DO YOU KNOW JESUS?

Why the Gospel stories won’t stay dead and buried.

- BY ADAM GOPNIK

For the scholar Elaine Pagels, the most improbable Gospel tales smooth over inconsistencies and inconvenient circumstances.

One subject that never dies, and, more significantly, never bores, is the life and times of the first-century Jewish rabbi and martyr Jesus, whose followers founded a religion in his name, or, rather, in honor of his title, Christ, meaning “the anointed one,” or Messiah. (Not necessarily a divine title, it had previously been associated with military and religious leaders, often indicating something closer to “the great” than “the godlike.”) Along with Buddha and Muhammad, he is one of three nameable figures credited with founding religions that have continued to grow over thousands of years.

The Princeton professor emeritus Elaine Pagels, who has written many imposing and engrossing books on early Christianity, is back with a kind of culminating work, “Miracles and Wonder” (Doubleday), the title slyly looking at both St. Paul and Paul Simon. Though her purposes are manifold, she begins by ably navigating through the shoals of the essential but surprisingly unsettled sources that seem to relate the events of Jesus’ life and death. There are, first, the Epistles of St. Paul, the late convert who brought the Jewish heresy to the Gentiles, releasing it from Torah observance and law, and making it a universal faith. The seven undisputed Pauline letters were written in and around the fifties, about fifteen to twenty years after the Passion; six others are regarded as later, polemical forgeries, correcting Paul’s egalitarianism with more gender-bound rules. Then, there are the “letters” (Hebrews and Jude and so on) of uncertain early date and more uncertain authorship.