Author explores core Christian doctrine.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Byline: Teresa Mears

When Elaine Pagels was growing up, religion played a minor role in her life until, at age 14, she attended a revival and wholeheartedly embraced Christianity. Two years later, she found she no longer fit in with a group that believed a Jewish friend killed in an auto accident was eternally damned. When she found no room to discuss her disagreement, she left the church.

Yet she couldn't let Christianity go. She studied Greek in college so she could read the New Testament gospels in their original language. While studying dance with Martha Graham, she still felt both compelled and frustrated by Christianity. She entered a doctoral program at Harvard, thinking she could find the "real Christianity" by studying the earliest texts.

What she found in her studies astonished her.

"For instead of the purer, simpler `early Christianity' that many of us had been looking for, we found ourselves in the midst of a more diverse and complicated world than any of us could have imagined," she writes in her latest book, "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas" (Random House, $24.95).

The book expands on her award-winning 1979 work, "The Gnostic Gospels," based upon more than 50 texts found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945, works that had been ordered destroyed by early church leaders in the fourth century and hidden from view for almost 1,600 years. Those texts detail the incredible diversity of the early Christians, some of whom disagreed about even such core concepts as whether Jesus was God.

"We really are rewriting the history of Christianity," Pagels says of the scholars working with those early Christian writings.