Doubleday
Review by David Starkey
The subtitle of Elaine Pagels’s new book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, isn’t meant to question whether Jesus existed—Pagels finds plenty of evidence to indicate that he did—but to suggest how early chroniclers of his life interpreted the events that were known or thought to be known about him. Her primary focus is the four canonical gospels of the Bible, although, not surprisingly for the author of The Gnostic Gospels, she has no qualms about referencing what has come to be called the Apocrypha, which in many ways is the richest writing about Jesus.
The book’s seven chapters each try to answer a separate question: What happened before, during and after the virgin birth? Who is Jesus? What is the Good News”? And so on. Pagels is especially keen to examine how two elements of Jesus’s story that might have been Christianity’s most glaring weaknesses were transformed by his earliest biographers into two of its greatest strengths.
The issue most likely to upset traditionalists is the questioning of Jesus’s paternity. If not God, then whom? Following earlier historians, Pagels identifies a particular member of the Imperial Army, Tiberius Julius Abdes Panthera, as a possible father. She backtracks a bit—“my purpose in mentioning these speculations is not to endorse them, since the sparse evidence that some writers cite is only circumstantial”—before making an irrefutable point: “What has leant credence to stories of Pantera is what local people know: that Roman soldiers brutally suppressed any hint of revolt, exploited subject people, and targeted local women with sexual violence.”
Neither Mark, the first gospel author, nor John, the last, mention the virgin birth, so it is up to Matthew and Luke to turn a potential bug into a supreme feature. They present us with annunciating angels, one whispering to Joseph, the other speaking directly to Mary, while also linking “Jesus to King David through his paternal line.” This argument that “Jesus’s seeming ‘irregular’ birth was actually a miracle—one that defies ordinary understanding” obviously became a cornerstone of Christianity. While some believers might find Pagels’s explorations of this question sacrilegious, she concludes that despite how “various writers interpret Jesus’s origin, they all agree on the spiritual truth: that Jesus is the ‘Son of God,’ and embodies God’s presence on earth.”
The other aspect of Jesus’s life most likely to have dissuaded early potential converts was the fact that, for all his preaching about the imminent coming of end times, he died before they arrived and in a manner reserved for rebels and the lowest of criminals. “What I find most astonishing about the gospel stories,” Pagels writes, “is that 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.” Again, she sees the spiritual and symbolic nature of the crucifixion as more important than the scant historical information about it. And of course it was not just how Jesus died, but what happened afterwards. His missing body became proof not that he was tossed into some common grave, but that he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.
As a skeptic, unlikely to be offended by any theory Pagels has to offer, I found it all rather bracing, even inspiring. The fact that she was willing to ask awkward questions and entertain even more awkward answers gave me a greater appreciation of Christianity. That some far-right Christians have espoused problems with a book that most of them have likely never read simply because Pagels dares to have an open mind is—like so much in contemporary American life—disappointing.
Ironically, Pagels is probably closer in her beliefs to those who are attacking her than she is to someone like me. Toward the end of the book, she acknowledges that “I myself was shaken by ‘experiences that I cannot explain’—by experiencing the presence of people who had died.” It turns that out such experiences aren’t unusual. A recent University of Virginia School of Medicine study found a third of people “across societies” report “perceived interactions with the deceased.” However, for Pagels, these encounters changed her life: “I now remain open to wonder, and even to hope for some kind of imaginable transformation.”
In the final chapter, she steps back from her close reading of Christian texts and briefly surveys how the religion manifests itself in the non-Western and artistic worlds. We meet rural Filipino Christians who celebrate a carved image of a mestizo Christ and the Piro people of the Peruvian Amazon whose conversion to Christianity led to literacy and real-world political power. Then there are the painted Christs of Dalí and Chagall and the cinematic Christs of Mark Dornford-May and Helen Edmundson and Martin Scorsese. Interesting as it is, this material feels as though it would have found a better home in another book; fortunately, Pagels is a gifted writer so the move away from primary sources doesn’t jar as much as it might.
Her “Conclusion” is quite short–just three and a half pages–and focuses on “the spiritual power that shines through” the Bible stories, which she believes provide “an outburst of hope.” That’s an optimistic way of looking at Christianity, especially when the “miracles and wonder” don’t necessarily show up when we need them most.
