Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

by Elaine Pagels

In what is here called the “true gospel,” Jesus’s death is not seen primarily as atonement for sin, as if a loving Father could not, or would not, forgive human sin “apart from shedding of blood” (Hebrews 9:22), as many Christians insist. This gospel challenges that idea, insisting instead that the Father is not “small, nor envious” (Gospel of Truth I 42.5); on the contrary, he overflows with compassionate love. Here, then, Jesus’s suffering and death, like our own, are no longer seen as punishment for sin. Instead, they are simply the necessary cost of entering into human life, motivated by love. “O such great teaching!” this author exclaims, marveling that Jesus willingly descended into the world to deliver us from terror and ignorance, even knowing that doing so would cost him great agony, “since he knows that his death is life for many” (I 20.13–14). Thus this gospel teaches that Jesus came into the world to reveal “what is written on our hearts,” bringing joy by showing us who we are.

Instead of being intellectual knowledge, this is heart knowledge, intuitive recognition of deeper, hidden aspects of ourselves, and of each other. Furthermore, this kind of knowing (gnosis, in Greek) involves paradox. And its secret is this: First, we need to know that we cannot “know God” in the sense of comprehending the Source of all being, since that Source far transcends our understanding. At the same time, what we need to know, and what we can know, is that we are intimately connected with that Source.

Instead, as I see it, historical evidence can neither prove nor disprove the reality that gave rise to such experiences. What we can verify historically, though, is that after Jesus died, many people claimed to have seen him alive.

Since claiming to have “seen the Lord” could involve jockeying for position among believers, the writers who select whose stories to tell, and decide how to tell them, effectively highlight the importance of those whose stories they include. Recognizing this, several historians suggest that Mark and Luke downgraded early versions in which women said they had “seen the Lord,” in order to diminish their standing.

Jewish law of the time often disallowed court testimony from women, since they were widely assumed to be unreliable witnesses.

In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, for example, Mary declares that she has “seen the Lord” in dreams and visions—a claim that Peter and Andrew flatly deny: “I do not believe that the Savior said these things, for indeed these teachings are strange ideas”…“Did he, then, speak with a woman in private without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?” (Gospel of Mary BG8502 10.2–3) In the gospel named for her, Mary wins the argument. But after the fourth century, when Catholic and Orthodox leaders took charge of most churches, they relegated her gospel, previously translated into many languages and circulated throughout the Christian world, to bonfires and trash heaps as “heresy.”

Since Paul’s letters, written some twenty to fifty years earlier than Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John, were the first writings to circulate widely among Jesus’s followers throughout the Roman world, they became enormously influential. To this day, they constitute over 60 percent of the New Testament writings.

resurrection is the revelation of what is actually real; a transformation of things, and a transition into newness.

And although Christians’ interpretations of resurrection have fluctuated throughout two millennia in far more ways than we could mention here, as Adolf von Harnack writes: This could not affect the certainty of the conviction that the Lord would raise his people from death. This conviction, whose reverse is the fear of that God who casts [people] into hell, has become the mightiest power through which the Gospel has won [its reception throughout the world]. In other words, the Christian movement became powerful because Christians could claim to offer “eternal life”—not only to an emperor like Augustus, pronounced divine after his death by a vote in the Senate, but potentially to everyone, even to women, slaves, children dying young, former criminals.

The poet Dylan Thomas embodies this shift in his powerful poem “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” having taken his title from the King James translation of Paul’s discussion of resurrection, “Knowing that Christ, being raised from the dead, dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:9): And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. Such visions, a primary reason for the astonishing success of this unlikely movement, continue even now to attract new converts,

Hebrew Scriptures set the pattern for such shifts: people enslaved are set free; a shepherd boy named David fells a hostile giant with a slingshot; hungry lions spare Daniel’s life; and Jonah emerges alive from the belly of a whale. The point is clear as a lightning flash: “God can make a way out of no way,” transforming what we suffer into joy. I love this about the gospel stories. Is that what keeps the stories of Jesus alive amid the twists and turns of history? As I see it, they give us what we often need most: an outburst of hope.