‘Miracles and Wonder’: Who Was the Real Jesus?

Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book The Gnostic Gospels (1979). The book discusses and analyzes the eponymous gospels—a set of 52 texts discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 that contain alternative stories about Jesus. In this book, Pagels doesn’t concern herself primarily with whether or not these writings are the word of God. Instead, she focuses on what a historian might: What do these texts reveal about early Christian tradition? In Miracles and Wonder, Pagels maintains this historical perspective to offer what we can really know about life and doings of Jesus.

Those who take the Bible more literally can take umbrage with such an approach, but Pagels does what she can to clarify that she is not exactly a non-believer herself. As a teenager in California, she became born again after hearing Billy Graham speak. While she eventually found the philosophies of Evangelicalism too confining and broke instead for the academic study of religion, she speaks highly in Miracles and Wonder of the effects of Christianity on the world.

At one point, she takes umbrage herself with a leader in the Christian community setting her up as some kind of East Coast liberal. Jesus can be a hard subject to take anything but an extreme stance on. Millions consider him the Son of God, while millions of others find that idea unthinkable. In the book, Pagels is determined to keep her arguments based on facts and not let the poles drag her into some stance she can’t defend.

For Pagels, Jesus is just as compelling to explore as a historical figure. For example, she argues that the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament (Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John) appeared decades after Jesus died, and none of their authors likely knew Jesus. People most likely wrote these Gospels as responses to the Gospel or Gospels that appeared before them, making them a continuum of perspectives that emphasize, downplay, or contradict elements of Jesus’s story.

At minimum, Pagels seems convinced that there was a historical person named Jesus who the Romans crucified. Most everything else that appears in the canonical Gospels (for example, his virgin birth, his resurrection) are challenge-able as historical facts. Pagels seems to want to respect the feelings of those who take literal views of the New Testament, but she has a job as a historian and scholar: What can we reasonably interpret from what we know about Jesus?

Pagels focuses her book on several pillars of the story of Christ such as his virgin birth, his crucifixion, his resurrection, and whether he is “God,” offering her own expert perspective as well as those of other scholars. For example, she touches and expands on the theory that the inclusions of virgin birth stories in Matthew and Luke were responses to charges that Jesus may have been an illegitimate child, as implied in the earlier Mark. It’s important to note that not even the four canonical Gospels agree on the basic details of Jesus’s birth, which are central to most Christian belief today.

Compounding the problem, people have translated the Bible we typically read several times, and each translation takes us further away from what the original writer might have hoped to convey. For example, a Hebrew word in the original that meant merely “young woman” suddenly became translated as “virgin” in a Greek version of the same story. Pagels argues that there might have been political reasons for such creative translations, but these things quickly get hard to talk about. It’s easy to imagine the kind of scrutiny Pagels might have undergone as the author of The Gnostic Gospels.

But this critical approach to the Gospels is only part of the Christian story Pagels wants to tell. She seems genuinely enamored by “the countless people who take [Jesus’s] teachings and his life as a template for their own.” Christianity is, after all, “the most populous religious tradition in the world.” That’s history too, right? And nobody today cares anywhere near as much for other figures from roughly Jesus’s time, such as Zeus or Julius Caesar.

Pagels chronicles the positive effects of Christianity on a range of populations well outside the western world. She touches on the deep spiritual connection to Christ of the Bicolano people of the Philippines, the Piro people of the Peruvian Amazon, the Urapmin people of New Guinea, and most movingly to me, the “untouchable” Dalit people of India. Through Christ, people who have unimaginable hardship in this world have a reason for hope. What more could the writers of the Gospels have asked for? Mission accomplished.

In the end, Pagels seems to want us to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time: the famous stories of Jesus may not relay history, and that means nothing for how important that are. After reading Miracles and Wonder, both seem undeniably true.