“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” So wrote David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A founder of empiricism, Hume argued that miracles are extremely unlikely since, by definition, they subvert our sensory understanding of the world. “It is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country.” Nobody, according to Hume, has ever seen a violation of natural law, and thus “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle.”
You may find Hume’s argument almost too obvious to mention. You may find it tautological or even demonic in its secular worldview. I probably know an equal number of people in each camp. Loved ones of mine take accounts of religious miracles literally and claim to have experienced them personally. I grew up with miraculous stories in my family lore. The most sympathetic example that comes to mind involves a pet kitten who, before I was born, was raised from the dead by prayer.
Whatever your personal understanding of miracles, the influence of Hume’s argument is irrefutable. In his own time, it was radical. Before the eighteenth century, accounts of miraculous events, whether in the Bible or in more contemporary texts such as the lives of saints, were taken as sufficient evidence of their occurrence. Cosmic forces—glimpsed through celestial events, exorcisms, or the incorruptible and talismanic remains of saints—were, for medievals, just as real as crop cycles or bodily death. But in Hume we see the nascent split between natural and supernatural—or, as Kant would put it a generation later, between faith and “pure reason”—that defines modernity in the West. According to Enlightened epistemology, what happens in the knowable world is determined by natural laws that are materially evident and cannot be broken by divine intervention. We know that gravity is a law of nature because we can see and measure its effects. While we might still say that God was incarnated as a man who walked on water and rose from the dead, we have not a shred of real evidence.
Many Enlightened thinkers thus rejected so-called “revealed” or scriptural religion altogether. Hume and others subscribed to the “deist” notion that some divine power had set the universe in motion and never intervened again. But what was the rational thinker to make of the life of Jesus Christ, the miraculous man-god at the very center of the European worldview for a millennium and a half? Could that center hold?
This is the identity crisis of Western modernity, a crisis perhaps dramatized most elegantly by the deist Thomas Jefferson, who used a razor and glue to construct his so-called Jefferson Bible, a version of the Gospels with all the supernatural bits cut out. Then again, belief in Jesus’s divinity did not end with the Enlightenment. Within a decade after Jefferson made his rationalist gospel, religious revivals burned across the young United States. For centuries, waves of revivalism in the West and imperialism abroad meant that Christianity only kept growing. Today a third of the planet confesses Christianity, making it the largest religion in the world.
But if the Enlightenment did not kill Christianity, it did birth an entire field of scholarship—which has produced thousands of books with thousands of different conclusions—to try to fit the life of Jesus into an empirical framework. Who actually was this man, what did he do, and what did it mean?
Much like the fields of philosophy, theology, and history in the nineteenth century, historical Jesus studies was dominated by Germans. It began with a polymathic Hebrew scholar named Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) whose writings about Jesus were so controversial in his lifetime that they did not reach the public until fragments were published posthumously in 1776. Though many of the specifics have been rejected, much of Reimarus’s basic premise still holds for some respected scholars today: that Jesus was a purely human Jewish political reformer who, after his execution by Roman imperial authorities, was recast by his followers as a divine Messiah.
As for the miracles described in the Gospels, historians and rationalist theologians have proposed various explanations. Heinrich Paulus’s The Life of Jesus (1828) interpreted the miracles as apostolic misunderstandings of perfectly normal phenomena. When Jesus supposedly fed a crowd of thousands with five loaves and two fishes, for example, what really happened, according to Paulus, is that the crowd saw the disciples sharing food and broke out their own picnic baskets.
In 1836 David Friedrich Strauss set a new paradigm for interpreting miracles with his 1,500-page The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (translated into English by a twenty-six-year-old Mary Ann Evans, who would later write novels under the penname George Eliot). With the Enlightenment giving way to a Romantic interest in folklore and symbolism, Strauss argued that the miracle stories were not meant to be taken literally at all; they were myths, that is, fictional stories told to convey deeper spiritual truths. Jesus did not literally walk on water; the tale is a metaphor for the way he transcends and tames the tempestuous seas of earthly life.
Another landmark in the field was The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) by the philosopher-cum-medical-philanthropist Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer argued it was pointless to try to fit Jesus into any kind of modern agenda, and instead emphasized the alienness of his subject’s social context: “The historical Jesus will be to our own time a stranger and an enigma.” Schweitzer’s Jesus is a preacher who propounded a strain of Jewish apocalypticism native to the politically and religiously volatile world of first-century Roman-occupied Judaea. When Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” he meant the end of the world is coming, like, now.
In recent decades, Jesus has been cast as a Marxist, a radical queer, a magician, etc.
As the modern Jesus scholar Bart D. Ehrman writes in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999), Schweitzer’s “basic emphases . . . have carried the day for much of the twentieth century” among textual critics of the New Testament. Ehrman continues:
In recent years, however, the apocalyptic view of Jesus has come under increasing attack in academic circles . . . For one thing, very few people who devote their lives to Jesus actually want to find a Jesus who is completely removed from our own time. What people want—especially when dealing with such potentially dry matters as history and such potentially inflammatory matters as religion—is relevance.
I’m unconvinced that someone who traveled around a colonized desert land predicting the imminent apocalypse lacks contemporary relevance. (I’d note that Ehrman’s book was published in 1999, when, though a literal new millennium was dawning, the apocalypse appeared less imminent than now). But it’s true that scholarly hot takes on Jesus have kept pace with the proliferating critical lenses of the late twentieth-century academy. In recent decades, Jesus has been cast as a Marxist, a radical queer, a magician, etc.
The feminist Jesus scholarship is also extensive. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, in works including Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet (1994), makes a case for Jesus as a prophet of “Divine Sophia” or “Woman Wisdom,” a female aspect of the divine with roots in early Jewish scripture. In terms of Jesus’s biography, feminist interpretations of various events and miracles abound. Jane Schaberg, for example, explains the virgin birth as a cover for Mary’s illegitimate pregnancy in her 1985 book The Illegitimacy of Jesus (more on this below). Still other feminist scholars have sought to rehabilitate Mary Magdalene, pointing out that her importance as a disciple (and possibly a sexual partner?) of Jesus was diminished by the canonical scriptures and an early nonscriptural Christian tradition that characterized her as a prostitute.
As a nonspecialist, I am glossing over vast subfields of research here, with a lot of curious nooks and crannies, but the truth is I find the macro history of the Jesus studies fields a lot more interesting than the work of any particular scholar. Partly this is because nearly all the claims discussed above are essentially unprovable; the scholars, from the Enlightenment to the feminist movement are all working with the same basic and unmovable constraint: the number of primary sources on Jesus written during his lifetime is exactly zero.
The earliest biographical sources on Jesus—including both canonical and noncanonical Gospels, as well as cursory mentions in narratives written by the Roman historian Tacitus and Jewish historian Flavius Josephus—all date from at least forty to sixty years after his death. The Gospels emerged from oral traditions passed down by Jesus’s early followers who were almost entirely illiterate peasants from the backwaters of Judaea. They express branching traditions of early Christian thought, and their accounts conflict with one another on basic biographical details (e.g., was Jesus born in Nazareth or Bethlehem?).
And so, any historical account ultimately comes down to guesswork or simply personal conviction. Jesus, in other words, is a Rorschach test. As Schweitzer wrote, “There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus. . . . It was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character.”
Given the enduring popularity of Jesus and the vastness of historical Jesus scholarship, it is a little surprising that the general public tends to know very little about the latter. I suppose most people either don’t care about Jesus or don’t want their received ideas about him challenged. Elaine Pagels, however, is one of the rare New Testament scholars to cross decisively over into a general readership. (An interesting yardstick: a friend of mine once announced to an MFA class at NYU that his drag name was Elaine Bagels; maybe half the room seemed to get it; one person thought it was a Seinfeld reference.)
I first read Pagels’s breakout book The Gnostic Gospels (1979) as a teenager disaffected with my Evangelical upbringing, titillated by the revelation that dozens of alternate accounts of Jesus’s life—other than the four “canonical” Gospels that made it into the Bible—not only existed but were, according to Pagels, actively suppressed by the early Church. While the book’s implications are subversive, Pagels is not so much a radical as a meticulous scholar with an approachable prose style who, like many successful historians, owes her fame mostly to hard work combined with extremely good luck.
As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1960s, Pagels became one of the first researchers to access the massive cache of early Christian documents discovered in a cave in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. These texts were most likely stashed there by Coptic monks in the fourth century CE, shortly after Catholic Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. As the Church began to consolidate its power by articulating orthodox doctrine, possession of “heretical” texts was deemed illegal, and the Nag Hammadi scrolls were hidden away in a jar for posterity.
Since these alternate Gospels were all composed at least as late—often later—than the canonical Gospels, they don’t necessarily tell us much about Jesus the historical personage. However they do provide another source of documentation for textual critics to cross-reference events and sayings from the other Gospels. Even more, they shed light on the diversity of early Christianities and so open new avenues of understanding.
Several of the Nag Hammadi Gospels belong to a previously little understood early Christian tradition called Gnosticism. The roots of Gnosticism are probably pre-Christian, possibly influenced by some combination of Judaism and the Platonist philosophy that suffused parts of the Hellenized Mediterranean world. Its commonalities with Eastern mystical traditions have also led some scholars to speculate about possible influences from India. It is worth mentioning here the apocryphal story that Jesus studied in an Indian monastery in the years of his youth not covered by the Gospels, another theory which cannot be proven by the sources (though it was embraced by several nineteenth-century European scholars as well as religious leaders like Paramahansa Yogananda, the Hindu monk who brought yogic meditation to California in the 1920s).
Gnosticism was itself a diverse set of practices but seems to have been essentially a form of dualistic mysticism. It contends that the material world is an illusion, a dream from which the individual seeker can awaken. This awakening is called gnosis—a Greek word meaning knowledge. Gnosis is obtained through an interior understanding of the esoteric teachings of Jesus laid out in noncanonical texts like the Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus delivers a series of koan-like sayings that both overlap and diverge from those in the canon (e.g., “The kingdom is inside of you and outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will realize that you are the children of the living Father”).
Pagels’s scholarship on Gnosticism opened new possibilities for interpreting the Gospel miracles. In the Gnostic theology, for example, Christ’s resurrection was perhaps not a literal event but a metaphor for gnosis. Or if it did happen, it was his soul and not his body that escaped the grave. In Treatise on Resurrection, discovered at Nag Hammadi, a Gnostic teacher writes, “Do not suppose that the resurrection was an apparition . . . the world is an apparition”; the resurrection is the moment of transcendence, of enlightenment. In other words, those laws of nature that Hume insisted on? They may be laws in the physical world, but who says that the physical world is all there is to reality?
In The Gnostic Gospels, Pagels made an influential and compelling case that these alternate Christian traditions were suppressed by the Church in favor of an orthodoxy that was less interior and mystical, more dependent on a worldly institutional hierarchy. For example, the orthodox doctrine that Jesus rose literally and bodily from the dead rests on the authority of the apostles, particularly Peter, who, according to early Christian tradition, founded the papacy itself.
In Pagels’s new book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, she explores Jesus’s biography more directly, drawing on her earlier research as well as the vast field of Jesus studies. As you may detect from my protracted windup to this review, I approached the book with some skepticism that anyone could possibly have anything new to say. After reading it, I’m not sure anyone does, but Pagels’s is a thorough and accessible introduction to the field. She cites most of the scholars I’ve listed above and many more, offering authoritative commentary on the major debates. Like much of the textual criticism, Pagels’s study is structured chronologically, reading the Gospels horizontally to compare differing accounts of Jesus’s birth, miracles, death, and resurrection, assessing which accounts are most reliable and what we can learn from them.
Pagel’s book…convincingly situates Jesus’s life within the violent context of Roman occupation.
The basic outlines of Pagels’s Jesus biography are shared by nearly every scholar who adheres to the available evidence: Jesus was a Jewish man born near the beginning of the first century CE in a rural backwater of the Roman-occupied province of Judaea. His family were probably manual laborers. (The Greek tektōn, while usually translated as carpenter,means simply builder, or someone who works with his hands.) He was likely illiterate, like most people in rural Judea, though he may have known some Greek as well as Aramaic. He probably never claimed to be divine, but he traveled the Galilean countryside, purportedly performing miracles and hanging with social outcasts, preaching an anti-
hierarchical message about God’s imminent kingdom that Roman authorities found threatening. Around 30 CE, he was brutally executed by crucifixion, a method the Romans commonly used to punish insurrectionary leaders. In the months and years that followed his death, he reportedly appeared to his devastated followers, who, in the oral traditions they passed down—ultimately recorded in the Gospels—constructed the narrative that Jesus had risen from the dead and was, in fact, the Messiah prefigured in Jewish scriptures like Isaiah and Jeremiah, which prophesied a king-like figure—a descendent of David—who would liberate the Jewish people. In the Gospel of John (the latest and most spiritual of the canonical Gospels) and the Epistles of Paul, this turned into the idea that Jesus was divine, the Son of God. By the fourth century CE, the orthodox version of Jesus that persists to this day crystallized: that Jesus is God and also fully human, and his bodily resurrection ensured eternal life for all who believe in him.
Perhaps of particular interest is Pagels’s discussion of the virgin birth, a seemingly miraculous event which scholars have interpreted in radically different ways. In the 1970s, The American scholar and priest Raymond Brown undertook a comprehensive study of the birth narratives from which he concluded that the documents indeed supported the occurrence of a virgin birth. In her Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives, Jane Schaberg became the first woman scholar to review the same documents and came to the opposite conclusion: that Jesus was in fact conceived out of wedlock, probably as the result of rape by a Roman soldier. Though several others, such as Marianne Sawicki, have come to similar conclusions, Pagels confesses, “When I first heard of [Schaberg’s] book, I ignored it, as did many other scholars, having mistakenly assumed from the title . . . that she had simply written a hostile polemic.”
Again the evidence for Schaberg’s theory is all circumstantial, and Pagels carefully explores it at length without endorsing it. However, a strength of Pagels’s book is that it convincingly situates Jesus’s life within the violent context of Roman occupation. “Decades before and after the turn of the first century, various groups of devout and militant Jews were plotting revolution against Rome, a situation that the Jewish historian Josephus documents in detail,” she writes. Around 4 BC (possibly the year of Jesus’s birth or just before), a Jewish resistance leader named Judas led a revolt against a Roman stronghold in the Galilean city of Sepphoris, four miles from Nazareth. To quash the rebellion, the Roman governor Varus sent a huge force that captured and enslaved the entire population, burned the city to the ground, and crucified thousands of insurrectionists on the public roads. Thus the violence and scale of the Roman presence in Judaea intensified dramatically around the time of Jesus’s birth.
We simply do not know if Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier, but the very possibility says something about the world that must have formed him. Whatever the truth of Jesus’s conception, the violent political context of his life is probably integral to both his biography and the way it got recorded. The Gospels, Pagels argues, are essentially “wartime literature,” composed around the time and in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman forces after the failed Jewish insurrection in 70 CE. As the heavenly kingdom on earth that Jesus prophesied seemed less and less viable in the face of Roman oppression and Jewish diaspora, a more and more vigorous case had to be made for its continued viability.
Pagels explores another explanation of the virgin birth that seems better supported than illegitimate pregnancy yet is not incompatible with it: it was a story told by Jesus’s followers after his death, as evidence that he fulfilled the messianic prophecy in Isaiah. According to that prophesy, the Messiah would be born to an almah (Hebrew for young woman, translated into Greek as parthenos, or virgin). Furthermore many, many scholars, going back at least to Freud in Moses and Monotheism (1939), have pointed out that virgin birth is a common trope in the biographies of national and religious heroes. In fact, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, a contemporary of Jesus, was also said to have been born to a virgin—as was Alexander the Great, and other despots of the ancient world alleged to be semidivine.
As the prolific Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan has written, to claim that someone was divine or ascended into heaven or born to a virgin was common in the ancient Mediterranean world. What is surprising is that these claims were made, for once, not about an emperor or strongman, but about a Jewish peasant who was crushed by his imperial overlords. It is the legacy of a man who rejected the social hierarchies of his time. He may have done so because he believed the apocalypse was imminent, or because he lived on another plane of reality, or because he saw the possibility of a radically different social order here and now. Either way, it is an uncommon and potentially world-shifting story.
Bart D. Ehrman often points out in his frequent public lectures that miracles are simply not the domain of historians. The historian’s job is to try to discern, based on the available sources, what most likely happened, whereas miracles are events which, by definition, are unlikely to happen. And so, even if further sources are discovered in another Nag Hammadi-like archaeological jackpot, historians can probably never know exactly who Jesus was or what he did. Perhaps that is rather the purview of mystics, those people across the ages who claim to have communicated with Jesus directly.
And indeed, for historians, the biographical details of the man himself matter very little. What affected the course of history was not the true circumstance of his birth, life, or death, but the story he became, a story about how “God so loved the world” that, to save it, he not only joined it in the flesh but experienced the suffering this world inflicts on its least valued people. To borrow the critical language of the fiction workshop, I’m not sure that story is believable. But the premise has a lot of potential.
