One subject that never dies, and, more significantly, never bores, is the life and times of the first-century Jewish rabbi and martyr Jesus, whose followers founded a religion in his name, or, rather, in honor of his title, Christ, meaning “the anointed one,” or Messiah. (Not necessarily a divine title, it had previously been associated with military and religious leaders, often indicating something closer to “the great” than “the godlike.”) Along with Buddha and Muhammad, he is one of three nameable figures credited with founding religions that have continued to grow over thousands of years.
The Princeton professor emeritus Elaine Pagels, who has written many imposing and engrossing books on early Christianity, is back with a kind of culminating work, “Miracles and Wonder” (Doubleday), the title slyly looking at both St. Paul and Paul Simon. Though her purposes are manifold, she begins by ably navigating through the shoals of the essential but surprisingly unsettled sources that seem to relate the events of Jesus’ life and death. There are, first, the Epistles of St. Paul, the late convert who brought the Jewish heresy to the Gentiles, releasing it from Torah observance and law, and making it a universal faith. The seven undisputed Pauline letters were written in and around the fifties, about fifteen to twenty years after the Passion; six others are regarded as later, polemical forgeries, correcting Paul’s egalitarianism with more gender-bound rules. Then, there are the “letters” (Hebrews and Jude and so on) of uncertain early date and more uncertain authorship.
Most important, there are the four Gospels, written in Greek some forty to sixty years after the Crucifixion is thought to have happened. These were composed somewhere far from Jerusalem, in a language that Jesus and his disciples would not have known, by writers who could not have been eyewitnesses. The books are attributed, in probable order of composition, to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, with the attribution provided by the Greek formula of “according to,” unique to these texts. The suggestion is that these are not accounts “by” So-and-So but “the story as told to” So-and-So.
Though fugitive and fragmentary, the events in the Gospels take place on a fixed historical time line. Judea, the remaining Jewish kingdom—conquered throughout the centuries by Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks—was annexed by the Roman Empire around 6 C.E. The story of Jesus’ life, if accurately reported, occurred in the brief window between the annexation and the Jewish revolt of the sixties and seventies. That fanatic rebellion, mournfully chronicled by the great Jewish historian Josephus, ended in a catastrophe rivalled in the history of Jews only by the Holocaust; it involved the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the enslavement and exile of thousands, and the loss of sovereignty over Jewish holy sites. From this desolation arose the Messianic faith of Christianity, which, after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312, eventually became the Roman Empire’s sole state religion.
How Jesus’ story fits into this framework is very much Pagels’s question. She’s working within a tradition of historical-Jesus studies that took shape in earnest more than two centuries ago, and for her the Gospels are palimpsests of lore, legend, and propaganda, beneath which a core of oral transmission and shared recollection remains detectable. The shifting Nativity narratives, for instance, suggest that rumors about Jesus’ parentage existed from the beginning. Pagels notes that the miraculous-birth stories appear relatively late. Paul—who never met Jesus, though he might have met his brother—mentions nothing about a virgin birth. Neither does Mark, who makes Jesus’ adoption by God as his son the true beginning of the story, tied to Jesus’ baptism by John. In various texts, including Apocryphal works that date to around the same time as the Gospels proper, Joseph appears to suspect Mary of infidelity. Meanwhile, an early Jewish polemic claimed that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier nicknamed Panther—perhaps employing a tasteless but pointed pun on the Greek word parthenos (virgin).
The story of the virgin birth, Pagels argues, was introduced by Matthew and, in another version, by Luke in order to address such lingering doubts. The consoling notion of divine impregnation was commonplace in the Hellenistic world, with countless tales of gods foisting demigods on virgins. Plutarch, for instance, described Rome’s founder Romulus as born to a divinely impregnated vestal virgin. As Catherine Nixey, a writer for The Economist, shows in “Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Others Sons of God” (Mariner), an irreverent reassessment of the Jesus stories in light of similar myths, early Christians didn’t merely acknowledge these parallels but actively traded on them, as precedents for their own claims. The second-century apologist Justin Martyr argued that Christianity’s central tenets were no different in kind from the divine births of Zeus’ many sons—though, of course, he insisted that his divine-birth story happened to be true. The only real originality in the accounts of Jesus’ virgin birth is their distinctly Jewish and prudish tone, with the impregnation dignified and at arm’s length rather than represented, as in the Hellenistic myths, as a shower of gold or the lovemaking of an amorous swan.
Pagels’s larger point is that the most improbable Gospel tales serve to patch a fractured narrative—using familiar tropes and myths to smooth over inconsistencies that believers struggled with from the beginning. We repair the rips in memory’s fabric with the filler of fable. (And so, within a decade of George Washington’s death, his undocumented childhood produced the enduring myth of the chopped-down cherry tree.) She concludes with a delicate rereading of the Magnificat, suggesting that Mary’s gratitude is not for the child himself but for the miracle that transforms an illegitimate birth into a blessing—an occasion of shame recast as a song of salvation. Not, perhaps, an orthodox reading, but one that is persuasive on its own terms.
Similarly, the variations in the Nativity stories—Matthew features Persian Magi, while Luke omits them in favor of local shepherds—are not merely discrepancies of partial memory. Rather, they are instances of purposeful mimesis, shaped by the needs of their authors. For Matthew, a Torah-observant “Jewish Christian,” the image of Persian Magi bowing before the newborn Jewish Messiah is appealing, reinforcing his vision of Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Luke, by contrast, is intent on reconciling Christianity with Roman rule—or, at least, demonstrating that this nascent sect poses no threat to the Empire. For him, shepherds and stables provide a nicely reassuring pastoral setting, but Persian Magi are an unwelcome detail—too foreign, too unruly.
Attentive to the mythological roots of these stories, Pagels negotiates between rationalist skepticism and a more romantic appreciation of their moral force. She notes that miraculous cures were common in the ancient world. Those attributed to Jesus—described in language nearly identical to accounts of the Greek mystic and holy man Apollonius of Tyana, say—are neither more nor less convincing than others. But she adds a deeper insight: the outlook of Jesus’ world made it particularly receptive to psychosomatic illness and its cures. Certainly, this offers powerful support to the scholar John Dominic Crossan’s claim that Jesus’ originality lay in his “commensality”—his willingness to touch lepers he could not heal and to dine with prostitutes he neither patronized nor liberated. His miracles were ecumenical, often involving the untouchable. He may not have cured those he healed, but the act of trying to heal anyone who asked was in itself a kind of miracle.
The Passion and the Resurrection are, of course, at the heart of the Jesus story. Matthew’s account of the empty tomb, followed by ever more elaborate resurrection narratives, serves, Pagels suggests, both to address the practical difficulties of reclaiming the bodies of the executed and to counter skeptical claims that Jesus’ corpse had simply been stolen. Stories of resurrection and rebirth, after all, recur throughout history. Bereavement hallucinations—intensely vivid encounters with the deceased—are reported by as many as half of all grieving people. Elvis, for one, was seen by many in the years following his death, with a newspaper report of a sighting in Kalamazoo at least as reliable as the spotty accounts shared by fervent believers two millennia ago. And Paul depicts his own explicitly visionary encounters with a long-dead Jesus as equivalent to the earlier encounters reported by the apostles.
Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus’ Resurrection to that of the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in our own time. During his life, many devotees of the Brooklyn rebbe believed he was the Messiah, a conviction that he encouraged without ever explicitly confirming—much like the Jesus of the Gospels. After Schneerson’s death, in 1994, only a small portion of believers insisted that he remained physically alive, but others continued to experience him as an enduring presence, a guide still available for inner light and intercession, as Jesus was for Paul.
In times of catastrophe, such beliefs tend to harden into certainty. If the Lubavitcher community had been struck by something on the scale of the Judeans’ loss of the Temple and their enslavement, what are now marginal, hallucinatory visions of the rebbe would almost certainly take on a more declarative, redemptive form. “Long live the Rebbe, King Moshiach forever!”—the Lubavitcher slogan seen on New York street corners—is, in essence, no different from “Christ is risen.” Both trace the same arc from comforting spiritual presence to asserted physical reality.
The interpretive approach that Pagels represents is skeptical—nothing happened quite as related—but inclined to accept that something happened, in something like the sequence suggested. A scholarly paradigm that has shone in recent years shifts the focus: the Gospels are now seen as literary constructions from the start. There were no rips in the fabric of memory, in this view, because there were no memories to mend—no foundational oral tradition beneath the narratives, only a lattice of tropes. The Gospel authors, far from being community leaders preserving oral sayings for largely illiterate followers, were highly literate members of a small, erudite upper crust, distant in experience, attitude, and geography from any Galilean peasant preachers. Their writings bear all the marks of that sharp-elbowed circle and none of the gentle gatherings of group memory.
Indeed, the Gospels don’t even present themselves as history, the way other chronicles of the time did. “Whether one considers the collection of early Christian gospels, the various apostolic acta, the assortment of apocalypses, or the burgeoning stock of hagiographa,” Richard C. Miller argues in his 2015 study, “Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity,” the reader finds “nothing deserving of the genus ‘historiography.’ ” The early Christian gospels show “no visible weighing of sources, no apology for the all-too-common occurrence of the supernatural, no endeavor to distinguish such accounts and conventions from analogous fictive narratives in classical literature.” From this perspective, the familiar elements of the Nativity—the stable, the shepherds, the Magi—were not meant to paper over the embarrassment at Jesus’ illegitimacy. Rather, they were simply the stories you told because that’s what the birth narratives of demigods were like. The tomb was not found empty because of local confusion or an effort to suppress the fate of a corpse; it was empty because an empty tomb was a standard signifier of divinity. Miller catalogues many comparable instances. The Gospel portrayals of Jesus, he concludes, offer nothing that couldn’t be found within the well-worn conventions of the Mediterranean demigod tradition.
Just as nineteenth-century criticism shaped the older paradigm, the new one is deeply informed by postmodern theory—Miller, for instance, approvingly cites Derrida—with its skepticism toward “foundationalist” thought. That is, the new paradigm rejects the idea that there is a base layer of historical fact that writing partially conceals, in a kind of dance of the seven literary veils. All there is beneath those literary veils is more dancing.
The most accessible statement of this new paradigm may come from Robyn Faith Walsh, a professor at the University of Miami. A pugnacious writer and a charismatic public speaker, Walsh argues in her 2021 book, “The Origins of Early Christian Literature,” that the Gospels, whatever else they may be, are, first and foremost, Greek literature. Their closest affinities, she contends, are not with Jewish folklore or communal memory but with the miraculous novels and excitable bioi, or lives, that filled the Hellenistic world—stories often centered on wonder-workers from a humble social caste.
These bioi—picaresque tales of magi, sages, and tricksters—are filled with miracles, dramatic confrontations, and recurring resurrection motifs. “Some bioi, for example, highlight the virtues of their subjects,” Walsh writes. “Others endow their subjects with extraordinary abilities of a different kind—‘superpowers,’ if you will—that involve what one might term ‘magic’ or other sorts of wonder-working.” Many of these protagonists also possess a keen wit, outfoxing their opponents with “clever ripostes and wise sayings, sometimes in the form of parables,” she notes. “Odd as it may seem to subsume the Alexander Romance, the Life of Aesop, and the gospels under the same genre, the narratives of Jesus’ deeds and sayings can be seen as pertaining to the same biographical tradition. Like Socrates or Aesop, Jesus is at the margins of society, a Judean peasant powerless in relation to the state. In his encounters with Pharisees or other interlocutors, he wins his victories by means of his wits and his ability to turn the words of his opponents against them.”
The habit of taking the Gospels as repositories of a community’s oral tradition, Walsh suggests, is an unexamined inheritance from nineteenth-century German Romanticism. Deeply invested in völkisch memory, German scholars envisioned the Gospel writers as culling and refining oral tradition, much like the Brothers Grimm, who collected and transcribed folktales. Just as the Grimms turned scattered oral traditions into polished literary narratives, so, the theory went, did the Gospel authors. But Walsh argues that no direct evidence supports the idea that the Gospels emerged from such a process. Instead, the Gospels seem to have more in common with the self-consciously crafted storytelling of Hans Christian Andersen—imaginative narratives shaped by skilled authors to fit a particular vision.
At the extreme edge of this revisionism is the work of Richard Carrier, whose book “On the Historicity of Jesus” (2014) forcefully presents the “mythicist” view—the argument that no historical Jesus ever existed. Carrier contends that early Christianity began as a purely visionary movement worshipping a celestial figure, an angelic being who took on human flesh to be crucified by Satan, buried, and reborn in the sky. Only later, he thinks, did a competing sect within the movement historicize this figure, placing him on earth.
Carrier, an independent scholar with a Columbia Ph.D., is a fascinating public figure—a YouTube intellectual (a term offered without snobbery) who is a regular presence in the energetic ecosystem of the platform’s myriad channels, mostly hosted by amateurs and improbably devoted to early-Christian history, including Gnostic Informant, Godless Engineer, MythVision, and History Valley. His polemical style, often sarcastic and combative, has made him a divisive figure, but his arguments in print are much more measured than his online persona might suggest. He’s cogent, for instance, about the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, the interpolated passage in Josephus’ history which seems to discuss, and extravagantly praise, Jesus. Though it is universally recognized to be at least in part Christian embroidery, Carrier offers convincing arguments for joining those who think that it is a forgery in its entirety. Unfortunately, he is one of those figures who, thinking for themselves, also think by themselves, and so he cannot always tell his strongest ideas from his weaker ones, defending both with sometimes undue aggression inside that ecosystem of videoed disputes. It is moving, in a way, that texts so ancient and arguments so obscure can continue to flame in an age where textuality and argument seem so remote.
Neither Miller nor Walsh would describe themselves as mythicists; indeed, both keep a wary if friendly distance from Carrier. (Neither mentions him in their bibliographies, but both have made peaceable references to him in interviews.) They could instead be described as postmodernists—Walsh regularly cites Bourdieu, as Miller cites Derrida—who think that asking “Did Jesus exist?” is naïve and off target, more a question for the History Channel than a question to be channelled through history. Jesus, whether a historical figure or not, exists for us only as a literary character in a series of polemical exchanges. Even if he existed, his actual purposes, whatever they might have been, are marginal to the development of Christianity as a religion.
Yet even after absorbing the suspicions of the new scholars—accepting the empty tomb as a set-piece story, the Nativity as a shifting proscenium narrative—one returns to a basic truth: fables can be entirely fictional and still contain implicit facts; extravagant narratives often have an empirical core. We make our way back to Pagels’s reasonable middle ground, one that acknowledges both the constructed nature of the texts and the oddities and frictions that point the way out of pure textuality.
Spike Lee’s 1992 bio-pic, “Malcolm X,” is also a collection of tropes, figures, and familiar cinematic devices, stuffed with quotations, conscious and unconscious, from earlier movies—with direct visual borrowings from Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” and a long climactic section quoting Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus.” That does not mean that there isn’t a very real figure being portrayed behind, and through, these devices. Indeed, the movie is separated from the life of its subject by about the same number of years that separate the Gospels from Jesus’ life, and, in the same way, it refashions Malcolm’s life and death to suit the political needs of its day. Lee emerges as Malcolm’s Mark, intent on diminishing the eccentricity of Malcolm’s religious beliefs—no flying saucers or human-making magicians—and, in a similarly prudent revisionist spirit, on diverting blame for his assassination from the Nation of Islam (eliminating Louis Farrakhan’s probable role in the murder) and instead affixing it to, so to speak, the Romans—the F.B.I. and the New York police. The film reshapes meanings, filters facts, and crafts a narrative around cinematic conventions, but it does not erase the essential outline of Malcolm’s life. It isn’t just a movie. The Gospels are certainly Greek literature. Yet they may well be Greek literature inspired by an actual Jewish life.
Pagels, rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect, revels in the contradictions and the inconsistencies not as flaws to be explained away but as signs of the faith’s capaciousness. The miracles are miracles simply because they are a source of wonder. Christianity is not one thing or one faith but countless variants, traditionally at war with one another but capable of reconciliation or at least coexistence. Its essential reversal of worldly expectations—captured in Paul’s defiant words “For Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong”—introduced a way of thinking about power and suffering with little precedent in the ancient world.
This paradox—strength emerging from weakness, ultimate truth found in apparent irrationality—echoes the dictum credo quia absurdum: “I believe it because it is absurd.” This sentiment finds its deepest modern expression in Kierkegaard’s view that faith requires a leap beyond reason. Yet it also edges uncomfortably close to George Costanza’s line that something isn’t a lie if you believe it. And a starkly apocalyptic interpretation of the New Testament is always near at hand. The Epistle to the Hebrews, for instance, makes Christianity’s blood logic unsettlingly plain: with animal sacrifices at the Temple ended, only a greater sacrifice—God’s son—can suffice. This doctrine is embedded in the Catholic Mass, where the Lamb of God represents not gentleness but a creature slaughtered for the good of the world. This concept horrified critics like William Empson, who saw it as depicting a cosmos ruled by an irrational deity whose rage toward humanity can be placated only by his son’s torture and death. That logic, however buried beneath more palatable readings, runs like a dark current through the text.
Liberals reading the Bill of Rights look past the slaveholding hands that wrote it, passionate Marxists regard the Gulag as a deviation rather than a destination, and Christians—including the secularized kind—look past the demands of blood sacrifice and the spectre of eternal punishment to focus on the extraordinary power of the common table, the promise that the last shall be first, and the idea that the rejected may yet be made royal. Kenneth Clark, in his still potent “Civilisation,” rightly singled out the Giotto frescoes in Padua—telling the Christ story from birth to murder to light restored—and Handel’s “Messiah” as high points of what we mean by civilized life. It is difficult to take in such works without feeling that they express something close to divine inspiration.
That Christianity spread across the world is an extraordinary fact of history. But we should resist the idea that it did so because of some inherent theological inevitability. The consequence of Constantine’s adoption of the faith was less a grand design than a lucky break; Roman emperors mostly had the life spans of gnats, and Constantine happened to avoid assassination. Christianity’s rise should be no more astonishing than that of Mormonism, a Christian heresy with obviously fabricated origins. People seek faith, and faith, by its nature, demands the embrace of what reason resists.
And the placid and ecumenical urge, so appealing in more serene moments, can land differently in our own. Christianity, Catherine Nixey insists, largely invented religious intolerance and the persecution of dissenters. Hellenistic culture was imperfectly tolerant; the Christian one perfectly intolerant. Constantine, adopting the faith as an expansive gesture, was shocked by the vengeful fervor of his new adherents. Nor was Christian intolerance simply a response to persecution, the Notre Dame professor Candida Moss contends in “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom” (2013). Her book, as the title suggests, attempts to dismantle the idea of Christianity as a faith forged in suffering. She argues, instead, that it constructed a cult of victimhood while stamping out dissent and violently opposing any pluralism of thought. Christianity, often so powerful in causes of human equality—Martin Luther King, Jr., after all, led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference until the day he died—has a bad record when it comes to authoritarianism, too often being it. (Even now, we see among conservative intellectuals how once well-meaning Catholic communalism can collapse into Trumpite acquiescence.)
What is missing from the discussion today, perhaps, are the pagan opponents of early Christianity. From Celsus to the Emperor Julian, they responded at length to Christian claims, yet their works are now almost entirely lost, known to us only in the fragments that their adversaries saw fit to preserve for the purpose of refutation. It would be as if all that remained of Daniel Dennett’s work were one of those “Ben Shapiro Pwns Atheist!” videos. As Stephen Greenblatt reminded readers in his Lucretian adventure, “The Swerve,” some of these largely vanished thinkers, especially those at the Epicurean edge, seem to have already grasped what remains a core truth: the world is material and values are made by us, often shaped through poetic myths and transcendent metaphors. The humanism they championed was always plural—there are many plausible ways to live. But, in its refusal of certainty, their humanism also produced enormous anxiety, and anxiety is always drawn toward the reassurance of authority.
The authority always fails. The anxiety reasserts itself. A new, amended authority emerges. In the interstices of such authority, the atoms we are made of will, by chance or by purpose, form and fix into new patterns—some of them beautiful, some not, with the shapes of faith both grotesque to our cooler judgments and inspiring to our warmest imaginations. We who are made of matter must somehow find a way both to recognize this mystery and not to mind it, too much. ♦