American scholar of religion at Princeton who wrote The Gnostic Gospels — the most widely read popular account of the Nag Hammadi texts — and Beyond Belief, examining the Gospel of Thomas — making Gnostic Christianity available to general audiences.
Made the Nag Hammadi texts accessible — The Gnostic Gospels demonstrated that early Christianity was far more diverse than the canonical tradition suggests, and that the Gnostic Gospels represent a suppressed tradition that emphasized personal spiritual experience over institutional authority.
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