The New Yorker Radio Hour - Elaine Pagels on “The Historical Mystery of Jesus”

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “The Devil Problem,” a Profile of the religion scholar Elaine Pagels—a scholar of early Christianity who had also, improbably, become a best-selling author with “The Gnostic Gospels,” from 1979. Pagels’s latest book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” is a summation of her lifetime of research on Christianity, as it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. She tells Remnick how she found and lost faith in the evangelical movement, but retained a lifelong interest in religion. “I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world,” she feels, “has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.”This segment originally aired on March 28, 2025.New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. 30 years ago, I published a piece in The New Yorker with the title, The Devil Problem. It was a profile of Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, who had also become improbably a best-selling author. Pagel's 1979 book, The Gnostig Gospels, was scholarly, but it was also accessible outside the Academy and very widely read. She changed how a lot of people, Christians and those we might call Christian curious, it affected how they thought about the Bible itself. Pagels went on to write the origin of Satan, as well as works on Adam and Eve and the Book of Revelation. Her latest

book is called Miracles in Wonder, and it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. For Many years, Pagels has been a professor of religion at Princeton. When we spoke earlier this year, I was struck by how focus she has remained on the topic of belief and how the world of two millennia ago, the world of the Jews and the Romans and Jesus, is to her so vividly alive. We first met, you're not going to believe this, 30 years ago, and shortly thereafter, you published a book and I decided to write about you.

You had suffered unimaginable loss. First, one of your children had died after a long illness, and then your husband, Heinz Pagels, had an accident and died while hiking. And you told me, and this is a quote from you at that time, I found that in times of grief, the church has little to say. It's just too remote.

How did that loss, those losses, affect your relationship to faith at that time? I didn't think of my work as a relationship with faith exactly. It was more a relationship with curiosity. I had given up on faith, you know, much earlier. My family wasn't religious. I mean, they would say the grandparents would call themselves Christians, but my father had given it up, you know, for science.

He was a scientist. Yeah, he was a biologist, Darwin. But you was a teenager? Well, that was just an accident. I mean, religion was not on the spectrum for me until somebody took me to San Francisco for something. And it turned out it was an evangelical crusade. I didn't know who this guy was, Billy Graham. But he was powerful.

And the whole event was extraordinary. And you get invited to be born again and have a new family and start your life over. And I thought that's great. 14. You described this. scene as it was, I think, at the old Cow Palace in San Francisco where basketball games were played. And you were so taken with Billy Graham, who's, I guess for younger people who are listening, don't know, but Billy Graham was the great evangelist of his day and filled Yankee Stadium and other such places. That's it, quickly.

From everywhere. He's just come. That's it. Come on. There are many people streaming down every aisle here, hundreds of people, here in the cow palace. And there are many of you sitting in your living room and home. You'd like to be here and come down this aisle and stand here and give you a life for Christ. You can right where you are.

And you were so swept away as a teenager than in the course of the evening you were called to Christ. Yes, I mean, he had, you know, this 6,000 people singing. and you know you can have this experience with God and all this and I was just totally captivated. He was charismatic and he surprised me. The whole thing surprised me. But I did feel like the sky opened up. You know, it was like something happened.

But it was brief. Well, it lasted until, you know, the church I went to told me something I couldn't stand. It was a friend of mine in high school. had been killed in an automobile accident. And I went back to this evangelical church, of which I'd been apart for a year quite intensely. And I said, my friend has been killed in an accident. And they said, that's terrible.

Was he born again? And I said, no, he was Jewish. And then, you know, someone said, well, then he's in hell. And I just felt like I'd been... That was out. You were out. Socked in the stomach. And I just walked out. I never went back.

So how did you decide to make a life of scholarship in religion? You've now published the latest book in what I consider a lifelong project. There's a real continuity to all these books. Why did you come to focus on Christianity and some of the lesser-known narratives of Christianity books that aren't part of the official canon? You've given your professional life to this, your intellectual life to this. Why? Because I had some kind of powerful experience with that conversion.

It didn't last. I mean, I left that group, that whole evangelical perspective on Christianity didn't work for me. But there was something transformative about it. And it was important. It opened up elements of my experience that nothing else did. Describe that because not everybody's had that. How did it change your life and your mind? It's about the imagination.

I mean, I was living in a world which, you know, science defines what you can see, and there's nothing else, right? That's at least what I was brought up hearing. But this was about opening up the imagination. I always thought about it later as the way I felt about the Wizard of Oz as a child, right? Just suddenly I was out there with Dorothy, you know. The wicked witch gets killed, and there's Glenda the Good, and there's... all of this action going on, this adventure, which is internal but very powerful. And that book's become a template for my life when I was maybe eight years old. And these stories of Jesus do that as well.

And it did it for me in that moment. And even though I left it, I thought, wait a minute, why are religion still part of culture? I mean, it is true that there's no culture that doesn't have some form of claims about invisible beings and how we interact with them. So I thought, could it be Buddhism? Could it be Judaism? Could it be Islam? Or is it Christianity? So I decided I wanted to find out. How does that work? And why do people continue those traditions even long after they're discredited rationally? When you were a kid and had this kind of evangelical breakthrough, no matter how fleeting it was, did you think of Jesus? as a real person existing in a real historical time

among political currents as well as think of him in terms of a kind of supernatural or religious presence. That's an interesting question. And it makes me realize that I didn't think of him as a real person. I thought of some grand mythological drama going on in the sky. You know, there's God and Satan and Jesus, and you're in part of a drama.

That's why I mentioned The Wizard of Oz. I mean, it's part of a imaginary world. It was a cinematic metaphor, but not real. Yeah. Well, I didn't think about that he wasn't real. I just thought whoever that might have been, this was now some grand drama played out in the universe. And that's how it felt.

If you could, and I know it's an elementary question, but it's crucial to understand it, if we're going to get at your work in a deeper way. But we know the New Testament, and we know that there are four Gospels. Right. Four Gospels emerged and somehow became canonical in what we know as the New Testament.

There was a discovery at a certain point of a gigantic jar. Yes. By somebody who basically came across it and broke it open, and inside were texts, some of which were used as, I hate to even think about it.

Half of them seem to have been burned up, most likely, right? Used as kindling for the fire, yes. But what survived are what's called the Gnostic Gospels. What are they, and how do they compare to the book of Mark and Matthew? Well, and so on. When those Gospels now in the New Testament were written, there were others as well. We know that because people at the time said, oh, well, there's the Gospel of Truth, and there's the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Matthew,

and the gospel to the Egyptians, you know, they name these. And some of the earliest writers say, well, there are genuine gospel, and that there are terrible ones. Avoid those. They're written by heretics. They will lead you astray. So we knew there were far more than four, but four became part of a canon, which means a standard, right?

Why did they emerge and become the canon and the others fell away? think they became the canon because they talk about actual narratives of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. These others are not that. They usually consist of sayings, just teachings, which are different from those in the New Testament. The ones in the New Testament, as Mark points out when he writes about them, are the public teaching of Jesus. What he taught when he was out with crowds on the hills of Galilee. And that's repeated in Luke and Matthew as well, also in the Gospel of Thomas. But these other gospels, which are called Dostick, for all the wrong reasons, by the way, it was partly my fault, claim to give private teaching that he gave secretly to certain disciples, the way any rabbi

teaches today, right? There's one thing to the congregation that's preached, and that teacher will say different things to his closest followers and sort of advanced level students. But why would they be considered heretical? Because you can't confirm what's said, I suppose. I'm talking with the religion scholar Elaine Pagels, and we'll continue in a moment. One part of your new book that's already received some, let's just say, attention in the Catholic hierarchy, long before publication, is your investigation. of the narratives of immaculate conception. Tell me how this is still controversial and uncertain

2,000 years later. Well, we're talking about virgin birth story, which you find in two out of four New Testament Gospels, that Jesus was somehow conceived in some spiritual way without the intervention of any man or any seaman. Or any Joseph. Or any Joseph, yes. The claim that Jesus was spiritually conceived in some way is a stunning claim, and it's always raised a lot of questions, which are never answered.

And the earliest account we have doesn't say that at all. It just says, Mary, his mother was a rural woman in Nazareth. She had a lot of children. There's no man ever mentioned in her life. There's no father of Jesus. And it's clear that the neighbors think that, that he might have been an illegitimate child. And that's an early attack. How long has that been in the scholarly discussion, the possibility that Jesus might have been an illegitimate child to use the old phrase? Well, I think it's in Mark's narrative. In a direct way?

Indirectly. Mark doesn't say that. But the neighbors say, who does he think he is? He's just Mary's son, he's a carpenter. Why is he out there preaching as if he was some kind of prophet? Why is he trying to heal people? And he can't do anything in his hometown because they scorn him. But as early as the end of the first century, when Matthew is being written,

there are critics in the Jewish communities who reject those claims about Jesus, that he's not the Messiah. The whole thing is a false trail. Is it an unspeakable thing among Catholic prelates and in Catholic academia to raise this question? It's not because the person with whom I was most familiar, actually he wrote the review of the Gnostic Gospels on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Who's that? Raymond Brown. But what it said is these texts were rubbish in the first century.

They're still rubbish. So it wasn't an entirely positive review. Oh, not at all. It was written by a Catholic scholar. He thought you were making a mountain out of a molehill. Well, he thought I was making a sacred book out of trash. Yeah. And he wrote a huge text, the largest one and the most comprehensively researched there is.

It's about the virgin birth of Jesus, the birth of the Messiah. And he considers the possibility that Jesus' birth involved. something different from some miraculous event. Not supernatural. Yes. He says, some people say that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier. It wasn't even Jewish. But he said, that's impossible because there were no Roman soldiers until after the Jewish war.

But that's not true at all. He didn't know about the insurrection of Judas the Galilean, which brought many Roman troops into the huge city of Sephora, which is a three and a half mile walk from Nazareth, and that those soldiers were stationed there after they burned the entire city down and enslaved the inhabitants for harboring a Jewish revolutionary against Rome. And it's now well known among scholars of military history of the time,

that those soldiers were very disorderly and that any young person, male or female, who spent time with a Roman soldier was assumed to have been sexually assaulted. You know, as I was reading this book, I asked myself if we are today, in the modern world, more or less inclined to believe in miracles than the contemporaries of Jesus?

I would say less inclined. Now? Yes. Because as you know, I'm sure, people who wrote about the Roman emperors, Julius Caesar had an ancestor who was Venus and Augustus had a divine ancestor. He was called Son of God on the Roman coins.

And all great men were somehow also credited to have a divine being somewhere in their genealogy which adds a special sauce to their humanity and makes them more than human. You've said that you left the faith as a teenager after briefly entering it. You've been through everything in life and more that has to offer, whether it's life and loss and love and its loss and all these things. And have had an incredibly rich scholarly intellectual life. Does religion as such play any role in your life beyond its being a source of your intellectual?

intellectual commitment and study. Well, yes. It is not what people call organized religion. You don't go to church. I have sometimes, and sometimes I do, because... In what spirit? Well, only if it's powerfully engaging. If the music and the service is

powerful, it can be almost any kind of service. Whether a Christian service, it can be a bar mitzvah, it can be a Buddhist ritual. There's a quality about sacred time. an experience that evokes some element of experience that I can't articulate, really. But it's not belief as such.

It's not belief. Actually, David, I really think belief is far overrated. Tell me about that. Well, after the advent of Christianity, you know, which in the fourth centuries, you know, it becomes a code of beliefs. Like, I believe in one godfather almighty maker. Okay, that's it. And so later, people would talk about different traditions, and they'd say, well, what do Jews believe? And what do Muslims believe? And what do Buddhists believe?

Well, belief isn't really the point so much in Judaism. The point is, are you Orthodox? Are you secular? Are you reform? To what degree do you practice or not? And in Buddhism, it's much the same. It's about the prayers. It's about participation in certain rituals. Well, Judaism also is the one that I know where it's closest to me is also a matter of its being a civilization and a set of a language and what language is and a great deal more. It's not just, do I believe in God, do I not believe in God?

Exactly. It's a set of values and it's an ethical tradition. Or a set of arguments. Yes, a set of arguments, but it also has very deep emotional support in the practices that people do. So is it too banal to ask you if you were a Christian or not? Well, it's a hard question. I mean, yes, I feel identified with Christian tradition from the way I grew up, and it speaks to me as sort of like English. You know, that's the language I grew up with.

And I find it compelling in many ways, but it's not the only kind of tradition that compels me. I mean, I'm engaged with some friends in New York in a Buddhist meditation group, which we meet often, and other traditions as well. well. But yes, I would say Christian. I love that tradition in some ways. And Jesus seems like he was a historical person, but he's not just that. There are myths woven into the stories. There are elaborations. There are miracles. There are signs and symbols that play in the stories. It's not just a history at all. It's called, these texts are called good news because there are publications of the message of Jesus, which is God is going to come into the world and transform it. And your world can

be transformed. Come and be part of that transformation. And the world, which now contains so much suffering and pain, will sort of explode into a glorious new reality. What does all your study and experience lead you to think what happens after we die? I don't know. I don't know. It leads me to, to at least have an open question. I mean, I assumed until some time ago that after we die, you know, it's sort of what Steve Jobs was said to say, it's lights out. But even stories I've heard about his death suggest that at some point he suggested there was something else. And maybe that's just the thing people need when they go into death to allow them to do it. But there may be something else.

So I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable. I think about this in the way that Tanya Lerman at Stanford wrote a brilliant book called How God Becomes Real. She's talking about Jewish tradition. She's talking about Muslim tradition, about witchcraft, and about Christianity, various kinds. And she says, people don't just talk to invisible beings because they believe they're there. They actually engage in practices like prayer, meditation, opening themselves up to a larger sense of expectation of what's real. and as they practice that, they become susceptible to envisioning more of reality than the visible world. Or seeing the transcendent in the visible.

And you include yourself in that. I do. I do. And Tanya does herself in the book. So it need not be spirits and gods. It could be the beauty of nature, the way it transforms people, or of art or music. that seems to open up a wider reality than the visible. So, yes, I'm now bizarrely open to that.

Do you think about death a lot? No, not too much, except... Except when I bring it up. As we get older, yes, it does come in. It does cross the mind from time to time. And, you know, it's very interesting. But I had some experiences with people I love who died that I couldn't explain at all

and totally didn't expect. I thought this was, I couldn't imagine it would happen, but... What were they? Well, even after my husband's sudden death in a mountain climbing accident, it was just an utter total shock,

I went to a Trappist monastery where, in Colorado, where I happened to have gone with musicians who were playing music for the monks from the Juilliard Quartet, Robert Mann. And I got to know the monks, and I often went there and meditated in this very beautiful well of silence in the chapel. I couldn't be a Catholic. It just sort of against my Protestant resistance to that kind of authority. But there was something very deep and powerful about those experiences with those monks.

And after my husband's death and after planning the funeral in a very spiritually deprived Protestant church in town. I went out there and meditated with one of the monks who was amazing man. And I thought I heard a voice saying to me I thought I could

suddenly, after we meditated for an hour, I had the idea that I could ask my husband a question. I said, well, what do you think about this? And a voice came into my head, not auditory. This is fine with me. It's you, I think,

about now. And I said, fine with you. I was, what do you mean fine with you? You leave me with two tiny babies. One is three months old. One is a year and a half. And you're gone. And what do you expect me to do with this? And I was, I rate at first. And then I thought, wait a minute, who said that? I don't think it was my unconscious. It was not fine with me then. What was it? It seemed like his voice. It seemed like my husband's voice. And I thought, How dare you ask? How dare you say it's fine with you? So you had a marital argument? We had a marital argument.

In his absence? Yes. At this late date, do you pray? Three days, sometimes. Yes, but not usually a lot of words. Meditate, maybe. So that wasn't the only experience with unexpected events like that. Elaine Pagels, thank you so much.

Thank you very much, David. Elaine Pagels is Professor of Religion at Princeton, and her latest book is Miracles in Wonder, The Historical Mystery of Jesus. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening, today and always, throughout the year. And I hope you have a good new year to come. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.