Christian texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945. These texts include secret gospels that some early Christian leaders denounced as heretical and successfully kept out of public view for nearly two millennia, and their rediscovery has changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity.

After receiving her doctorate at Harvard University, she participated with an international team of scholars to translate, edit and publish several of these texts. She published two monographs and several scholarly articles, and wrote The Gnostic Gospels, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1982, after receiving a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, she joined the faculty at Princeton University as the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of History of Religion. She has received honors from Harvard University and, in 2016, the National Medal for the Humanities.