Bible stories can strike some people as “simple or naive,” but they’re not, says Elaine Pagels, an expert in early Christianity and the author of such books as “The Gnostic Gospels,” “Revelations,” and “Why Religion: A Personal Story.” After decades studying the Bible, reading chapters in their original languages such as Hebrew and Coptic, Dr. Pagels has many questions. “Why do these stories still fascinate me? Why do I still love teaching this?”
Her new book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus” seeks to answer those questions, and delves into the many accounts of the life of Jesus. And, she says, she discovered much that she hadn’t articulated in her previous scholarship.
Dr. Pagels, a Princeton University professor, spoke recently with the Monitor. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why We Wrote This
A Bible scholar explores how Jesus’ teachings, and the stories told about his life, have reached across centuries to guide and inspire Christians.
Why did you choose this point in your career to write about the life of Jesus?
I wanted to look at the whole picture. What do we know about the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth from the New Testament stories? What do we find in the new cache of secret gospels discovered in 1945? What do we know of what’s going on in Judaea at the time? Because that puts the whole story of Jesus into a light that I never saw when I was growing up in a little Protestant church in California, with pictures of Jesus sitting with children on his lap.
Jesus took his own Jewish teaching and seemed to open it up even to people who aren’t Jews. He told stories about a Samaritan, an ungrateful son, even an enemy. That teaching is compelling. This time around, I saw something different as well, and that is how the stories move from the world that we live in, with suffering and oppression and sickness and death and brutality, and they move into hope. They mingle historical events with stories of transformation. And I think that’s very powerful. It works at a very deep level to encourage us to hope.
Your book references the secret gospels you mentioned earlier, as well as the description of God as father and mother. Where does that come from?
After studying the Gospel of Thomas, I realized I love what I find in the secret gospels. There aren’t just four gospels; there are many more. We know of at least 10. Several turned up in 1945 in an archaeological discovery in Egypt from a monastery library. They’d been hidden there for 1,600 years because they were banned as heretical by the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the fourth century, although they’d been widely read before that.
These secret gospels speak of God as mother as well as father, because they’re originally written or spoken in Aramaic or Hebrew, in which the word for “spirit” is a feminine word. But when you translate it into the Greek of the New Testament, it becomes a neuter word without gender. And then if you translate it into Latin, it becomes a masculine word, so when you say it in Latin, as the church did, it’s “father,” “son,” and “him.”
So if you’re using anthropological metaphors for God, who’s not supposed to be imaged, but you’re using the one “father,” then you could also use “mother.” That would be natural: the father, the mother, and the son. And I thought, Who else would you expect to find with the father and the son?
Is it important to one’s faith to know whether Jesus had an earthly father, and who that was?
It wasn’t for Mark, the earliest person to write about it. There’s no mention in the Gospel of Mark of a father, and there’s a suggestion that Jesus’ birth was questionable, even in his hometown, by calling him “the son of Mary.”
But when people were talking about the message of Jesus, one of the replies by members of the Jewish community who were not his followers was to say that he was illegitimate. They put the worst cast on it, saying his father wasn’t even a Jew; he was probably a Roman soldier. So at least by about the time Matthew and Luke are writing, they are concerned about that kind of polemic, and they feel they have to counter it. But interestingly, Mark doesn’t.
If you go back to Mark’s Gospel, there is a story about Jesus of Nazareth as a young man. He hears that John the Baptist is preaching out in the wilderness, and he goes out with crowds of people to hear him. And the prophet says, “The kingdom of God is coming. Repent and believe in the message, and be baptized, get your sins forgiven, and join God’s people.” So Jesus gets baptized, and as he’s coming out of the water, Mark says he saw a vision. He saw the heavens split apart, and he heard a voice saying, “This is my son, my beloved son. Listen to him.”
Mark is saying, “God is Jesus’ father. And I’m not telling you; God is telling you himself,” in the first chapter. That’s Mark’s answer. “You want to know where he comes from? He comes from God.” John’s Gospel has nothing about the virgin birth explicitly. It says, “Where does Jesus come from? Well, in the beginning was the divine word, when God said, ‘Let there be light’ at the beginning of time, and that light and that energy from God became human and lived among us. Where does he come from? He comes from God.”
That’s enough for John. So for faith, for those two writers, that’s an answer. And it’s not about his biological paternity.
What do you hope readers will take away from “Miracles and Wonder”?
An awareness of how the stories work, how they have a capacity to transform the way we interpret our experience, the way we see the world. They’re stories of Jesus, but they’re not simply histories. They’re attempts to convey his message, which is about anticipating transformation into what he calls the kingdom of God, into a glorious new moment, we could call it.
