Elaine Pagels is best known for research and publication involving a cache of over fifty ancient Greek texts discovered and translated into Coptic in Upper Egypt in 1945. After completing her doctorate at Harvard University, she participated with an international team of scholars to edit, translate, and publish several of these texts.

After publishing two monographs and several scholarly articles, she wrote The Gnostic Gospels, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Then, having received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, she joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1982 as the Harrington Professor of History of Religion at Princeton University, where she now teaches and engages in research.

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