Elaine Pagels on “The Historical Mystery of Jesus”

0:02This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

0:11This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thirty years ago, I published a piece in The New Yorker with the title The Devil Problem. It was a profile of Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, who had also become improbably a best-selling author. Pagel's 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels, was scholarly, but it was also accessible outside the academy and very widely read. She changed how a lot of people, Christians and those we might call Christian curious, it affected how they thought about the Bible itself. Pagel's went on to write The Origin of Satan, as well as works on Adam and Eve and the Book of Revelation.

0:53Her latest book is called Miracles in Wonder, and it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection. For many years, Pagels has been a professor of religion at Princeton. When we spoke earlier this year, I was struck by how focused she has remained on the topic of belief and how the world of two millennia ago, the world of the Jews and the Romans and Jesus, is to her so vividly alive.

1:28We first met, you're not going to believe this, 30 years ago. And shortly thereafter, you published a book and I decided to write about you. You had suffered unimaginable loss. First, one of your children had died after a long illness. And then your husband, Heinz Pagels, had an accident and died while hiking. And you told me, and this is a quote from you at that time, I found that in times of grief, the church has little to say. It's just too remote. How did that loss, those losses affect your relationship to faith at that time? I didn't think of my work as a relationship with faith exactly. It was more a relationship with curiosity.

2:15I had given up on faith, you know, much earlier. My family wasn't religious. I mean, they would say the grandparents would call themselves Christians, but my father had given it up, you know, for science. He was a scientist. Yeah, he was a biologist, Darwin. But you as a teenager. Well, that was just an accident. I mean, religion was not on the spectrum for me until somebody took me to San Francisco for something, and it turned out it was an evangelical crusade. I didn't know who this guy was, Billy Graham. But he was powerful, and the whole event was extraordinary. And I'd, you know, you'd get invited to be born again and have a new family and start your life over.

2:58And I thought, that's great. Well, you described this scene as, it was, I think, at the old Cow Palace in San Francisco where basketball games were played. And you were so taken with Billy Graham, who's, I guess for younger people who are listening, don't know, but Billy Graham was the great evangelist of his day and filled Yankee Stadium and other such places. That's it, quickly, from everywhere, use this cup.

3:32That's it, just come on. There are many people streaming down every aisle here, hundreds of people here in the cup house. And there are many of you sitting in your living room at home. You'd like to be here and come down this aisle and stand here and give your life to Christ. You can right where you are. And you were so swept away as a teenager that in the course of the evening, you were called to Christ. Yes. I mean, he had, you know, this 6 ,000 people singing. And, you know, you can have this experience with God and all this. And I was just totally captivated. He was charismatic, and he surprised me.

4:13The whole thing surprised me. But I did feel like the sky opened up. You know, it was like something happened. But it was brief. Well, it lasted until, you know, the church I went to told me something I couldn't stand. It was a friend of mine in high school had been killed in an automobile accident. and I went back to this evangelical church of which I'd been apart for a year quite intensely. And I said, my friend has been killed in an accident. And they said, that's terrible. Was he born again? And I said, no, he was Jewish. And then, you know, someone said, well, then he's in hell. And I just felt like I'd been...

4:56That was out. You were out. ...socked in the stomach. And I just walked out. I never went back. So how did you decide to make a life of scholarship in religion? You've now published the latest book in what I consider a lifelong project. There's a real continuity to all these books. Why did you come to focus on Christianity and some of the lesser-known narratives of Christianity, books that aren't part of the official canon? You've given your professional life to this, your intellectual life to this. Why? Why? Because I had some kind of powerful experience with that conversion. It didn't last. I mean, I left that group, that whole evangelical perspective on Christianity didn't work for me.

5:46But there was something transformative about it. And it was important. It opened up elements of my experience that nothing else did. Describe that, because not everybody's had that. How did it change your life and your mind? It's about the imagination. I mean, I was living in a world which, you know, science defines what you can see, and there's nothing else. That's at least what I was brought up hearing. But this was about opening up the imagination. I always thought about it later as the way I felt about The Wizard of Oz as a child, right? Just suddenly I was out there with Dorothy, you know.

6:26So, the wicked witch gets killed, and there's Glenda the Good, and there's all of this action going on, this adventure, which is internal but very powerful. And that book's become a template for my life when I was maybe eight years old. And these stories of Jesus do that as well. And it did it for me in that moment. And even though I left it, I thought, wait a minute, why are religions still part of culture? I mean, it is true that there's no culture that doesn't have some form of claims about invisible beings and how we interact with them. So I thought, could it be Buddhism? Could it be Judaism?

7:08Could it be Islam? Or is it Christianity? So I decided I wanted to find out, how does that work? And why do people continue those traditions even long after they're discredited rationally? When you were a kid and had this kind of evangelical breakthrough, no matter how fleeting it was, did you think of Jesus as a real person existing in a real historical time among political currents as well as think of him in terms of a kind of supernatural or religious presence? That's an interesting question. And it makes me realize that I didn't think of him as a real person. I thought of some grand mythological drama going on in the sky.

7:56You know, there's God and Satan and Jesus, and you're in part of a drama. That's why I mentioned The Wizard of Oz. I mean, it's part of an imaginary world. It was a cinematic metaphor, but not real. Yeah. Well, I didn't think about that he wasn't real. I just thought whoever that might have been, this was now some grand drama played out in the universe. And that's how it felt. If you could, and I know it's an elementary question, but it's crucial to understand it if we're going to get at your work in a deeper way. But we know the New Testament and we know that there are four Gospels. Right. Four Gospels emerged and somehow became canonical in what we know as the New Testament.

8:41there was a discovery at a certain point of a gigantic jar by somebody who basically came across it and broke it open and inside were texts, some of which were used as, I hate to even think about it, half of them seem to have been burned up most likely, right? Used as kindling for the fire, yes. But what survived are what's called the Gnostic Gospels. What are they and how do they compare to the book of Mark and Matthew and so on. When those gospels now in the New Testament were written, there were others as well. We know that because people at the time said, oh, well, there's the gospel of truth and there's the gospel of Thomas and the gospel of Matthew and the gospel to the Egyptians.

9:27You know, they name these. And some of the earliest writers say, well, there are genuine gospels and that there are terrible ones. Avoid those. They're written by heretics. They will lead you astray. So we knew there were far more than four, but four became part of a canon, which means a standard, right? Why did they emerge and become the canon and the others fell away? I think they became the canon because they talk about actual narratives of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. These others are not that. They usually consist of sayings, just teachings, which are different from those in the New Testament.

10:14The ones in the New Testament, as Mark points out when he writes about them, are the public teaching of Jesus, what he taught when he was out with crowds on the hills of Galilee. And that's repeated in Luke and Matthew as well, also in the Gospel of Thomas. But these other gospels, which are called Gnostic for all the wrong reasons, by the way, it was partly my fault, claim to give private teaching that he gave secretly to certain disciples, the way any rabbi teaches today, right? There's one thing to the congregation that's preached, and that teacher will say different things to his closest followers and sort of advanced level students.

10:59But why would they be considered heretical? Because you can't confirm what's said, I suppose. I'm talking with the religion scholar Elaine Pagels, and we'll continue in a moment.

11:26One part of your new book that's already received some, let's just say, attention in the Catholic hierarchy, long before publication, is your investigation of the narratives of Immaculate Conception. Tell me how this is still controversial and uncertain 2 ,000 years later. Well, we're talking about virgin birth story, which you find in two out of four New Testament Gospels, that Jesus was somehow conceived in some spiritual way without the intervention of any man or any semen. Or any Joseph. Or any Joseph, yes. The claim that Jesus was spiritually conceived in some way is a stunning claim, and it's always raised a lot of questions, which are never answered.

12:17And the earliest account we have doesn't say that at all. It just says, Mary, his mother, was a rural woman in Nazareth. She had a lot of children. There's no man ever mentioned in her life. There's no father of Jesus. And it's clear that the neighbors think that he might have been an illegitimate child. And that's an early attack. How long has that been in the scholarly discussion, the possibility that Jesus might have been an illegitimate child, to use the old phrase? Well, I think it's in Mark's narrative. In a direct way? Indirectly. Mark doesn't say that. But it's the neighbors say, who is this?

13:00Who does he think he is? He's just Mary's son. He's a carpenter. Why is he out there preaching as if he was some kind of prophet? Why is he trying to heal people? And he can't do anything in his hometown because they scorn him. But as early as the end of the first century, when Matthew is being written, there are critics in Jewish communities who reject those claims about Jesus, that he's not the Messiah. The whole thing is a false trail. Is it an unspeakable thing among Catholic prelates and in Catholic academia to raise this question? It's not, because the person with whom I was most familiar, actually, he wrote the review of the Gnostic Gospels on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

13:54Who was that? Raymond Brown. But what it said is, these texts were rubbish in the first century. They're still rubbish. So it wasn't an entirely positive review. Oh, not at all. It was written by a Catholic scholar. And he wrote— He thought you were making a mountain out of a molehill. Well, he thought I was making a sacred book out of trash. Yeah. And he wrote a huge text, the largest one and the most comprehensively researched there is. It's about the virgin birth of Jesus, the birth of the Messiah. And he considers the possibility that Jesus' birth involves something different from some miraculous event.

14:34Not supernatural. Yes. He says some people say that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier. He wasn't even Jewish. But he said that's impossible because there were no Roman soldiers until after the Jewish war. But that's not true at all. He didn't know about the insurrection of Judas the Galilean, which brought many Roman troops into the huge city of Sepphorus, which is a three-and-a-half-mile walk from Nazareth. And that those soldiers were stationed there after they burned the entire city down and enslaved the inhabitants for harboring a Jewish revolutionary against Rome. And it's now well known among scholars of military history of the time that those soldiers were very disorderly and that any young person, male or female, had spent time with a Roman soldier was assumed to have been sexually assaulted.

15:31You know, as I was reading this book, I asked myself if we are today in the modern world more or less inclined to believe in miracles than the contemporaries of Jesus. I would say less inclined. Now? Yes. Because, as you know, I'm sure, people who wrote about the Roman emperors, Julius Caesar had an ancestor who was Venus, and Augustus had a divine ancestor. He was called Son of God on the Roman coins. And all great men were somehow also credited to have a divine being somewhere in their genealogy, which adds a special sauce to their humanity and makes them more than human. You've said that you left the faith as a teenager after briefly entering it.

16:28You've been through everything in life and more that has to offer, whether it's life and loss and love and its loss and all these things, and have had an incredibly rich scholarly intellectual life. Does religion as such play any role in your life beyond its being a source of your intellectual commitment and study? Well, yes. It is not what people call organized religion. You don't go to church? I have sometimes, and sometimes I do. In what spirit? Well, only if it's powerfully engaging. If the music and the service is powerful, it can be almost any kind of service. Whether a Christian service, it can be a bar mitzvah, it can be a Buddhist ritual.

17:17there's a quality about sacred time and experience that evokes some element of experience that I can't articulate really. But it's not belief as such. It's not belief. Actually, David, I really think belief is far overrated. Tell me about that. Well, after the advent of Christianity, which in the fourth century, it becomes a code of beliefs. like, I believe in one God, Father Almighty, make a rule. Okay, that's it. And so later, people would talk about different traditions, and they'd say, well, what do Jews believe? And what do Muslims believe? And what do Buddhists believe? Well, belief isn't really the point so much in Judaism.

18:02The point is, are you Orthodox? Are you secular? Are you Reform? To what degree do you practice or not? And in Buddhism, it's much the same. It's about the prayers. It's about participation in certain rituals. Well, Judaism also is the one that I know where it's closest to me. It's also a matter of its being a civilization and a language and what language is and a great deal more. It's not just do I believe in God, do I not believe in God. Exactly. It's a set of values and it's an ethical tradition. Or a set of arguments. Yes, a set of arguments, but it also has very deep emotional support in the practices that people do.

18:47So is it too banal to ask you if you're a Christian or not? Well, it's a hard question. I mean, yes, I feel identified with Christian tradition from the way I grew up, and it speaks to me. It's sort of like English. You know, that's the language I grew up with. And I find it compelling in many ways, but it's not the only kind of tradition that compels me. I mean, I'm engaged with some friends in New York in a Buddhist meditation group, which we meet often, and other traditions as well. But yes, I would say Christian. I love that tradition in some ways. And Jesus seems like he was a historical person, but he's not just that.

19:28There are myths woven into the stories. There are elaborations. There are miracles. there are signs and symbols that play in the stories. It's not just a history at all. It's called, these texts are called Good News because they're publications of the message of Jesus, which is God is going to come into the world and transform it. And your world can be transformed. Come and be part of that transformation. And the world will, which now contains so much suffering and pain, will sort of explode into a glorious new reality. What does all your study and experience lead you to think what happens after we die?

20:10I don't know. I don't know. It leads me to at least have an open question. I mean, I assumed until some time ago that after we die, you know, It's sort of what Steve Jobs was said to say, just lights out. But even stories I've heard about his death suggest that at some point he suggested there was something else. And maybe that's just the thing people need when they go into death to allow them to do it. But there may be something else. So I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable. I think about this in the way that Tanya Lerman at Stanford wrote a brilliant book called How God Becomes Real.

21:06She's talking about Jewish tradition. She's talking about Muslim tradition, about witchcraft, and about Christianity, various kinds. And she says people don't just talk to invisible beings because they believe they're there. They actually engage in practices like prayer, meditation, opening themselves up to a larger sense of expectation of what's real. And as they practice that, they become susceptible to envisioning more reality than the visible world. Or seeing the transcendent in the visible. And you include yourself in that. I do. I do. And Tanya does herself in the book. So it need not be spirits and gods.

21:55It could be the beauty of nature, the way it transforms people, or of art or music that seems to open up a wider reality than the visible. So, yes, I'm now bizarrely open to that. Do you think about death a lot? No, not too much, except as we get older. Yes, it does come in. It does cross the mind from time to time. And, you know, it's very interesting. But I had some experiences with people I love who died that I couldn't explain at all and totally didn't expect. I thought this was—I couldn't imagine it would happen. Who were they? Well, even after my husband's sudden death in a mountain climbing accident, it was just an utter total shock.

22:48I went to a Trappist monastery in Colorado where I happened to have gone with musicians who were playing music for the monks from the Juilliard Quartet, Robert Mann. And I got to know the monks and I often went there and meditated in this very beautiful well of silence in the chapel. I couldn't be a Catholic. It's just sort of against my Protestant resistance to that kind of authority. But there's something very deep and powerful about those experiences with those monks. And after my husband's death and after planning the funeral in a very spiritually deprived Protestant church in town, I went out there and meditated with one of the monks, who was an amazing man.

23:36And I thought I heard a voice saying to me, I thought I could suddenly, after we meditated for an hour, I had the idea that I could ask my husband a question. I said, well, what do you think about this? And a voice came into my head, not auditory. This is fine with me. It's you I think about now. And I said, fine with you? What do you mean fine with you? You leave me with two tiny babies. One is three months old. One is a year and a half, and you're gone, and what do you expect me to do with this? And I was irate at first, and then I thought, wait a minute, who said that? I don't think it was my unconscious.

24:17It was not fine with me then. What was it? It seemed like his voice. It seemed like my husband's voice, and I thought, how dare you ask? How dare you say it's fine with you? So you had a marital argument. We had a marital argument. In his absence. Yes. In his absence. At this late date, do you pray? Three days, sometimes, yes, but not usually a lot of words. Meditate, maybe. So that wasn't the only experience with unexpected events like that.

24:52Elaine Pagels, thank you so much. Thank you very much, David.

24:59Elaine Pagels is professor of religion at Princeton, and her latest book is Miracles and Wonder. The Historical Mystery of Jesus. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening today and always throughout the year. And I hope you have a good new year to come.

25:19The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.

26:01Thank you.