Book Review: "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus"
Elaine Pagels' newest book is an erudite and at times surprisingly moving examination of the historical specificity of Jesus and the New Testament, as well as their transhistorical impact.
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As some of you may now, I have a rather fraught relationship with the Christian faith. Though raised in a religious hold, I long ago left that path and declared myself an agnostic. In recent years, though, I’ve slowly begun to feel my way back to faith and, while I know that I have a long road ahead, I’ve really immersed myself in the world of books, particularly those focused on the history of Christianity. There are many excellent books out there that manage to take an insightful look at the historicity of Jesus and the Bible more generally, without losing sight of the fact that this man and this book continue to have a great deal of meaning for millions of people around the globe, just as they have for the last two thousand years. Which brings me to Elaine Pagels Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. In this eloquent volume, she looks at the historical circumstances that led to the formation of both the Bible and Christianity as a whole.
Few scholars working today have had a more profound influence on the study of early Christianity than Elaine Pagels. I’ve been familiar with her work for decades, of course, because I’ve long had an interest in the history of Christianity and in Gnosticism in particular (I’m pretty sure that every nerd of a certain kind goes through a Gnosticism phase at some point in their academic career). I loved hearing about her own spiritual journey over the years, because it gives a deeper richness and depth to her rigorous exploration.
Indeed, I can think of few people more equipped to take us on this journey than Pagels. Her prose is crisp and accessible, yet there is also a rigor to her approach that speaks to her voluminous writings on early Christianity and its various offshoots. Reading the book is like spending time with your wise and erudite aunt. There’s weighty material here, to be sure–how could it be otherwise, when you’re dealing with the historical nature of one of the world’s most important religious figures–but Pagels has a light touch. The pages fly by, even as you can’t help but be amazed at how adept she is at illuminating so much of the historical period that produced Christianity.
She situates Jesus’ teachings, both those revealed in the Gospels themselves as well as in Paul’s various letters, in the historical moment at which they emerged. The 1st and 2nd centuries were periods of profound crisis for the nascent Christian movement. After all, this was a time when the Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem, and when the writers of the New Testament had to wrestle with various questions, including whether Jesus might have been illegitimate and whether his message was for the present or for all time. Seen in this light, it makes sense why the Gospel writers should go to such lengths to connect his birth to previous prophecies from the Hebrew Bible, even if doing so meant turning Mary into a virgin. Pagels also examines other pressing historical questions, including how Jesus went from a the leader of a new movement to being God Incarnate, and as a result she takes account of the Gospels as well as Paul’s writings and those of various other Church Fathers.
Even as she grapples with the Gospels and the Epistles themselves, she also draws upon some of the other books that didn’t end up making it into the official version of the Bible. Texts such as The Gospel of Thomas, as Pagels reminds us again and again, were as much a part of the formation of Christianity as the books that would come to be regarded as canonical. As such, they are also useful historical documents in their own right, shedding new light on the period of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual fervent that gave us the Bible in its current form. In their pages one can see the various issues that the early Christians were contending with as they attempted to lay out the parameters of orthodoxy and the most basic tenets of their new faith.
As she reaches the end of the book, Pagels turns from the history surrounding Jesus and the Gospels and toward the reception of His story in subsequent eras. Given my own interest in the reception of antiquity in popular culture, I was especially drawn to her analysis of both Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Garth Davis’ Mary Magdalene. Her analysis of Mary Magdalene was particularly welcome, since it’s a film that, for all of its thoughtful and insightful engagement with one of the most important figures in the Gospels In this way we can see that the message of Christ and his followers is one that continues to astound with its sheer multiplicity. Somehow, people across the globe and throughout the span of history have found something to inspire them, something about this specific historical moment and this specific historical person and this historical narrative to give them access to the timeless and eternal.
Miracles and Wonders is as much a work of profound religious and spiritual reflection as it is scholarship. Pagels recounts her own religious journey, of how she was raised in a relatively innocuous (one might even say bloodless) Methodist tradition before making detours into both Catholicism and evangelicalism. As most of us know by now, she ended up going to graduate school and becoming one of the leading scholars of the Gnostic Gospels and the other writings associated with Nag Hammadi. For someone like Pagels, then, faith isn’t just something to be experienced but also something to be examined and interrogated anew. This is something that continues to resonate with me, and I suspect that readers of all kinds, whether devoutly religious, questioning, or downright skeptical, will find something in Miracles and Wonder that calls to them.
Having finished the book, I’m not sure that I’m ready just yet to return to a faith that I abandoned over two decades ago. Nevertheless, I will say that there is a subtle power and grace to Pagels’ grappling with the mysteries of faith that I found very appealing and that stirred something in me that I haven’t felt for a very long time. There is thus something particularly apt in her title, in that there remains something inherently mysterious about Jesus, whether we’re speaking of the historical figure or the transhistorical being who changed the course of the future and, in theological terms, redeemed a fallen and deeply broken world.
There is a distressing tendency among many Protestants–particularly among evangelicals and other more fundamentalist groups–to shut down any sort of historical inquiry into the Bible. At its worst, such a belief starves Christianity of the intellectual vitality that it really needs in these dark days, when we seem to be plunging headfirst into a new dark age of misery and ignorance. Moreover, as Pagels’ book demonstrates, one can still see a divine truth in the words written by historical figures. One can acknowledge that the New Testament and its words are both products of a very specific time and place while also taking comfort in the fact that they also speak to truths that are, in a very real way, transhistorical. Miracles and Wonder is an apt reminder of the enduring power of Jesus’ life, which continues to inspire people throughout the world and throughout time.