Review: Christian Caryl on Elaine Pagels and Paula Fredriksen
The Greatest Show on Earth: How early Christianity conquered the world
We’ve all gotten rather used to Christianity by now, I suspect—even those of us who count ourselves as rigorously secular. Christian sensibilities inform the secular calendar, language, sense of history, notions of charity and social obligation, philosophical horizons. What’s more, even as non-religious Europeans and Americans are turning their backs on it, Christian faith (especially its evangelical branch) is booming in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
I would argue that the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection has become such a part of the background noise that we tend to overlook the factors that have made it so appealing to billions of people over the past two thousand years. The rise of Christianity is arguably one of the great success stories of human culture. “What intrigues me is the astonishing persistence of Jesus, both rediscovered and reinvented,” writes Elaine Pagels in Miracles and Wonder, the latest stage in her five-decade quest to understand the origins of Christianity. In this new book, Pagels (one of our most esteemed scholars of ancient religion) attempts to see the core New Testament texts with a fresh eye, bringing all the power of her accumulated expertise to bear. She is keen to plumb some central questions: Who, exactly, was Jesus of Nazareth? What did he mean with his enigmatic talk of the “Kingdom of God”? How did his followers understand the crucifixion and the resurrection? And how did Jesus “become God”?
Pagels’s reading of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four accounts of Jesus’s life, offers an intriguing example of her approach. There’s a reason why modern literary critics like Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom have been so drawn to Mark. His gospel dispenses entirely with any accounts of the messiah’s nativity and instead plunges into a maelstrom of miracles, bewildering proverbs, and head-spinning plot twists. At one point, by now renowned for his astonishing works, Jesus returns home to Nazareth—only to have his family worry that he is “out of his mind.” The locals can’t quite fathom the dramatic change in this man they’ve known since childhood: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon; and aren’t his sisters here with us too?”
This realistic evocation of an extended Middle Eastern family sits uncomfortably with the orthodox picture of Jesus as a divine singularity. What’s more, as Pagels points out, Mark’s characterization of Jesus as “the son of Mary” is striking in the context of a patrilineal tribal society that always named children after their fathers: Is the evangelist implying that the Mother of God didn’t have a husband? Neither Mark nor Paul mention Jesus’s supposed virgin birth—which appears to be a later accretion that could have been intended, at least in part, to counter claims of Jesus’s illegitimacy by many of Christianity’s early critics. Matthew, Luke, and John—all probably more recent than Mark—make a point of inserting Joseph into their stories. (At least the clan has a biological father now!) While Matthew makes a glancing mention of Jesus’s brothers (no sisters this time), he doesn’t give them names.
Later Church commentators would try to explain away Jesus’s siblings (some claimed that those “brothers” were actually “cousins,” for example). Pagels makes a strong case that the later gospels can partly be understood as efforts to smooth out the rough edges of their more eccentric precursors. The letters of Paul, by scholarly consensus the oldest of the New Testament texts (largely dating from the 50s), probably didn’t help; they repeatedly mention Jesus’s brother James, who ran the Jerusalem branch of the Jesus movement after the messiah’s death. Similarly, the later evangelists make increasingly strenuous efforts to play down accusations that Jesus was executed for sedition. Pagels explains that these later accounts are written at a time when Christians, facing deepening persecution, are desperate to defend themselves against accusations that they’re undermining the state. They accomplished this by shifting the culpability for Jesus’s death from the Romans to the Jews—a slur that gained particular traction after the year 70, when the Romans brutally crushed a Judean rebellion by laying waste to Jerusalem. For many years to come, Jews would be viewed as a traitors to Rome, and Christians fell over each other to disassociate themselves. Pagels rightly traces the roots of two millennia of institutionalized antisemitism back to this moment.
This might make it sound as though Pagels is out to discredit Christianity across the board. She’s not. Tracking the spikiness, the complexity, and the contradictions of Christian scripture is all part of her project to understand its underlying power. The tale of an omnipotent God who assumes human form for a self-sacrifice that will redeem all humankind would resonate through the ages. “The Christian movement became powerful because Christians could claim to offer ‘eternal life’—not only to an emperor like Augustus, pronounced divine after his death by a vote in the Senate, but potentially to everyone, even to women, slaves, children dying young, former criminals.” Christianity, says Pagels, “democratized heaven.”
In Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen (another one of our most esteemed historians of the ancient world) emphasizes environment over doctrine: “If the spread of Christianity had really depended on the arguments of the theologians,” she writes, “its success really would have taken a miracle: very few people had the education to understand what all the arguing was about.” Her book offers a wonderfully vivid account of early Christianity’s pullulating diversity, which included many abstruse doctrines that never made it into the approved teachings of the early Church. Though Fredriksen’s focus is wider than that of Pagels, her method is similar: she aims “to introduce the reader to the complexities and ambiguities, the ironies and surprises, the twists and turns of this richer story”—by which she means the broader, “less linear” reality of early Christianity, which she depicts as much bigger and messier than the progress of establishing the canonical faith.
The creation of the New Testament (which dates back to the fourth century) is just one part of this story. The early Church tried to define its enemies as “pagans” or “heretics,” she argues, but these allegedly heterodox characters were also crucial to Christian evolution. Theological efforts to draw sharp dividing lines between the “faithful” and their opponents often depended on entirely secular power struggles and patronage networks. I especially enjoyed Fredriksen’s description of “cemetery meals,” long-established commemorations of the dead where Christians and non-Christians tended to mingle in ways that couldn’t entirely be contained by Church doctrine. Similarly, contrary to their own harsh rhetoric, the Church fathers didn’t throw all Greek and Roman influences overboard. Even as they discarded “cultic practices directed to the gods,” they embraced the “intellectual culture” of the pre-Christian world, including rhetoric, philosophy, and grammar. Orthodoxy triumphed in the end not least because Constantine, the Roman emperor who converted to Christianity and halted its persecution, realized that he needed a unifying ideology to knit his empire together. But Constantine’s watchdogs never quite succeeded in stamping out all the competing versions of the Christian story. “We have to bear all this diversity in mind,” Fredriksen cautions, “when we speak of ‘the triumph of Christianity.’ The question remains: which Christianity?”
Read Book Post’s Allen Callahan on the power struggles reflected in the composition of the Hebrew Bible and Adam Kirsch on the origins of Halakhah, or Jewish law.
Christian Caryl is the author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. He has worked as an Opinions editor at The Washington Post and an editor and columnist at Foreign Policy. He is working on a biography of the journalist Gitta Sereny. He has written for Book Post on Colin Thubron, Werner Herzog, Jósef Czapski, Edward Gorey, a dystopian novel on North Korean armageddon, and the Russian dissident movement, as well as historian of early Christianity Bart Ehrman.
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Having read Gibbon, I tracked through the hellishly complicated and irregular path of the early church. Do these two authors make use of "the Gibbon," as the Bloomsberries called him?