Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

by Elaine Pagels

First I learned that none of the narratives now called “gospels” were written during Jesus’s lifetime. Instead, they were written anonymously, some forty to sixty years after his death. What I thought were their authors’ names had been added about a hundred years after they were written, when admirers of these particular “gospels” added names familiar from Jesus’s inner circle, to lend them credence. Around 160 C.E., the two called the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of John were attributed to Jesus’s disciples.