Elaine Pagels on “The Historical Mystery of Jesus”

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. 30 years ago, I published a piece in The New Yorker with the title The Devil. problem.

It was a profile of Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity, who had also become, improbably, a best-selling author. Pagel's 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels, was scholarly, but it was also accessible outside the Academy and very widely read. she changed how a lot of people, Christians and those we might call Christian curious, it affected how they thought about the Bible itself. Peggles went on to write The Origin of Satan, as well as works on Adam and Eve and the Book of Revelation. Her latest book is called Miracles and Wonder, and it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity.

including the stories of Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection. For many years Pagles has been a professor of religion at Princeton, and when we spoke earlier this year I was struck by how focused she has remained on the topic of belief, and how the world of two millennia ago, the world of the Jews and the Romans and Jesus, is to her so vividly alive. We first met You're not going to believe this. Thirty years ago, and shortly thereafter you published a book and I decided to write about you, you had suffered unimaginable loss.

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