Elaine Pagels
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
There's a quality about sacred time and experience that evokes some element of experience that I can't articulate, really.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
It's not belief. Actually, David, I really think belief is far overrated.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Well, after the advent of Christianity, you know, which in the fourth century, as you know, it becomes a code of beliefs, like, I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker of... 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?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Exactly. It's a set of values and it's an ethical tradition.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Yes, a set of arguments, but it also has very deep emotional support in the practices that people do.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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. It's 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Hmm. and other traditions as 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
These texts are called good news because they're 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
I don't know. I don't know. It leads me 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, just lights out, right? But even stories I've heard about his death suggest that at some point he suggested there was something else.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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 Luhrmann at Stanford wrote a brilliant book called How God Becomes Real. She's talking about Jewish tradition.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
And as they practice that, they become susceptible to envisioning more reality than the visible world. Or seeing the transcendent in the visible.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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. 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. What were they?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
I couldn't be a Catholic. It's just sort of against my Protestant resistance to that kind of authority. But there's 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 an amazing man.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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? What do you mean fine with you? You leave me with two tiny babies.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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 irate 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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 in his absence? Yes. At this late date, do you pray? Sometimes, yes. But not usually a lot of words. Meditate, maybe. So that wasn't the only experience with unexpected events like that.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
You get invited to be born again and have a new family and start your life over, and I thought, that's great.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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 a part 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?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Socked in the stomach. And I just walked out. I never went back.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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. Mm-hmm. 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 New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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. Mm-hmm. And these stories of Jesus do that as well. And it did it for me in that moment.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
And even though I left it, I thought, wait a minute, why are religions 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 Buddhism? Judaism? Could it be Islam? Or is it Christianity? So I decided I wanted to find out, how does that work?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
And why do people continue those traditions even long after they're discredited rationally?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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 an imaginary world.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Well, 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 named these. And some of the earliest writers say, well, there are…
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
genuine gospels, 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?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
I 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. 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
And that's repeated in Luke and Matthew as well, also in the Gospel of Thomas. But these other Gospels, which are called Gnostic 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?
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Because you can't confirm what's said, I suppose.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
And it's clear that the neighbors think that he might have been an illegitimate child. And that's an early...
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Well, I think it's in Mark's narrative.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Indirectly. Mark doesn't say that. But the neighbors say, who is this? 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 were some kind of prophet? Why is he trying to heal people? And he can't do anything in his hometown because they scorn him.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Raymond Brown. But what it said is, these texts were rubbish in the first century, they're still rubbish.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Oh, not at all. It was written by a Catholic scholar.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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 involves something different from some miraculous event.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
Yes. He says some people say that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier. He 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
He didn't know about the insurrection of Judas the Galilean, which brought many Roman troops into the huge city of Sepphoris, 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.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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'd spent time with a Roman soldier was assumed to have been sexually assaulted.