Searching for an imaginary Jesus

Elaine Pagels, a prolific author and longtime professor at Princeton University, has long advanced the claim that orthodox Christianity (as in the Nicene Creed) was not the true account of Jesus. She argued this in her bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels (1979), and in several books since. While she never identified as a New Ager, the New Age movement took much inspiration from her Gnostic vision, fashioning a Jesus who was a guru advising us how to find the truth within, rather than a Jesus who is Lord and Savior.

Pagels now takes up the identity of Jesus as her central topic in Mystery and Wonder (Doubleday, 336 pp.). She considers the Biblical material and Gnostic sources, as well as contemporary portrayals of Jesus in culture. Sadly, she does not explain or embrace the true figure who dominates the New Testament. Since she rejects the Biblical documents as historically spotty and not reliable enough to convey much about Jesus, she offers another version. This is what the Apostle Paul called “another Jesus” (2 Corinthians 11:4). For her, Jesus was a mysterious sage whose real identity can only be guessed at. But she tells us we can know He was not the divine and resurrected Lord. She includes references to Gnostic materials as giving insights into Jesus, even though they were written far later than the canonical Gospels and do not fit the portrayal of Jesus found therein.

In approaching the Gospels, Pagels cavalierly dismisses their traditional authorship, does not try harmonizing differing accounts that seem discrepant (a common practice of historians of ancient history), and presupposes that miracles do not occur. She thinks reports of healing miracles are fraudulent or only represent psychological healing or perhaps psychosomatic reversals of illnesses. Regarding Jesus’ birth narratives, if an event described is not corroborated by secular sources, she deems it fictional. She avoids the truth that the Biblical sources are themselves well attested. She fails to interact with evangelical New Testament scholars, such as Craig Blomberg, Craig Keener, and Gary Habermas. She has three short references to N.T. Wright, but doesn’t address his formidable arguments for the virgin birth and for the resurrection of Jesus.

It would take an evangelical New Testament scholar many pages to respond to all of Pagels’ deconstructions of the Gospels, but a few comments suffice. First, she almost never reads the Gospels as they were meant to be taken—that is, the story as told by the authors. Since she doesn’t believe in the virgin conception of Jesus, she concocts an elaborate story about Jesus’ possible illegitimacy and how Matthew and Luke tried to cover up that idea with a virginal conception they made up. These readings are not based on the best scholarship—as noted, she largely ignores conservative scholars—but on reinterpretations. As C.S. Lewis put it in his essay, “Modern Biblical Criticism,” the higher critics are so busy reading between the lines that they don’t read the lines themselves. This is both bad history and bad literary criticism.

Second, Pagels’ naturalistic interpretation colors and distorts all her reading of the Gospels. This anti-supernatural prejudice is unwarranted. We have sufficient evidence, independent of the Gospels themselves, for a supernatural God. Miracles are possible, given the existence of a supernatural God who created and designed the world. There are many credible reports of miracles occurring in recent history, as shown in Lee Strobel’s popular but well-documented book The Case for Miracles (2018) and in Craig Keener’s magisterial Miracles (2011). If miracles are happening now, there’s no reason to assume they didn’t happen in the life of Jesus. Moreover, when we remove all bona fide miracles from the Gospels, very little is left, and the story of Jesus is eviscerated. As many have argued, without the “grand miracle” (as C.S. Lewis put it in Miracles) of the resurrection, we cannot even explain the origin or continuation of Christianity, since it presupposes this event at its earliest stages.

Elaine Pagels might be an established scholar, yet on what matters most—the identity of Jesus Christ—she is tragically wrong, and may mislead many unless she is countered by solid arguments (1 Peter 3:15). Happily, this apologetic is widely available. We don’t have to guess who Jesus was and is. We can know He is Savior and Lord.