‘Miracles and Wonder’ digs into mysteries about Jesus: review

For nearly seven decades, Elaine Pagels has wrestled with the question: “Why religion?” At age 15, she found herself among thousands in Candlestick Park, electrified by the words of evangelist Billy Graham. The theology scholar to be was entranced, “overcome with tears … praising God for all the souls being saved that day.” Being born again at that moment, Pagels writes in her remarkable “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” “opened up vast spaces in my imagination. It changed my life.”

While Pagels’ love affair with evangelical Christianity lasted only a year, her curiosity about the “powerful responses” that stories about Jesus evoked in her persisted; interrogating that response became her life’s work. Now 82, she is an emeritus professor of religion at Princeton, where she’s taught for more than four decades. Over the course of her extraordinary career, she has written wide-audience books including “Origin of Satan,” received a MacArthur “genius” grant and a National Humanities Medal, and won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. But Jesus has still remained an enigma to one of the country’s preeminent authorities in gospel scholarship in many ways.

As a lapsed Catholic who never studied the Bible, I was at first skeptical that this deep immersion into Jesus’ life could have any particular relevance for me. Jesus had been a vague presence in my youth, but once I stopped attending church, that door closed. Catholicism undoubtedly led me to prize compassion and social justice, but I’d never specifically connected this to my early impressions of Jesus. Perhaps a revisit was in order. I dove in.

Some of the passages in this illuminating and essential work are tough going. Pagels is conversant with every version of the gospels — even the most obscure — and wades through them with forensic thoroughness. Like a detective, she’s always on the lookout for contradictory gospels about Jesus’ origin story. But it’s worthwhile hanging in: As the chapters unfold, the plot thickens.

For one, it turns out there aren’t physical descriptions of Jesus anywhere in the gospels. We have no idea what he looked like, which means all the subsequent representations of him in art and elsewhere are wholly imagined. Incredibly, none of the narratives now called “gospels” were written in Jesus’ lifetime. Rather, they were penned anonymously decades after his death, likely by disciples of his teachings who’d never actually met him but wanted to spread the word. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were names added afterward, to lend credibility, derived from men in Jesus’ inner circle. These and many other such nuggets were revelatory to me as a newcomer to Bible study.

Pagels also points out that the gospels can’t be read as “gospel.” In other words, they are “less a biography than a passionate manifesto, showing how a young man from a rural background suddenly became a lightning rod for divine power.” Each version of the gospels has a slightly — or occasionally, vastly — different take on Jesus’ genealogy, the virgin birth, whether or not he was actually the son of God, and even whether he literally rose from the dead or his “resurrection” came in the form of a vision to some of his followers after his crucifixion. The gospel writers, Pagels concludes, were less interested in accuracy and more focused on expanding awareness of Jesus as son of God and savior: She observes that the gospels “report historical events while interweaving them with parables, interpretations, and miraculous moments told in symbolic language.”

Some of Jesus’ detractors — and even some of his most devoted followers — questioned why, if Jesus was truly the Messiah, he’d been unable to deliver Israel from its Roman occupiers, or to make good, before he died, on his promise that “the Kingdom of God is coming soon.” Two generations after his death, doubts persisted even among the most devout: “If he were a true prophet,” they wondered, “why had his message failed?” Judea remained under Roman rule; persecution and barbarism reigned.

As a teacher and an activist, Jesus was fierce, secretive, volatile and impatient, by some accounts. Others emphasized the “compassionate Christ” who urged that we “turn the other cheek,” who mingled among lepers and saw the poor and sick as being God’s children: that “those who are ‘first’ in this world — prominent and powerful — may find themselves last in God’s kingdom.” Pagels argues that the very concept of all humans being equal originated with Christ, and eventually led Christianity, in the course of 2000 years, to become the most prevalent of all religious traditions, with one-third of the world’s population identifying as Christian.

Whether or not you are a true believer, it is nothing short of miraculous to realize that one person’s words and actions — and the storytelling around that individual — can continue to resonate in all realms of society and culture, in all corners of the world. How Jesus’ teachings are interpreted is left to the eye of the beholder — whether to justify violence, to elevate peace and kindness or to inspire artists ranging from William Blake to Salvador Dali and Martin Scorsese.

When I got to the last pages of “Miracles and Wonder,” I realized that while I knew a great deal more about the origins of Christianity than when I began, the mystery of Jesus himself had deepened. Perhaps that’s how it’s meant to be. But the moral of the story is clear: Christ’s story is an iconic tale of hope emerging from darkness.

“After Jesus suffers the worst imaginable fate,” Pagels writes, “betrayed by a trusted friend, abandoned by everyone, falsely accused, tortured, and cruelly executed in public, he is raised to glorious new life.” That a charismatic 1st century rabbi interpreted the Genesis creation myth “to mean that every member of the human race has sacred value,” Pagels observes, “still resonates through our social and political life as indictment — and inspiration.”

Ultimately, the meaning of Jesus, Pagels suggests, has less to do with religion and more to do with the way in which we confront and transcend despair. “What fascinated me,” she concludes, “is not only the historical mysteries my book seeks to unravel but the spiritual power that shines through these stories.”