"That which God has joined together..."

"...let no man put asunder." ~Yeshua

I began reading Elaine Pagel's Adam, Eve & the Serpent tonight.  From the intro and 1st chapter, I'm still thinking about how Yeshua made a big deal about divorce when divorce was an accepted practice for Jews in Yeshua's day.  Pagel's scholarship so often puts New Testament teachings in a fresh light and her efforts to show the link between the Genesis story and Yeshua's insistence that marriage represents a sacred union are intriguing given the Apostle Paul's later depature from the implications of Yeshua's teaching.  You really see this over and over in the New Testament where later writers create a more convenient rendering of Christian ethics that is implied by the sayings attributed to Yeshua.

No one does a better of job of taking scholarly religious questions and turning them into intriguing explorations which can be easily enjoyed by a wide audience than Pagels.

If your interested in Gnosticsm, Pagel's book The Gnostic Gospels ranks as core "gospel" within the Gneo-Gnostic canon.  I look forward to the rest of what was her follow-up to TGG, Adam, Eve & the Serpent, so that I can share what jumps out at me on the Gneo-Gnostic Gnews.