Miracles and Wonder Quotes

“since religious convictions arouse strong emotion, people seeking power have used versions of Christianity ever since to promote their social and political agendas.”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“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.’ ” Stunned by this insight, so similar”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“No wonder”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“They make a desert and call it peace.”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“Voting About God in Early Church Councils,”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“Throughout the later fourth century, as Constantine’s successors reshaped Roman legal codes in order to “Christianize” the empire, they not only outlawed crucifixion and declared rape a capital crime but also decreed harsh penalties against Jews, creating precedents that have lasted for centuries, even millennia. In the process, as the historian Timothy Barnes notes, “Christian prejudices against the Jews became legal disabilities.”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“Having come to know Thomas’s gospel, we begin to understand why certain leaders calling themselves “orthodox” (literally, “straight-thinking”) found its message dangerous, and rejected it as diabolic blasphemy. For, instead of revering Jesus as the only Son of God, as later Christian tradition would insist, Thomas teaches that everyone is potentially a child of God—just like Jesus!”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“But after investigating Mark, Matthew, and Luke more carefully, I’ve come to see that these early gospels, read in their first-century context, do not support the theological assumptions enshrined, for example, in the Nicene Creed, which declares, in effect, that Jesus is God incarnate—creeds that Christians wrote centuries after Jesus lived.”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“translated it as spiritus, a word gendered masculine. Greek speakers translated it as pneuma, a word gendered neuter—effectively, however, erasing the vision of divine Mother, an interpretation of the Holy Spirit, whose presence resonates through many of the earliest sources.”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“But, aware that people are slandering Jesus’s mother, Matthew weaves into his genealogy something surprising—the names of four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Scholars have long debated Matthew’s motives: Why women? And why these women, in particular? The Biblical stories told of each of these women have little in common, except this: each one includes hints of sexual scandal.”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“Recognizing the political context of first-century Galilee is necessary, though, to understand the gospel stories. What they tell hints at what the writers knew well: that everyday life in occupied Judea often included violence”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

“He paused, and, with a severe look, asked, “What makes you think it has an essence?” At that moment, I knew I was in the right place. Although I couldn’t answer his question, I realized that I had come here precisely for this: to be asked a question like that; challenged to think in ways I’d never imagined.”
― Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus