“ Miracles and Wonder '' digs in mysteries on Jesus: Revue

For nearly seven decades, Elaine Pagels fought with the question: “Why religion?” At 15, she found herself among thousands of people at Candlestick Park, electrified by the words of the evangelist Billy Graham. The theology scholarship holder was fascinated: “Overcomes by tears … praising God for all the souls saved that day.” Having born at that time, Pagels written in his remarkable “miracles and wonder: the historical mystery of Jesus”, “opened vast spaces in my imagination. It changed my life. ”

While the love story of Pagels with evangelical Christianity lasted only one year, its curiosity about the “powerful responses” that the stories about Jesus evoked in it persisted; Applicating this answer has become the work of his life. Now 82 years old, she is a professor emeritus of religion at Princeton, where she is taught for more than four decades. During her extraordinary career, she wrote large -scale books, notably “Origin of Satan”, received a MacArthur “Genius” subsidy and a national human science medal, and won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. But Jesus has always remained an enigma of one of the pre -eminent authorities of the country on the evangelical stock exchange in many ways.

As an exalted Catholic which has never studied the Bible, I was first skeptical that this deep immersion in the life of Jesus could have a particular relevance for me. Jesus had been a vague presence in my youth, but once I stopped attending the Church, this door closed. Catholicism undoubtedly led me to grant compassion and social justice, but I would never have specifically connected this to my first impressions of Jesus. Maybe a review was in order. I plunged.

Some of the passages of this enlightening and essential work are difficult. Pagels knows each version of the Gospels – even the most obscure – and travels them with a forensic mining. Like a detective, she is always looking for contradictory gospels on the origin of Jesus. But it is worth clinging: as the chapters take place, the intrigue thickens.

On the one hand, it turns out that there are no physical descriptions of Jesus anywhere in the Gospels. We have no idea what he looked like, which means that all the subsequent representations of him in art and elsewhere are entirely imagined. Incredibly, none of the stories now called “Gospels” has been written in the life of Jesus. Rather, they were written anonymously of the decades after his death, probably by disciples of his teachings who had never met him but who wanted to pass the word. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were names added later, to give credibility, derived from men in the inner circle of Jesus. These nuggets and many others of this type have been revealing to me as a newcomer in the biblical study.

Pagels also underlines that the Gospels cannot be read as “the Gospel”. In other words, they are “less a biography than a passionate manifesto, showing how a young man from rural background has suddenly become a lightning rod for divine power.” Each version of the Gospels has a slightly – or sometimes, largely – different from the genealogy of Jesus, the virgin birth, whether or not the Son of God, and even if it is literally resurrected from the dead or his “resurrection” appeared in the form of a vision to some of his disciples after his crucifixion. The writers of the Gospel, conclude pages, were less interested in accuracy and more focused on the widening of the consciousness of Jesus as the son of God and Savior: she observes that the Gospels “report historical events while surrounding them with parables, interpretations and miraculous moments told in the symbolic language”.

Some of the detractors of Jesus – and even some of his most devoted disciples – asked why, if Jesus was really the Messiah, he had not been able to deliver Israel from his Roman occupants, or to do good, before dying, on his promise that “the Kingdom of God will soon come”. Two generations after his death, doubts persisted even among the most devoted: “if he was a real prophet,” they wondered: “Why was his message failed?” Judea remained under Roman domination; Persecution and barbarism reigned.

As a teacher and activist, Jesus was fierce, secret, volatile and impatient, by certain accounts. Others underlined the “compassionate Christ” who urged that we “turned the other plays”, who mingled with the lepers and that we saw the poor and the sick as the children of God: that “those who are” the first “in this world – prominent and powerful – can find themselves last in the kingdom of God”. Pagels maintains that the very concept of all humans is equal to the origin of Christ and finally led Christianity, during 2000 years, to become the most widespread of all religious traditions, with a third of the world population identifying themselves as Christian.

Whether or not you are a real believer, it is nothing less than miraculous to realize that the words and actions of a person – and the narration around this individual – can continue to resonate in all areas of society and culture, in all corners of the world. The way in which Jesus' teachings are interpreted is left to the eye of the spectator – whether it is to justify violence, to raise peace and kindness or to inspire artists from William Blake to Salvador Dali and Martin Scorsese.

When I arrived at the last pages of “miracles and wonder”, I realized that even if I knew much more on the origins of Christianity than when I started, the mystery of Jesus himself had deepened. Maybe that's how it is supposed to be. But the moral of history is clear: the history of Christ is an emblematic story of hope emerging from darkness.

“After Jesus undergoes the worst imaginable fate”, writes Pagels, “betrayed by a trustworthy friend, abandoned by everyone, wrongly, wrongly, tortured and cruelly executed in public, he is raised to a new glorious life.” That a charismatic rabbi of the 1st century interpreted the myth of the creation of Genesis “to signify that each member of the human race has a sacred value”, observes Pagels, “always resonates through our social and political life as an act of accusation – and inspiration”.

In the end, the meaning of Jesus suggests Pagels, has less to do with religion and more to do with the way we will face and transcend despair. “What fascinated me,” she concludes, “it is not only the historical mysteries that my book seeks to untangle but the spiritual power that shines through these stories.”