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?”