2 weeks Ago
”Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” By Elaine Pagels. Publisher: Doubleday. 320 pages.
$30. It sounds like a strategy meeting with the campaign team: “Whom do men say that I am?” Staff members start tossing out responses from the latest polling: “Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.” But when Jesus presses them for their own thoughts, Simon Peter nails it: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.
” So there it is — settled. Except, no. As 2,000 years of theological turmoil attests, the identity of that man remains so contentious that even suggesting the possibility of continuing debate is heretical.
Into this lions’ den ventures Elaine Pagels — Princeton professor, MacArthur “genius,” National Book Award winner and arguably the country’s most well-known scholar of religion. Since publishing “The Gnostic Gospels” in 1979, Pagels has been a voice crying in the wilderness of academia but heard in the homes of lay readers. Her vast knowledge has always been tempered by deep humility.
From a field perceived as hostile to anyone singing, “This I know, for the Bible tells me so,” she speaks candidly about the limits of research and the porous membrane between scholarship and her own faith. Across several unlikely bestsellers, such as “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas,” she has probed the magmatic core of early Christianity that cooled into the crystalline creed we tread on today. From where I sit, Pagels was always writing in one way or another about Jesus.
But in the preface of her new book, “Miracles and Wonder,” she says, “Only now, after reflecting on the themes, texts, and enigmas of Christian tradition for decades, have I felt ready to engage the stories of Jesus directly.” Here she presents a fleet and accessible survey of scholarship about Jesus filtered through her own liberal sensibility as a person alive to the spiritual power of his message. As usual, there’s a peculiar tension in Pagels’s new book between her introductory approach and her brisk assumption of critical experience.
She’s the physicist who can explain to a child how a balloon stays aloft while also casually mentioning adiabatic expansion. One could read “Miracles and Wonder” without ever wrestling with the bruising academic debates she passes over so breezily. It is, as she claims, an “adventure.
” Whether it’s an adventure you want to take will depend substantially on the depth of your interest in Jesus and the resiliency of your faith. Like many otherwise rational Christians, I take the Gospels as literally true even while puttering around the material world wearing a seatbelt. I don’t need science or archaeology to confirm the events described in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John any more than I expect a cardiologist to pry open my chest and show me where love resides.
But I’m still susceptible to the prick of academic skepticism, which is probably healthy for anyone’s system. Pagels confesses that in her naive student days, she imagined “that if we went back to 1st-century sources, we would be able to find out what Jesus actually said and did.” A lifetime of research, though, has taught her how knotty that quest actually is.
She’s certain that the historical evidence confirms the existence of Jesus, but everything about him beyond that must be judged according to what was written down — with “reverence or contempt.” Her goal in this book, then, is to disintegrate those voices and suss out why we have these particular accounts. That task would require a much longer and more comprehensive work, but “Miracles and Wonder” provides an engaging introduction to the question of what might have motivated various people to record (or envision) the wondrous details that define the life of Jesus.
For some devout Christians, the answer is simple: We have the Gospel stories because that is what actually happened. Pagels’s great tact is expressed in her willingness to acknowledge the miraculous as a possibility while gently noting that the Gospels contain “startling discrepancies” that only the loudest choir can drown out. But her goal is never to determine biographical details with any certainty; she knows that the records we have are not historical in our modern sense.
Instead, she strives to suggest why the earliest followers of Jesus might have told, repeated and written down the details they did. What points were the tellers trying to make? What audience were they attempting to attract? What accusations were they aiming to refute? These may be historical questions, but they’re also fundamentally narrative ones. Pagels’s overarching thesis is that the stories we have about Jesus were composed decades after his lifetime, in different circumstances and for distinct purposes.
Since then, the long, often aggressive effort to harmonize these testimonies — particularly in an effort to establish Jesus as God — has shaved away the curious edges of the earliest responses to the Galilean teacher. But careful readers, she insists, can still discern those distinct narrative threads through a glass, darkly. “As Mark tells it,” Pagels writes, “Jesus’s power to heal is what demonstrates — and validates his claim to speak for God.
” But “Miracles and Wonder” is not as concerned with this aspect of the story as one might expect. She confesses, “Like many readers influenced by rationalist assumptions, I once tended to skip over the miracle stories to focus instead on Jesus’s teachings” — like Thomas Jefferson who sliced away the supernatural elements from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John to create “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” But if Pagels is now more tolerant of the healings and nature miracles that fill all four Gospels, she’s still not overwhelmingly interested in them.
Although her book contains one chapter focused on Jesus’s healing ministry, she devotes most of her attention to the beginning and end of his life — to what happened to him — and to others’ perceptions of what those events mean. In her bold first chapter, for instance, Pagels considers the various accounts about Jesus’s birth. Curiously, the historical record offers no definitive evidence of a celestial event, the Slaughter of the Innocents or a Roman census requiring Joseph and Mary to travel to Bethlehem.
But our choice is not between truth or lie. Speaking of Matthew, Pagels writes, “His likely intention is not to deceive his audience into believing something that didn’t happen. Instead, convinced that Jesus was, indeed, God’s promised Messiah, Matthew may have assumed that events coinciding with his birth would have fulfilled ancient prophecies.
” In other words, metaphors are not lies. Turning to the Virgin birth, Pagels describes the climate of skepticism and scorn in which Jesus’s first followers were preaching. Clearly, she says, there was great anxiety about the parentage of this savior emerging from humble origins.
“Rumors ridiculing Jesus as a bastard” and his mother as a promiscuous victim of rape needed to be contradicted in the most powerful way possible. The genealogies tracing Jesus’s lineage back to Abraham and Adam weren’t enough. For Matthew and Luke, “Jesus’s seeming ‘irregular’ birth was actually a miracle — one that utterly defies ordinary understanding.
” Pagels’s exploration of the Crucifixion follows a similar pattern. Looking at the historical context of Roman oppression, she reminds us that the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke are essentially “wartime literature.” The evangelists faced an extraordinary problem: “How,” Pagels writes, “could anyone claim that a man betrayed by one of his own followers, then brutally killed on charges of treason against Rome, not only was, but still is, God’s appointed Messiah?” The solution to that existential crisis — aside from blaming the Jews, which has fueled centuries of genocidal rage — is the Resurrection.
In this formation, Jesus’s “capture and death were not a final defeat but only a preliminary skirmish in a vast cosmic conflict now enveloping the universe,” Pagels writes. “Jesus’s followers managed to take what their critics saw as the most damning evidence against their Messiah — his crucifixion — and transform it into evidence of his divine mission.” Pagels is at pains to insist that she does not mean to suggest the Easter story is fictitious.
“As I see it,” she writes, “historical evidence can neither prove nor disprove the reality that gave rise to such experiences.” What’s incontrovertible, though, is that “after Jesus died, many people claimed to have seen him alive.” And this is what really interests her: How did Paul and others — including writers excluded from the New Testament canon — conceive of Jesus’s resurrection in relation to their own lives? For all Pagels’s well-known gentility, she’s no pushover.
She doesn’t hesitate to claim that the historical record and the Gospels do not always align with Christian theology, including the Nicene Creed, which she characterizes as some kind of procrustean corporate mission statement. And she refuses to get bogged down in the intricacies of scholarly debate. Indeed, she sometimes sounds like someone touring a house she doesn’t really want to buy.
Perhaps that sense of urgency is why “Miracles and Wonder” never develops the narrative grandeur of Jack Miles’s “Christ” (2001) or the prosecutorial vigor of John Dominic Crossan’s “The Historical Jesus” (1991). But Pagels offers something else: The opportunity to hurry along with a scholar of tremendous graciousness and think about some of the most profound and inspiring stories ever told. Regardless of what you believe this is an author hoping to convince you of nothing but the “outburst of hope” conveyed by the multitudinous voices of Jesus’s early followers — voices that have too often been unfairly, ignorantly and sometimes violently misrepresented.
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