[6] She follows the well-known thesis that Walter Bauer first put forth in 1934 and argues that the Christian church was founded in a society espousing contradictory viewpoints.

The programme triggered a national furore, and marked a significant moment in the changes that religious broadcasting was already undergoing at that time.

According to Pagels's interpretation of an era different from ours, Gnosticism "attracted women because it allowed female participation in sacred rites".

Aided by a MacArthur Fellowship grant in 1981, she researched and wrote Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, which examines the creation account and its role in the development of sexual attitudes in the Christian West.

In both The Gnostic Gospels and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Pagels focuses especially on the way that women have been viewed throughout Jewish and Christian history.

[9] These personal tragedies deepened her spiritual awareness and afterwards Pagels began research leading to The Origin of Satan.

Pagels suggests that Gospel of Thomas, along with other non-canonical texts, portrays Jesus not as God, but as a human teacher uncovering the divine light within individuals.

She supports this by noting that in John's Gospel, the apostle Thomas is portrayed as a disciple who struggles with doubt, needing physical proof to believe, while John emphasizes the divine nature of Jesus as central to faith—a key aspect of early Christian orthodoxy.

In 2012, Pagels received Princeton University's Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities for, as one nominator wrote, "her ability to show readers that the ancient texts she studies are concerned with the great questions of human existence though they may discuss them in mythological or theological language very different from our own.

[16] In April 1987, their son Mark died at age six and a half, followed 15 months later by the death of her husband in a climbing accident.