Jesus in the Fun House

Nick Owchar reviews Elaine Pagels’s “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.”

By Nick OwcharApril 2, 2025

• Religion

• History

WHEN ELAINE PAGELS enrolled at Harvard as a doctoral student to study the history of religion, she thought she made a good decision. She was eager to get at the truth of Jesus’s life, buried under all the narrative inconsistencies, myths, and theological debates that have continued for thousands of years. Harvard seemed to be the perfect place for that. “I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma,” she writes early on in her new book Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. “Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we would be able to find out what Jesus actually said and did, and how Christianity began.” This book is partly about why these assumptions were wrong.

It’s not a knock against Harvard. Anyone with even a faint interest in the hunt for the historical Jesus knows that the search is like walking through a fun house hall of mirrors. Taken together, the four Gospels, along with the others not included in the New Testament, are an editorial hodgepodge—they contradict each other on many of the “facts,” they’re obscured by a thick veneer of biblical allusions, and mistranslations of related texts haven’t helped, either. And yet, Pagels writes, for all their flaws, these stories of a dirt-poor itinerant preacher in first-century Galilee continue to attract followers today. “How is it that Jesus, who lived thousands of years ago, has not gone the way of other beings, gods or humans, like Zeus or Julius Caesar, who populate our culture’s remote past?” she asks. “How do so many people relate to him as a living presence, even as someone they know intimately? What attracts people to Jesus today?”

An acclaimed scholar and popularizer of early Christian history who first attracted attention with The Gnostic Gospels (1979), Pagels offers an answer in her new book. But before she does that, she spends much of it summarizing what scholarship says about the narrative problems of the Jesus stories and providing intriguing historical contexts that many believers don’t know or choose to ignore. Ignorance of context is the reason why some treat the Gospels (or anything else in the Bible) as 100 percent factual. You don’t have to go very far to find examples. There are plenty of people on social media excitedly talking about the proof of the Star of Bethlehem or Noah’s Ark or applying the Book of Revelation to contemporary events and individuals. It’s clear they don’t know anything about the people who actually wrote these stories or the circumstances in which they lived. “[A]lthough the New Testament writers often mention historical events,” Pagels explains,

they were not writing primarily to report history, or even biography—not, at any rate, in ways that conform to Greek and Roman literary conventions. Instead, they were writing, some forty to seventy years after Jesus’s death, primarily to publicize his message. Simply put, Jesus’s devoted believers wrote these narratives to persuade others to “believe in the gospel”—the Greek term evangelion translates as “good news”—and join their new movement.

Miracles and Wonder, then, aims to show us why Jesus’s historicity can’t be so easily gleaned from the religious propaganda we call Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John (Mark’s Gospel appeared first, and the others were both reactions to and revisions of it) or the other stories that didn’t make the cut to become part of the New Testament canon.

Much of the material here covers familiar ground that’s been trod by many scholars, including Raymond Brown, John Dominic Crossan, and E. P. Sanders. Pagels revisits it all, pondering the miracle accounts and stories of healing (were they really miracles or just examples of the placebo effect?) and the way the gospel writers struggled to shift blame for Jesus’s execution from the Romans to the Jews to avoid trouble with the Roman authorities (igniting thousands of years of antisemitism in the process). She presents the debate over whether Jesus’s resurrection was physical or, as Paul seems to suggest, a visionary experience instead. And all of it is guaranteed to upset anyone with a fundamentalist belief in the Bible’s literal truth.

To get a sense of why these folks might get upset, consider some of the historical context surrounding Jesus’s birth, which can be summed up in three points:

• Jesus’s mother is often called the Blessed Virgin Mary even though scholarship shows that identification is based on a mistranslation. The Gospel writers frequently drew references from the Hebrew Bible to show how Jesus was the fulfillment of ancient prophecies. A Greek version of Isaiah 7:14 used by the Gospel writers takes the Hebrew word “almah”—which simply means a young woman—and substitutes the Greek “parthenos” (virgin). Thus, the ordinary statement that “a young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call him Immanuel” was turned into an extraordinary one defying medical science.

• So much time is spent by the Gospel writers (except Mark) defending Jesus against claims of illegitimacy that it’s likely Mary got pregnant before marrying Joseph. Either she and Joseph had premarital sex or Mary, like other young women of the period, had been physically assaulted by a member of the occupying Roman forces. This would make Jesus the product of a rape. 

• If it was a case of assault, Jesus’s father could be a soldier named Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, who served in Palestine in the years surrounding Jesus’s birth. This rumor was well known in the ancient world. First-century rabbinic sources refer to Jesus as “Jesus ben Pantera” (Jesus, son of Pantera), and even a Greek philosopher, Celsus, includes this story in his anti-Christian polemic On the True Doctrine.

Have most people heard such incredible claims before? Probably not, unless they’re interested in biblical scholarship.

Leaving the door open to such startling ideas requires a loosening of one’s grip on the many Gospel set pieces one may have grown up with—the Three Wise Men, the Christmas Star, the raising of Lazarus, and other beloved things that many learned in childhood. Letting go of them is easier said than done. But didn’t Paul say that, at some point, it is necessary to put childish things away? And if one is willing to do that, what is left? What happens to one’s identity as a Christian without a belief in Jesus’s miracles or his actual bodily resurrection? What remains to inspire us?

Pagels’s book makes the answer clear: Jesus’s humanity. And his message.

In the book’s later chapters, Pagels describes present-day groups like the Association of Vineyard Churches, whose followers use a meditative practice to create an intense, personal experience of Jesus. She describes how African Methodist Episcopal Christians, facing intense racial persecution, have found meaning in Jesus’s sufferings and are “confident that he would understand the suffering of one of their own, and their own devastating grief.” It’s this experience of the human side of Jesus, not the mystical one, that groups like these celebrate with their followers. As Pagels puts it: “As in the Roman Empire, where many enslaved people and others despised as ‘the rabble’ rejected the traditional Greek and Roman gods to worship instead the humble, suffering Son of God, so, today, marginalized people are often drawn to the crucified Jesus.” Along with the marginalized and the persecuted, many artists—Christian and non-Christian alike—have been drawn to Jesus because of this humanity, not any supernatural claims. Pagels’s summary of these artistic examples ranges far and wide, from painters such as Salvador Dalí and Marc Chagall to filmmakers including Mark Dornford-May, Helen Edmundson, and Martin Scorsese.

Pagels is a bit guarded about how she addresses controversial issues, often inserting language into the middle of a discussion that feels like a disclaimer: “Let’s be clear, then,” she states at one point, “my purpose in mentioning these speculations is not to endorse them.” It’s understandable why she does this: it’s risky presenting such ideas in the midst of a culture war in which religious extremists attack anyone making a point based on scientific information. Still, even with such disclaimers, Pagels’s book advances a refreshingly honest reminder about why the stories of Jesus, unlike similar ones about first-century rabbis or the holy man Apollonius of Tyana, haven’t gone away. Jesus’s time spent ministering to the sick and rejected continues to attract followers now because of its deep roots in a “radical, unprecedented reading of Genesis”:

This passionate, charismatic first-century rabbi interpreted the Genesis creation myth that “God created humankind in his image” to mean that every member of the human race has sacred value. Other moral teachers, like Plato, had recommended helping people in need, but only people of one’s own status—certainly not indigents, the poor, or people enslaved. And other rabbis of Jesus’s time preached, as he did, the Scriptural injunction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” But instead of focusing such charity primarily on other Jews in his community, he shocked his listeners by urging them to lend compassion and practical help to anyone who is sick, in prison, or hungry, to a disgraced and ungrateful son, or even to an enemy.

It’s this simple message of compassion and grace that gets lost in the mythic splendor and spectacle of the celebrations of Christmas, Lent, and Easter, as well as in the theological debates about dogma. By devoting the later chapters of her book to this message, Pagels clearly hopes this point will stay with us long after all the scholarship she has summarized in the book’s first half fades away.

Thomas Jefferson devised his own special way to stay focused on this radical yet simple message of Jesus. He decided, Pagels tells us, “to ‘correct’ the gospels by cutting [the miracle stories] out of his own Bible with scissors, leaving intact only the teachings that he found rationally comprehensible and morally compelling.” On display at the Smithsonian, his Bible is an extraordinary example of the drastic measures sometimes required to stay focused (the cut-out sections of his book are reminiscent of CIA-redacted documents)—an even greater challenge today in our digital media-saturated world. Books like Pagels’s go a long way to help us achieve this focus.