We take for granted that Christianity is well established. Indeed, it's the most popular religion in the world. But a close look at what we know about the historical Jesus and the aftermath of his death reveals that outcome was far from obvious. This week, Grant Reeher speaks with renowned biblical scholar Elaine Pagels, whose most recent book is "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus."
Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is the renowned biblical scholar and writer Elaine Pagels. She's a religion professor at Princeton University, and among her many recognitions and awards are a MacArthur fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Award. She's here with me today to discuss her newest book. It's titled "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." Professor Pagels, welcome to the program. It’s a thrill to have you on.
Elaine Pagels: Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.
GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with this question. It's a little bit quirky, but I wanted to start with it. What's the most important thing about the written material that forms the Gospels? Either the four gospels that make up the first four books of the New Testament, or any of the others that you write about in this book, and others that most people today don't know or most people today don't sufficiently appreciate.
EP: That's a hard question. What is the most important thing? Somehow, the power of the person who was Jesus of Nazareth comes through this material, even though it's got all kinds of miracle stories, it's got all kinds of things that sound very unlikely. It's remarkable that that sense of somebody who lived 2,000 years ago is vivid to people all over the world and often in many different ways. I think that's astonishing, actually.
GR: Yeah, yeah. No, it really is when you sit back and think about it. And one of the things I loved about this book as I was reading it is you do that all the way through. You sort of take a step back and remind the reader of the big picture. One of the things that I wanted to ask related to that is, and you write about this in the book, the historical context in which all of these gospels were being written. You talk about that being important to understanding parts of their content. Just tell us briefly about what was going on when the Gospels were being written.
EP: Well, when I was growing up and was taken sometimes to a sort of nice Methodist church, I saw pictures of Jesus with children on his lap and flowers around. And it was all very pastoral and all very nice. It looked very much like California, right? What we don't remember is that Judea, land of Israel, is between—always has been between—enormous empires. And at that time, it was also under siege by Rome. The Romans had been allies of the Jews, and then they were so powerful that they just dominated the whole country. And whenever anyone tried to start a revolution against the oppression of Roman power in Judea, they were brutally murdered. There were forests of people who were crucified as Jesus was on the charge of insurrection, as he was. And so it's about war. And the death of Jesus certainly reflects the context of war, because he was accused of starting a revolution against Rome. That was the charge. And the birth of Jesus probably shows that too. But it's not that pastoral, lovely scene so much. It's a very ancient part of the world that has been lived in for so many years. And there's enormous amount of warfare that's going on.
GR: Yeah. And I was struck by something that you pointed out, that the writers of the Gospels were writing at a time when they were worried about their own lives. And so that is a lens through which we can interpret some of the decisions they made about the kinds of stories they told or didn't tell. And I think that's an important point of understanding it. I wanted to shift a bit and sort of ask you a question you probably get asked more frequently, which is, you've spent so much time with us thinking about this. You must by this time have a picture in your head of what Jesus was like as a person, his personality, what he was like to be around. You said that it comes through in the Gospels. I'd be very curious to hear your own impression of that.
EP: Well, that's a good question. As I mentioned in the book, there's not one word about what he looked like. So you've got all kinds of portraits. That's why I put paintings and photographs in the book of totally different views of what he looked like. I have the sense of a powerful, charismatic, remarkable person with quick changes of moods. And what else? Then it becomes a kind of mosaic of different views of somebody who can be compassionate and welcoming to people who are in need, somebody can be harsh to people in authority. Contemplative, maybe foolhardy in some ways. But there are so many different interpretations that when I think of a mosaic, for 2,000 years people have been making pictures either visually or psychologically or religiously of who Jesus was. So I'm sure I'm affected by all of those different portraits.
GR: You mentioned that he could be harsh and again, a personality that varied. One of the things that I was struck by being a neophyte in all this, when I first began reading about this topic of the historical Jesus several years ago, was the fact that he wasn't always nice to his own family. And I'd be curious to hear you talk about that and if you think it means anything for the message of the Gospels.
EP: Well, the first thing we know is that the family wasn't very nice to him. That is, the earliest gospel written is the "Gospel of Mark," is just 17 pages and the others are both "Mark" expanded, "Matthew" and "Luke." And what "Mark" says is that when he went to his hometown, people didn't believe that he was a prophet or a preacher, or had any right to talk like he was, or to try to heal people by divine power. They just thought, who is this guy? We know his mother. We know his brothers. There are four of them, and we know his sisters. Who does he think he is? And he said nobody believed in him. His family went out to stop him when he was speaking in public. And it says because they thought he was out of his mind, which is something you don't expect to see. Translators kind of avoid that. That's the Greek, but they make it a little better in English. And they also are very—several of the gospels say his brothers didn't believe in him. So the picture there is of a disrupted family, a mother. And the strangest part of it for me is that they called him—who is this guy? He's the son of Mary. Now, you don't call a Jewish boy son of Mary if he has a recognized father, because it's always a patronymic. But they called him Son of Mary, and they speak of his maybe seven siblings. And so, when the others come up with stories about virgin birth, you begin to wonder what's going on.
GR: Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, you speculate about that in the book. Yeah.
EP: And critics always said that he was the son of a woman who was rather disreputable and probably illegitimate. And that's the reason that Matthew and Luke make up biblical stories for a birth story that probably wasn't historically true.
GR: Interesting. I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations, and my guest is the biblical scholar and writer Elaine Pagels. She's published a new book. It's titled "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." So, I'm a political scientist, so of course I'm going to ask you this question about his leadership style. Can you say a bit more about how you'd characterize him as a leader of other people?
EP: Well, I'd be interested if you would comment on that, because I didn't really focus on it much. He was obviously somebody who drew people to him in a very powerful way. And it seemed they would do anything for this man. They would go to the death for him. And that's quite remarkable. How he did that? He didn't have any natural authority as far as we know. He was brought up in a family that was not remarkable. He perhaps wasn't educated in the way we think of it, although he would have learned the scriptures by heart the way Jewish boys did, the way Muslim boys learned the Koran and boys in India learned the Indian scriptures. But somehow, he had great power to compel people to believe that the end of time was coming, that all the hopes of Israel were coming to a great climax, and the world was about to be transformed.
GR: Yeah. I was thinking as I was reading, I thought, which president has the leadership style that I feel like I'm getting here, and I couldn't come up with any. And the irony was the most religious president, genuinely, knowledgeably religious president we've probably had, arguably Jimmy Carter, at least in the modern age. Certainly, other presidents knew their scripture, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Garfield. But obviously, there's very little similarity in those leadership styles. So it is perplexing. One of the things that you marvel at and you've already spoken to it earlier in our conversation is, but I want to draw you out a little bit more is how and why this movement of early Christianity, with all the challenges that it faced, including the sudden death of its leader, was able to succeed and ultimately has changed the world the way it has. Is there one thing more than anything else, you think that's made that possible in your view?
EP: That's such a hard question. His message was that God was going to come and bring the world to its conclusion and everyone was about to be judged. And you have to get ready. And strikingly, many people today believe that in the same way, Jesus may come tomorrow. Amazing, isn't it? That he preached a message which didn't happen. And then he was brutally killed. And nevertheless, the movement started. And the only thing I can think of, it probably would have gone away. People would have left. They would have thought he wasn't the person we thought he was. We thought he was a prophet. We thought he was going to maybe rule the world. But he's dead. And he was helpless. It's only when people said he's alive. And they came to the conclusion that he was, even though he had died, many people said they saw him. And then they give you so many different kinds of stories that these stories came from many kinds of sources. Without that, I can't imagine that it would. Except I did mention, as you may remember, being a professor of political theory and science, that there was a movement in the 20th century in New York about a Hasidic rabbi in New York Menachem Schneerson, whose followers said he was the Messiah and the Holocaust in Europe was the signs of the times—the worst things had happened in the world. The end was about to come. And this rabbi, a famous and charismatic rabbi, was going to rule the world. And he died. But the movement didn't die. It's grown all over the world. Now it has many thousand followers. The followers of Menachem Schneerson. So if you thought it couldn't happen, it does happen. Even though Schneerson has—actually, people say they've seen him since he died. There are many stories like that.
GR: Yeah, and I was thinking of this in a secular way that it's sometimes said that the moment makes the leader. And in a sense, if that leader hadn't appeared the moment would have made another one. And I was thinking about that in this case with Jesus. And it's hard for me to imagine that that would be the case. Although your story suggests that I probably need to rethink that. I want to come back and ask you a different version of that question after the break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Elaine Pagels. The biblical scholar and writer is a professor of religion at Princeton University. And we've been discussing her newest book, "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." You mentioned about the importance you think in making this movement grow and last over the hundreds of years that it has this notion of Jesus coming back to life or having some sort of everlasting life, and then that gets translated and you talk about this in your book to a more general proposition for everyone. And that promise of everlasting life, however it is we understand it—if it's explicitly corporeal or if it's a different sort of more abstract—that's been an enormous draw, obviously, for many people. Other than Jesus, of course, is there any one person in this story who gets the most credit for crafting and putting forward that message in Christianity?
EP: Well, the obvious person is Paul, the apostle who never met Jesus and never knew him, and actually turns it into a very different story about a being who comes down from heaven and goes back and saves us from sin. That is quite different. But even before that, I think there's something else about the message of Jesus, Grant. And that is that the gods of Greece and Rome were patrons of the rulers. Right? And if you want a favor from a god, you go to a temple and you pay money, so that the god will give you what you need. You make a sacrifice. It could be Zeus. It could be the goddess Roma. It could be anybody, any god. But you have to pay. This teacher, from a humble background, said that God could be with anybody. It was astonishingly democratic in our sense of the word. That people could say that a man who had no social status to speak of was speaking for God, and that you could join the movement, and God loves you. No matter who you are, you could be a slave, and you could join the movement. You don't have to pay. You can go and worship. And in fact, if you or I were a destitute woman without a husband's support or a child with no parents, you could go there, and they would give you food. They would take care of you. So this is a movement that welcomes people at the bottom, and that's really outraged the aristocrats. It was enormously inclusive because if you could take God with this Jewish peasant from the provinces, he could be with anybody. And anybody could be welcomed.
GR: Do you think, given how it has lasted and grown, as you point out, a third of the planet itself is Christian, do you think that Christianity will still be as prominent in the next millennium as it is today? It's going to look really far ahead there.
EP: That's a very interesting question, but I don't think I'm equipped, and I wish I were a prophet. I don't know because when I think about politics and questions like that, there's so much uncertainty. In many ways, we see many people moving out of, particularly Christian, structures of value systems. Many people have dropped that. And I think many more will. At the same time, there are others who are joining. This is still the fastest-growing movement in the world, particularly in Africa and Latin America. And I think the appeal for that is exactly the reason that I was looking at those anthropologists—that people say, well, if you join this movement, you're a human being. You're valuable. God loves you. No matter who you are. You can be a person that is not even human in some societies, as the Dalai people were regarded recently called untouchables, but they joined Christianity with great joy because it tells them how valuable they are. So that there's movement in both ways.
GR: Yeah. And that speaks to the democratic appeal that you were talking about before as well, when you talk about these recent movements. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Elaine Pagels, and we've been discussing her new book, "Miracles and Wonder." You talk a lot about where there are no clear consensus among scholars regarding important facts and questions, and then you sometimes offer your own speculations based on the available evidence and your interpretation of the texts. That's where the mysteries are, beyond the biggest one, of course, and that's where the mysteries remain. I was wondering, is there one of those mysteries, more than all the others, that you'd like to be able to solve to your satisfaction before you depart planet Earth, and at least in the form that you have?
EP: Well, the most convenient one before I depart planet Earth would be the one about resurrection. I guess growing up among scientists and having married a theoretical physicist, I always thought, well, these are just fantasies. I was certainly brought up—my father would just say, no use for religion anymore. We've got science, and this is all nonsense. So the idea that life after death is a possibility is just not open. But since that time, I've had different kinds of experiences, some of which made me think—what do we know? So I would really like to know about that. And I don't expect to get any information until we all get there.
GR: I couldn't help wonder, as you've set forward some of your hunches and speculations about where there are different accounts and where scholars have different ideas about it, whether as an intellectual and scholarly matter, we have now reached the point of diminishing marginal returns, absent discovering new material to examine. Is that something that you and your colleagues discuss? Like, where are we in our collective journey? Have we kind of reached the end in one way?
EP: Well, that's an interesting question. I remember when my husband was taught that physics was over a long time ago, and now it's starting all over. But actually, we only have a handful of information, of actual sources. Now, of course, you can find a cave somewhere with a lot of more ancient texts in it. And the secret gospels that were found in Egypt are an example of that. They really challenged the way we thought about Christianity before. But this idea I started out as a historian to what do we know historically? And the answer is not much. So I began to get very interested in why this person, who is so elusive to track historically, is so powerful. And it's really about the visions. And it's about 2,000 years of reinventing and re-exploring those stories. And projecting into them different content. That's why I wanted to look at see how movie makers use the story of Jesus, and one can use it as a South African director can to speak about apartheid and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and how Jesus is depicted as a kind of Steve Biko figure, a revolutionary against apartheid, who dies in the cause. We could think of Jesus as some kind of teacher. That is, the messages that people associate with Jesus are compassion for all people. Openness, not responding with anger toward others who are violent. It's a kind of teaching that is fundamental to human beings. It's something like the Buddha teaches, although not identical, but certainly comes from the Hebrew Bible. Very ancient. So that's something we can use without becoming Christians necessarily. Also, many people think that he's the savior of our souls. And that's another way to have a personal relationship with Jesus. I was reading the work of many anthropologists who study the way people speak to Jesus or to other divine beings, and engage in strong relationships with them. And a psychiatrist might say, this is delusional. I met 12 at Stanford at one lunch, and I asked them if they thought anyone who had a religious experience was delusional. They all looked at me somberly and they said, well, yes, but other people will say, well, that's not delusional. That's a helpful way of encountering the many possibilities that human beings have that we may not be aware we could develop.
GR: Plenty of issues to sort through. We've got about a minute and a half left, and I want to try to squeeze in two questions on this. And this first one's more personal. I have to ask it. It's how do you come down on all of this? And I'm only going to give you a few seconds. I'm sorry, but how have your views changed as you've aged on that question?
EP: Well, that's a big question. I wrote about it in this little memoir called "Why Religion: A Personal Story." I started out as an evangelical once for a year as an adolescent, and I'm not that now, but I understand that these traditions are not foolish. They have many deep insights about human behavior that actually transform people's lives. So people sometimes say to me, are you a Christian? I want to say, well, that's the tradition I was brought up in, and it's familiar to me the way English is familiar, but I don't feel that I'm defined by it. I do love this tradition. I love English language, too. But that doesn't mean there aren't others. Nevertheless, it is a valuable tradition. Otherwise, I wouldn't have spent my life devoted to trying to understand it.
GR: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, only a few seconds left. I have to say, I don't want to spoil this, but I love the way you ended your book. And I was wondering, as I was reading it, how is she going to wrap all this up?
EP: So was I.
GR: So the only thing I want to say about it is, and you can kind of almost do yes or no, but was it in any way influenced or intended to speak to our current political climate?
EP: Well, it couldn't help be, since we're all immersed in that. And what I realized that I love about these stories in the Bible, whether you quote unquote, believe them or not, is that they suggest that no matter how terrible a situation can be and seemingly impossible to resolve, there's always hope. And that's spoken not just to our political climate, but to people for millions of years. So yes, I think that's the way I saw these sources and what they can do for us.
GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Elaine Pagels. Again, her book—really, it's a book I devoured and I will reread—is called "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." Professor Pagels, thanks for writing this great book. And again, it's been a real thrill to have you on the program.
EP: Well, thank you. I very much enjoyed our conversation.
GR: Me too. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. Conversations and the Public Interest.