When her infant son is diagnosed with fatal pulmonary hypertension, Elaine Pagels is moved to explore her faith. In Beyond Belief, her spiritual journey becomes a springboard for an intellectual and professional one and prompts her to re-examine the faith of early Christians. She looks at faith before there was doctrine and discovers that Christianity as we know it could have been radically different. Gospel of Thomas discovered at Nag Hammadi. She uses the contrasting gospels to investigate the politics of Christianity and how the Church crafted a Bible and a faith according to a rigid conception of God. As a result, she argues, alternate versions of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ have been lost to the world.