In Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, Elaine Pagels—now in her eighties—recounts her lifelong obsession with the figure of Jesus, not as a doctrine, but as a presence: a message of love and transformation in a world saturated with darkness. From a young age, she noticed a glaring contradiction. The Jesus of her local Methodist church was soft-edged and suburban, tailored to soothe middle-class anxieties. Meanwhile, the Catholic church she visited with a friend introduced her to a far more shadowy vision—one where sin reigned, and a priest, cloaked in mystery, handed out judgment like grades on a cosmic report card.
Hungry for something real, she threw herself into faith. She attended a Billy Graham “Crusade for Christ” at Candlestick Park and, in a moment of tearful surrender, accepted Jesus as her savior and joined an evangelical church. But the honeymoon didn’t last. When her Jewish friend died in a car accident, she turned to her church community in anguish—only to be met with a chilling theological shrug. Was he saved? they asked. When she answered no, they calmly consigned him to hell. That moment of smug certainty shattered something in her. She walked away from the church—and never looked back.
But the ache didn’t go away. Instead, it deepened into a lifelong question: Why did the story of Jesus strike me so deeply? Was it about Jesus himself? Or was it something broader—something in the architecture of religious experience that opened people up to realities they couldn’t explain?
That question led her to Harvard’s Study of Religion, where she discovered a Christianity far more fractured, contested, and diverse than the one she’d been taught. The four canonical gospels were only a sliver of the story. Written decades after Jesus’ death, by authors who retrofitted their names to evoke apostolic authority, these texts were shaped by literary tropes and cultural myths of the Greco-Roman world. Beyond them were the apocryphal books and the Gnostic gospels, each offering competing visions of who Jesus was. Even after Constantine made Christianity the state religion and tried to enforce orthodoxy, believers couldn’t agree on what “true” Christianity actually meant.
Still, Pagels returns to the core question: What kind of person was Jesus? Why did he endure when gods like Zeus faded into mythology? Why are there so many versions of him—prophet, rebel, savior, mystic, divine son?
As she peels back the layers of history and doctrine, Pagels isn’t looking for the “correct” Jesus. She’s looking for the one that moved her, the one that cracked open the world with possibility. And in this, her search feels less like an academic pursuit and more like a human longing—to believe that, in spite of the noise and contradiction, there is still something true at the heart of the story.
Like the old game show To Tell the Truth, we’re all watching the contestants declare, “I am Jesus.” And the question still echoes: Will the real Jesus please stand up?
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As usual, Pagels’ book is engaging. As I read about Matthew and Luke’s different accounts of the virgin birth and church people blithely telling Pagels that her Jewish friend is in hell, it occurs to me that I despise piety; but moral debauchery and smug nihilism are just as odious.
Cinemorphosis 
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