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.

To resolve such disputes, Constantine invited more than three hundred bishops to codify “orthodox” Christian belief into a standard statement that would become the “Nicene Creed” of those who called their group “catholic” (in Greek, “universal”). This was the founding of the Catholic Church.

But the evidence confirms that he was, indeed, an actual person; everyone among his contemporaries who mentions him agrees on that, whether they speak of him with reverence or contempt.

Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives, then, likely contain more literary adaptation of Hebrew Bible stories than history.

Apparently, what prompted Matthew and Luke to write these birth narratives were rumors ridiculing Jesus as a bastard—a charge of illegitimacy that Mark’s account, written some ten years earlier than the others, seems to confirm.

After echoing what Luke reports (“the kingdom of God is within you” [Luke 17:21]), here Jesus goes on to explain that God’s kingdom is not a place in space—not, as often imagined, in the sky, or in “heaven.” Nor is it an event in time, coming at the end of the world. Instead, it’s a state of spiritual awareness—illuminating who we truly are, and who we always have been, even before the world was created.