On a Zoom call from her neat, book-lined home office in Princeton, New Jersey, Elaine Pagels explains how her latest book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” differs from her previous works of scholarly nonfiction.
“First of all, the others were much more specific. They were either about the Gnostic Gospels or Christian antisemitism or sex and politics. This one came after I was teaching about how Christianity began for a long time, and I wanted to make it much more comprehensive. That is, look at ‘What do we know in the New Testament?’ ‘What about the secret gospels?’ ‘What about the political, social and military history of Palestine’ — as wide a scope as we can get,” says Pagels, whose previous books include “The Gnostic Gospels,” “Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas” and “Why Religion? A Personal Story.”
The questions she addresses in this new work, which is already a New York Times bestseller, relate to the history of the New Testament, the life of Jesus Christ, the crucifixion and more.
“It’s not just about the obvious questions: ‘What do we know about Jesus historically and what do we not know?’ — which is, I would say, 90 percent. But the big question for me was, ‘Why do we care?’” says Pagels, referring to how the story of Jesus of Nazareth has been embraced by so many over the past two millennia.
“How does that happen?” she asks. “I did want in the end to show how some people in the 20th and 21st century are captured by the stories, as I am, in different ways.”
Faith and history
While she’s been on the faculty of the Department of Religion at Princeton since 1982, Pagels stresses that her work focuses not only on the gospels and religious accounts but also on Roman and Jewish historians of the era.
”People say, ‘Oh, I know you’re a theologian…’ and I would say, No, theologians literally mean someone who talks about God. I mean, I try to talk about people,” she says. “I’m a historian.”
When asked whether the study of history can be considered to be at odds with faith, Pagels, a National Book Award winner and recipient of a National Humanities Medal among her many achievements, has clearly thought about this.
“How did you put it first? Because that really got me — whether faith is at odds with history,” she says. ”In most traditions, it’s not. In Judaism, it’s not really; you talk about the stories of Moses and the Torah and the 10 Commandments and the practices, right? In Buddhism, you talk about the Buddha and how to practice meditation and contemplation until you get a different perspective on the universe.”
Pagels, who grew up attending a Methodist church and was an evangelical Christian for a time, says history and faith can seem in conflict for those to whom the Bible is the literal truth, but perhaps less so to those who consider it a more metaphorical source of teaching and inspiration.
“These stories were not written to be histories. Primarily, they’re written to put forth the message of Jesus, partly through stories about him and through things he said,” she says. “But they weren’t just meant to be taken literally in every word — and when you do that, faith has got to conflict with history, right? … Maybe for some people it doesn’t.”
Pagels recalls reading a headline that suggested she was attempting to debunk elements of Jesus’s birth — the new book features a chapter discussing the scholarship, cultural norms and contemporaneous stories that circulated around that time — but she is adamant that the characterization couldn’t be further from the truth.“I’m not writing to debunk anything. I’m trying to say, as a historian, ‘What can you say about this story, the way it’s told?” she says. “I wouldn’t write about them if I didn’t love teaching them and thinking about them. I learned a lot in the process of going through them carefully again, again and again. … I still find new perspectives.
“I’m a historian. I’d love a lot more information than we’ve got. It’s stunning how much is done with very little information. I’d love to know more about the life of Jesus, what other people thought, you know? We have very little,” she says. “”The existential question I’d like to know more is about resurrection, about life after death.
“I was brought up to be a rationalist, maybe it’s just getting older, but when you go through experiences with death, with people, and you know that many people actually see those who died after they’re dead, they sense a presence,” says Pagels, whose 6-year-old son Mark and physicist husband Heinz both died within 15 months of each other in the 1980s. “I don’t think that proves anything about survival after death, but that is a subject that is very interesting.”
A treasure trove
Pagels describes how continuing to engage with the work and new findings has led her to new insights over the years, especially regarding her bestselling 1979 book, “The Gnostic Gospels.” The discovery in 1945 of these noncanonical books in Nag Hammadi has an almost Indiana Jones-ish quality, as the cache of texts was found in an Egyptian cave more than 1,500 years after being stashed away. The discovery upended what she had previously understood.
“When we first looked at, say, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, or the Gospel of Mary, it looked like they’re challenging the New Testament gospels, but now I understand that they weren’t written that way.
“There are 52 different sacred writings. Not all of them are Christian; most of them are. They have allusions to Christianity or to the Hebrew Bible. Some of them speak about Isis. But if you read, some of them just change everything — for example, the little book called ‘Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas,’” she says, referring to its lists of sayings attributed to Jesus.“I love those sayings. When I first read the one that said, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’ And I thought, ‘Whoa, you don’t have to believe that; it just happens to be true. I was taking it psychologically, but later I realized it has a spiritual meaning, too.”
Did that discovery demonstrate that even history operates on a type of faith about how things were, one that can be disrupted with new information?
“What we know is that there’s a lot more we didn’t know,” she says. “And then when these secret gospels arrived, I thought, ‘Wow, this is something that makes sense to me.’
As a scholar, new information provides an opportunity to reassess. She recalls a mentor — one who’d warned her that women were rarely accepted at Harvard Divinity School and those who were didn’t graduate — saying that she’d altered his thinking with her research.
“Our teacher said, ‘Before I read your book, I thought these [Gnostic] gospels were just weird.’ — and he was the Archbishop of Sweden!” says Pagels, laughing.
Wonder and women
Pagels, who writes in “Mysteries and Wonder” about how women were often excluded and their roles downplayed in some bible stories, says her own experience, while challenging, was gratifying overall.
“I was glad to be a pioneer. It doesn’t make it particularly easy, but I was very excited to be there and grateful to that institution for that,” she says.
Her alma mater Harvard was in the headlines when we spoke, as the institution’s funding was frozen by the current presidential administration when Harvard refused to cede to demands to change its hiring, admissions and teaching practices.
“I’m very glad that Harvard people stood up to that challenge. And if they can’t afford it, who could? The fact is, it takes a fortune to have a great university and then have a great medical school, a law school and a business school,” she says. “More importantly, for most people, is medical research. What do you do about that? We all depend on the advances of medicine, and most of them come out of universities.”
Now with the book finished after years of work, Pagels says she finally has time to read some of her favorite writers, including John Donne, Dylan Thomas, and Mary Oliver, among them.
“I spent seven years on this book. I’m starting to read again, especially poetry. I love poetry and biographies. I like to read about people’s lives and what happens to them,” she says.
“I mean, everybody has stories, right?” she says. “I love that.”