MIRACLES AND WONDER: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, by Elaine Pagels
In 1835, a young German scholar named David Friedrich Strauss published an innovative study of the life of Jesus, titled simply “The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined.”
Strauss offered a new, mythographical reading of the Gospels, discounting the historical veracity of the miracles attributed to Jesus, but affirming their status as expressions of moral truth. The book was an international sensation, elevating its author to widespread fame and notoriety.
Though hardly the first author to try to understand the central figure of Christianity by scientific, historical and other rationalist means, Strauss particularly intrigued and enraged readers by suggesting that these methods be brought out of the academy and into the world of public discourse and religious practice. The truth of the historical Jesus and his life was not, in other words, just a scholarly debate, but a burning question that each individual, and society as a whole, must answer: not just how to be a Christian, but whether to be one at all.
Elaine Pagels, the best-selling author and Princeton professor, explains her interest in the life of Jesus in much the same terms. She opens her new book, “Miracles and Wonder,” with an account of her youthful dissatisfaction with the milquetoast Methodism of her suburban-California youth, with the more richly sacramental yet dourly punitive Catholicism and, finally, with the firebrand evangelism of Billy Graham that, despite its apparent joie de vivre, indulged the same willingness to condemn nonbelievers to eternal hellfire. But there persisted in her a fascination with Jesus, from whose personal existence the whole imaginative galaxy of Christianity seems to have sprung.
The “quest” for Jesus, as the prominent 20th-century theologian Albert Schweitzer memorably called it, has taken on many forms. Pagels takes the historical approach — which, since Strauss’s day, has proliferated widely, transforming from a philosophical insurgency to a mainstay of academic and even theological inquiry — drawing on the Gospels, contemporaneous primary source accounts and centuries of academic research to answer the questions of who, in fact, Jesus was.
Undoubtedly, the most attention-grabbing of these has to do with the circumstances of Jesus’ birth. According to Pagels, the doctrine that says that Jesus was born of a virgin is likely a later insertion into the story by Gospel writers seeking to overcome the “inconvenient fact” of his presumed illegitimacy.
But unlike some of the early slander they were defending against — that Mary was promiscuous — Pagels also raises the possibility that the young mother was one of the many victims of marauding Roman soldiers who were then ravaging the area in which she was living. And, both classical and modern critics have pointed out that the original Hebrew of Isaiah 7:14, the prophecy that the Gospel writers cite to support their claim, makes reference not to a virgin, but literally to a young woman (almah).
Pagels’s tone is consistently sympathetic, attuned to the pressures and incentives under which the Evangelists were writing, even as she betrays the somewhat superior attitude of the rationalist toward the religious. In her language, “many of today’s scholars” would agree with Trypho, the Jewish philosopher who first broached the possibility of a mistranslation, while the faithful “have persisted in following” Justin Martyr, the philosopher-convert who defended the teaching of Mary’s virginity.
But despite the implied disparity here, the translation of almah into “virgin” instead of “young woman” may not have been a matter of simple fideism — much less of quasi-conspiratorial track covering — considering the fact that it was not even originally Christian, but made by much earlier Jewish translators of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. (This text, the Septuagint, was known throughout the Mediterranean world, and may well have been the source for the Gospel writers’ understanding of Isaiah.)
Of course, this does not entirely address how and why the Gospels were written, much less how they came to us. To the contrary, it suggests still deeper questions about the status of different translations, who is capable of interpreting the word of God and what it means to receive texts whose sources are at the very least mysterious to us — theological questions.
Without asking these questions, we risk assuming that we can immediately recognize the social and psychological contours of the stories as we receive them — and that these alone explain the texts’ possible meanings.
The story that Pagels presents is a detailed speculation that can be roughly summarized in Goethe’s saying that Christianity, having failed as a political revolution, became a moral one. The Jesus of “Miracles and Wonder” is primarily a Jewish radical whose death was allegorized by his posthumous followers and eventually transposed into the language of ethics on the one hand, and religious doctrine on the other.
In rendering the early days of this reconstruction, Pagels presents decisions concerning the Gospel story and Christian doctrine as contrived, if not conspiratorial. But the depth of spirituality she uncovers is profound, providing for two millenniums of art and poetry. Pagels’s appreciation for these riches, as well as for the irrecoverable gaps in the historical record, keeps “Miracles and Wonder” from mere iconoclasm, even if its basic perspective finds Christian orthodoxy unsupportable.
But however much the critical-historical mode is shaped by modern presuppositions, it is also forever linked to an essential claim: To announce that God has become human is to demand a historical as well as a theological perspective — and, ultimately, to try to understand each in light of the other. And even the most rigorously critical investigation eventually puts us back on the enriching, infuriating, unavoidable human task of discerning between varieties of testimony.
MIRACLES AND WONDER: The Historical Mystery of Jesus | By Elaine Pagels | Doubleday | 320 pp. | $30
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