Miracles and Wonder:
The Historical Mystery of Jesus
by elaine pagels
doubleday, 336 pages, $30
Quests for the “historical Jesus” are as old as Christianity itself. The claims of Jesus’s earliest followers and the strange communities to which they gave rise were so extravagant that outsiders quite reasonably wanted to know what the fuss was about. Who was this Jesus, this man whom people worshipped as God? When Christianity did not go away but flourished and even came to dominate parts of the world, the question became more pointed: Not “Who was Jesus?” but “Who was Jesus really?” It was a way of asking whether Christian churches, with their dogmas, hierarchies, heresy-hunting, and elaborate rituals—their religion—might have gotten it all wrong. Had they blown one man’s life radically out of proportion?
In the modern era, responsibility for finding the “historical Jesus” has largely fallen to biblical scholars. This is not to say that contemporary scholarship on Jesus and the writings of the New Testament is intrinsically hostile to historic Christian faith, nor even that most of it is hostile in practice. It is rather to say that one strand of this scholarship aims at recovering a historical Jesus shorn of dogmatic accretions and stripped of ecclesiastical vestment, a Jesus whose words, actions, and motivations are best understood with reference to the pre-Christian time and place in which he lived.
Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, one of the most celebrated New Testament scholars of the last fifty years, is no stranger to scholarship that trains a critical eye on the early Church. Pagels’s biggest claim to fame rests in her studies of ancient Gnostic texts, which bear witness to versions of Jesus and Jesus’s teaching that were ultimately rejected as heretical by “orthodox” authorities. Her book The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which presented Gnostic ideas not as heresy but as attractive Christian teachings that have been unjustly suppressed, became a best-seller and won numerous awards. With a knack for engaging popular audiences, Pagels has remained a recognized authority on alternative Christianities for more than four decades.
With Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, Pagels turns her attention to the historical Jesus. The book comes in the latter stages of a successful academic career and serves, in part, as a retrospective. It is Pagels’s way of coming to terms with the enigmatic person at the heart of the early Christian world. Pagels begins the book with the story of her own faith journey: from a small, suburban Methodist church, to a born-again conversion at a Billy Graham crusade, to a rejection of Christian faith eighteen months after that conversion, and then, finally, to a lifetime of exploring Christianity in the secular academy. As she reports, “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.” For Pagels, this engagement means confronting two questions. The first question is who Jesus was as a historical personage. The second is who Jesus is. Accordingly, after six chapters devoted to historical questions, Pagels reflects in her concluding chapter on Jesus’s contemporary significance.
Though Pagels does not use the phrases, readers familiar with New Testament scholarship will recognize that the distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” is operative in the book. One is human, a man with desires and limits, a discrete personality pressured by historical circumstance. He is like us. The other is a figure who transcends history and receives, nay, demands worship—a luminous, divine figure atop a celestial hierarchy, on whom hangs the fate of the world. According to the logic of the historian, the former gave rise to the latter (rather than the other way around, as in the Nicene Creed). Yet Jesus researchers work to keep the two apart. Theology must be extricated from history so that Jesus can be known as he really was.
Take the virgin birth, for example. It may be theologically correct to say that Christ was born of a virgin, but what were the real origins of Jesus? Pagels looks for clues in the Gospels. Like most New Testament scholars, she holds Mark to be the earliest Gospel (composed sometime around the year 70), with Matthew and Luke—both of whom use Mark as a source document—coming along a generation later. John, independent of the other three, came later still. Pagels points out that Mark has no birth narrative for Jesus but that his Gospel does contain the detail that people in Nazareth think of Jesus as “the son of Mary” (Mk 6:3): He seemingly has a mother and “brothers” (which may refer to stepbrothers or cousins) but no father. When Matthew and Luke wrote their Gospels later, they were concerned to defend Jesus against the belief, adumbrated in Mark, that he was born illegitimate. Thus, they drew on the Old Testament (for instance, Isaiah 7:14 and stories of barren women) to create extensive birth stories for Jesus.
Citing an account from Josephus, Pagels argues further that Roman soldiers were on campaign in Galilee at the time of Jesus’s birth. She suggests that Mary might have been among the many young Jewish women raped by soldiers. The suggestion is not Pagels’s innovation, as she acknowledges. The idea that Jesus was really the son of a Roman officer named Panthera is one that goes back to the time of the early Church. After providing a rather lengthy exposition of the “Panthera” theory, however, Pagels refuses to endorse it, admitting that the evidence for it is “only circumstantial” (not to mention wildly speculative). Her point in discussing rape is not to identify Jesus’s father but merely to highlight the oppression and violence that were part of life in Roman-occupied Judea. A rape could have happened, and anyone seeking to understand the historical Jesus should appreciate this context. In the end, Pagels declines to make a historical claim about Jesus’s origins: “As for what happened—divine miracle, human dilemma, or both—who can say?”
Pagels’s treatment of Jesus’s birth follows a pattern replicated throughout the book. She takes up an important question about the historical Jesus, isolates the particular perspectives of Gospel writers on the question, throws in material from Gnostic sources, and then says that the historical question cannot ultimately be answered. Pagels’s noncommittal stance marks a contrast with critical scholars who, in previous generations, had plenty to say about who Jesus was. Earlier Jesus researchers were not shy about offering definitive answers. Pagels, for example, mentions a founding father of critical Jesus scholarship, the scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), whose posthumously published denial of the resurrection, and accompanying portrait of Jesus as a failed and disappointed revolutionary, sent shockwaves through the scholarly world in the 1770s. Though she admits that Reimarus’s portrait fits plausibly in a first-century context, especially Jesus’s hopes for an imminent, political restoration of God’s kingdom, Pagels finds Reimarus’s portrait “simplistic” and “rationalistic.”
This critique of Reimarus is a good example of Pagels’s historical skepticism. Reimarus inaugurated the modern scholarly quest to get behind the Gospel accounts and reconstruct the man behind the myth. Early on, this quest worked by separating Jesus from his Jewish context, making him out to be a man concerned to proclaim his extraordinary God-consciousness (Friedrich Schleiermacher), universalize religion (Ernest Renan), or defend true virtue from Pharisaic formalism (Wilhelm Bousset). Yet, following the groundbreaking work of Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), who saw Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, the pendulum swung the other way. The fuller picture of Second Temple Judaism afforded by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls allowed scholars like E. P. Sanders and Geza Vermes to speak of “Jesus the Jew” and make sense of him as a kind of Jewish reformer.
Whereas this strand of Jesus research has aimed at identifying Jesus, another trajectory, traceable to David Friedrich Strauss and his Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835), has largely despaired of finding the Jesus of history. Finding nothing of historical value in the Gospel accounts, Strauss argued famously that they were composed of “myth” aimed at portraying Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic hopes and the embodiment of “eternal truths.” In a similar vein, Wilhelm Wrede’s landmark study The Messianic Secret (1901) convinced many that, because each Gospel is fundamentally an expression of its author’s theology, the historical value of the Gospels is severely limited. As the late James Dunn has pointed out, Wrede’s influence turned contemporary study of Jesus into a study of the Gospel writers themselves, so that Jesus remains an unknown figure screened off by the texts that bear witness to him.
Pagels belongs clearly to this second group. For her, the Gospels do not allow access to Jesus—even when they are critically sifted and reconstructed—as much as they show us how the Gospel writers, creatively but imperfectly, made sense of him. By prescinding from historical questions, Pagels shifts her quest for Jesus from factual history to literary criticism. In doing so, she exemplifies a broader postmodern loss of confidence in the power of critical analysis to deliver objective truth about what happened in the past and, at the same time, a renewed faith in the capacity of form criticism to illuminate the contexts and conditions in which historical descriptions were written.
As for the message that Jesus preached, it too, Pagels says, cannot be reconstructed with confidence. With so many possible constructions, what Jesus actually said about the “kingdom of God” must remain opaque. In the case of Jesus’s death, Pagels finds somewhat firmer ground: She is certain that Jesus was indeed crucified by the Romans, but she finds no clear indication in the Gospels of who was responsible. Whether Jesus actually rose from the dead is, again, historically uncertain. In her chapter on the resurrection, Pagels points to N. T. Wright, who says that belief in the bodily resurrection of Jesus is warranted by historical method. Pagels reports that she declined Wright’s invitation to debate him publicly on this point because she did not want to be cast in the role of the “East Coast liberal” who argues that “Jesus was not physically resurrected.” Pagels’s own position is that the question of Jesus’s resurrection goes beyond what a historian can say: “Historical evidence can neither prove nor disprove the reality”; it can only verify that “after Jesus died many people claimed to have seen him alive.”
Pagels is not entirely wrong. The evidence that Jesus was put to death—actually killed, in public, on a cross, by the governing authority—and that many people claimed, only a short time later, that they saw the same Jesus alive cannot seriously be doubted. Wright would no doubt agree that these are indeed the two things that the conscientious historian can affirm. The question is what to do with these two facts. Wright, for his part, does not add the bodily resurrection of Jesus as a third fact but rather sees it as a sound historical inference that meets all reasonable standards for reaching such conclusions. It is just that, in this case, the simplest and best explanation happens to be an earth-shattering one. When Pagels and others adopt an agnostic position, they are, as Wright correctly asserts, guilty of maintaining a historiographic double standard. Yet Pagels’s instinct to identify belief in the resurrection with something that goes beyond historical judgment—the suggestion that it comes down to faith—is difficult to gainsay. After all, as Wright would surely recognize, there is more at stake here than historical accuracy regarding the biography of a man who lived long ago. One can only regret that the proposed debate between them did not take place.
In the end, Pagels’s historical Jesus is not very substantial. As a historian, she is unable to say very much about him, and as a result the book is less about a “historical Jesus” than, as the title of the book announces, a “historical mystery.” In a brief chapter about how Jesus “became God,” Pagels suggests that the early Church, unable to tolerate this mystery, set to work dogmatizing and standardizing. Irenaeus of Lyons limited the number of Gospels to four and Constantine imposed unity on Christian doctrine. According to Pagels, the emperor was made to sit through hours of exhausting debate about the divinity of Christ, which he regarded as trivial. When he sensed that a majority opinion was forming, “he said, in effect, ‘Let’s go with that.’” It is difficult to tell whether this is a joke, a sign of ignorance, or simply a cavalier comment, but it conveys Pagels’s lack of serious interest in historical theology.
Pagels breaks off her short stay in Nicaea and concludes the book by celebrating the ways that modern people around the world have found meaning in the life and example of Jesus. The final chapter is something of a grab bag, as there are no clear themes or criteria for selecting the artists, filmmakers, and communities described there. What comes through is an admiration for Jesus and for some Christians, and an effort to find Jesus outside traditional, mainstream Christianity. Pagels concludes that a “spiritual power shines through” the stories of Jesus. The Gospels show how, amid suffering, a story can shift suddenly to “hope”: One sees in them that “God can make a way out of no way.” It is a fine sentiment, though perhaps a little thin and, ironically, unmysterious. After leading the reader through tortuous historical debates over six chapters, Pagels does what she says the Gospel writers were doing: She makes meaning.
Though the book does not illuminate the figure of Jesus in the way one might hope, Pagels does make some sensible points. Jesus is mysterious, and his message is difficult. He resists categorization and transcends human understanding. The Gospels are distinct from one another. They are not neutral, eyewitness accounts but carefully crafted, theologically motivated compositions that draw on the Old Testament and reflect the sociological pressures of a Roman-occupied Judea. And it is sensible for a historian to admit the limits of historical knowledge and allow faith in the resurrection to rest on the witness of the apostles rather than on independent analysis. After all, the risen Christ did not dispatch historians to go out and prove that he had been raised from the dead. Instead, he sent out apostles as witnesses to show, in word, deed, and death, the reality of resurrection itself: “You shall be my witnesses (martyres) in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
In the end, though, what makes Miracles and Wonder significant is the opportunity it provides to see that modern biblical scholarship, once a determined rival to traditional faith, is now in retreat. Pagels’s book shows that an older confidence in the power of criticism to modernize faith by getting history right and removing the irrational, superstitious elements from Judaism and Christianity has waned. Her point is not that the authors of the Gospels got Jesus wrong, but that their creative constructions of who Jesus was are not the only possible ones. Historical criticism thus relativizes the Gospels and weakens their claim to absolute truth, but it does not disqualify them as scholars once claimed it did.
In Pagels’s book, criticism allows varying perspectives on the Gospels and so opens a cultural space for individualized meaning-making, but, as even she allows, it also leaves room for belief. It was once the goal of critics to present the historical Jesus as an alternative to the Christ of faith. Yet, if Pagels’s book is any indication, modern research, having yielded more questions than answers, leaves us only with a “historical mystery.” What impresses Pagels is that people assign “meaning” to the mystery of Jesus in so many interesting and creative ways. Across the centuries, though, what the Christian churches have offered in proclaiming the death and resurrection of Christ is not the meaning of life so much as the possibility of life—true life—and the conditions in which it may be had. And if this proclamation is right, then it is worship, not “wonder,” that brings one inside the mystery.
