The Man Himself

Miracles and Wonders: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels.  Doubleday.  320 pp.  $30.00.  *****

Mark Twain tells a story about a typesetter from the days of hot type, when things were a lot more difficult than they are now.  The young man was setting a sermon in type, and after the first appearance of the name Jesus Christ, he figured the readers knows who he was talking about, so he just put JC.  The brochure, or whatever it was, got printed that way, and his boss exploded.  He wouldn’t put up with that kind of laziness.  It was profoundly disrespectful.  He said, “Go back and do this job again, and every time our savior appears, use his full name.”  So the typesetter did the job again, and every time the name appeared wrote Jesus H. Christ.

Nevertheless, in my family we tend (affectionately) to use the designation JC.  I’ve been a practicing Buddhist for thirty years, but still, if my mind turns to a religious figure, someone to look up to or revere, JC comes to mind, not the Buddha.  That is partly because the Buddha is so nebulous—and sometimes, frankly, unbelievable—in his life story, whereas Jesus, especially if you focus on the Gospel of Mark, seems all too human.  Matthew and Luke add some fluff around Mark’s basic story, and John does a complete re-working, seeing it from the perspective of the Absolute.  But Mark’s is the account that sticks with me.  That’s the one I believe, if I believe any of them.

Elaine Pagels tells us, among other things, that these names we give to the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—were added later, and that in fact we know nothing about the people who authored these Gospels.  They appeared years after the man lived, in fact didn’t appear until Paul had experienced his conversion and begun writing letters.  (In a way he seems to be the true founder of the Christian religion.)  There were various other Gospels that didn’t make the canonical cut, which was determined centuries after Jesus lived.

But Pagels makes an important distinction between two ways of encountering Jesus, through the accounts of his life (we don’t know that any of the Gospel writers actually knew Jesus in his lifetime; they may just have been telling stories they heard) and also through experiencing him in a mystical vision, as Paul did.  Both of these ways of encountering Jesus are important in establishing what we can loosely call Christianity, though it varies so much from place to place that it seems an abundance of religions rather than just one.

Pagels is the perfect person to write this account.  At age 82, she is a lifelong student of the history of Christianity, and was particularly important in bringing the alternative Gospels to our attention (her earlier books include The Gnostic Gospels and Beyond Belief).  She does a superb job of keeping track of the variations in accounts of Jesus life.  It’s like juggling ten balls at once (or maybe ten sharp knives).  And she is aware that, for many people, the important thing is not the facts of his life, but his presence in their lives now.  Pagels doesn’t seem to have a personal point of view (though she must).  She’s respectful of all of them.

She organizes her book around a number of key topics: the birth, the miracles, the message, the crucifixion, and the resurrection.  She also has chapters on how this itinerant rabbi “became God,” and how he has been portrayed in various art forms.  She covers a great deal of ground, but in a graceful survey, not exhaustive detail.

Back in 1967, when I did an intense study of the New Testament with Duke professor Orville Wintermute, who was a Presbyterian minister, he made light of the Virgin Birth, startling me at the time.  He said that any number of ancient figures were said to have been born of a virgin, it was a way of showing reverence and respect, so I’ve discounted the birth stories ever since.  Mark doesn’t include the birth in his Gospel—Matthew and Luke add the Virgin Birth to the beginning of their stories, despite the fact that they still want Jesus to be part of Joseph’s bloodline—and John doesn’t mention the birth at all.  Some people, I think, believe Jesus is the Son of God because of the Virgin Birth, but two Gospels don’t even mention it.

I have mixed feelings about the miracles.  Jesus was obviously a healing person in the fact of who he was; he inspired confidence and trust in people.  There was something about him as a person that went way beyond the message he was bringing.  A number of the healings concern psychosomatic ailments, and I find them perfectly believable.  Others seem to be a stretch; healing the blind might be one example (though I knew one person who suffered from psychosomatic blindness for a period of time).  The scholar Geza Vermes has told us that various Jewish holy men were credited with similar healings, including bringing people back from the dead.  I’m not saying that there’s some logical or scientific explanation for the healings; something was going on that had to do with the person of Jesus.  But I don’t dismiss the stories of healings, which dominate the early Gospel of Mark.

Jesus’ message is where people get into conflict.  It seems obvious to me that he favored the downtrodden and unacceptable, people on the fringes of society; no one was off limits for him.  He taught us to love God and love one another, messages which, again, any number of rabbis also preached.  He seems—at least in the Gospel of John—to have spoken of the oneness of God with him and with all of creation, and seemed to be saying in several places that the Kingdom of God was not in the future, but was present at that very time, in us and spread out all over the world.  But he also spoke, fairly often, as if the end times were coming, and in that regard seems to have been wrong.  He’s not the only person to have made a failed prediction of the end of things, and that was far from his whole message.  But I don’t see any other way to read what he said (though preachers contort themselves in all kinds of ways to make his predictions sound true).

John makes it sound as if his whole life story was a set-up, that Jesus knew what was happening from the get-go and was walking through a pre-arranged script.[1]  I’ve never bought that.  The whole thing sounds hokey to me, and it makes Jesus less than human.  I prefer the Jesus who was so afraid in the Garden of Gethsemene that he literally fell to the ground (he felt “fear unto death”), the man who righted himself by prayer (while the disciples dozed around him) but who later felt, on the cross, that God had forsaken him (in one account).  We can identify with a man who feels that kind of despair.  If he didn’t, his life was just a matter of enduring pain and discomfort, but no metaphysical doubts.  I don’t think the Crucifixion had to happen—Pontius Pilate is portrayed as trying to get out of it (though some historians suggest that was unlikely)—but Jesus is the type of human being who gets martyred.  If you preach love and acceptance of everyone, somebody’s going to kill you.  It goes against the interest of too many important people.

I don’t know what to say about the Resurrection.  The idea that a man who had been pronounced dead (even though the methods in those days don’t seem to have been foolproof) later appeared in bodily form so that people could touch his wounds is a bit much for me.  That he—and we—survive death in some way is something that various religions believe.  That his spirit lives on in the lives of others is certainly true; in that way he is very much alive.  It wasn’t just Paul who had a vision of a living Christ.  Any number of people have, including my own writing mentor, Reynolds Price (he’s written about it in books, and told me about it at the time).  Price wasn’t some nutty Bible thumper.

The most interesting character that emerges from this saga is Mary Magdalene, perhaps the most misunderstood character in the whole story.  We think of her as a former prostitute whom Jesus accepted and put up with, and who had a kind of blind devotion to him that survived everything.  But Pagels tells us that it was a Pope from a much later time who characterized her as a prostitute, or at least a promiscuous woman.  The Gospels themselves don’t say that.  We’re not even sure how many stories she’s in.  It doesn’t help that nearly every woman in the Gospels seems to be named Mary.

There is another tradition that says Mary Magdalene was from a prominent family and followed Jesus because she understood him in a way that other people didn’t.  A backstory to all the Gospel narratives that it’s easy to miss is that the disciples, though devoted to Jesus, didn’t particularly get him.  I agree that some of the parables are tough, but others seem perfectly straightforward, and the disciples keep asking for explanations.  They’re like football players in a poetry class.[2]  They also do a fair amount of jockeying for position, wondering which of them is most favored (again, sounds like a football team), then completely desert Jesus at the end, despite their protestations that they never would.  It was the women who stayed.  They were the faithful ones, also the fearless ones.  And it was Mary who discovered the open tomb.  In Mark that’s where the story ends, with a mystery.  It should have stayed that way.

I sometimes think that it is women, with their intuitive understanding and their closeness to bodily existence (menstrual cycles and childbirth) who genuinely understand religious truth. Men come along with their rational thinking and discursive logic and try to explain it, make a bunch of rules around it, make a religion of it and turn it into an institution, which always, inevitably, falsifies it.  Maybe Mary Magdalene did report an empty tomb to the disciples who were off trying to decide what to do with themselves, now that all their hopes had failed.  Maybe she just had a strong feeling that the man lived on.  Maybe she was the first to have a vision of a living Jesus, long before Paul, thereby combining the two ways of knowing Jesus.  In any case, I can’t help feeling that women are at the heart of this story, and that the men who tried to institutionalize it, and who left the weird Gospels out, have falsified it.  This book didn’t make me feel I finally understood.  It made me want to read more.

[1] It’s this same mentality that says God has a plan for my life and that plan will inevitably take place.

[2] I feel their pain, as a person who grew up without much intuitive sense.