Elaine Pagels on Jesus's Historicity

[John Cole]

Today there are many scholars who are looking for the historical Jesus. Not a new endeavor, but certainly with a great new impetus provided by these new sources. There are those who say, with John Dominic Crossan, that Jesus was a peasant Jewish sage of some kind, and there are others who say, with another group of scholars, that Jesus was, on the contrary, an apocalyptic teacher of the coming end of time. Both groups claimthat they can get to the real Jesus. And that if you read the sources right, you make the right selection of the sayings and the materials, you will find the real Jesus. I have doubts about that. It seems to me that history doesn't get you there. It would be fascinating if it did. If we had videotapes, if we had transcripts. We don't have those. We have... a series of refractions of some extraordinary person, seen from a variety of quite different viewpoints. We have fragments, we have sayings, we have impressions, we have vignettes. That's what we have. And actually, as I read them, they're quite different, and they're quite contradictory. They may not be irreconcilable, but to me, it's not satisfactory to go back to one type of evidence and say, "this is the real Jesus," or," that's the real Jesus." What I see is that as far back as history will take us, we see an enormous range of different people. Now there's nothing really so dismaying about that. I mean, what if we saw the origins of the Christian movement as, in fact, a movement with strong disagreements, with powerfully different perspectives, people in conversation with one another struggling to understand what is the most important truth of their lives. Is that so different from the way we look for truth today?

This might sound as though one were saying, "We'll never know who Jesus is." But that question is only because the perspective from which I spoke is a historian's perspective. I can't get back as a historian to Jesus. I don't think history will get you that far. Now that hasn't stopped Christians, all over the world, millions and millions of them, from having an intimate relationship with Jesus. Whether they're Russian Orthodox or whether they're Roman Catholics or whether they're Baptist or whether they're Quakers. So there is certainly access, religious access, in these sources to a spiritual presence of Christ, which is quite different from what would you say as a historian. Because there are many people today who base their lives on a relationship with Jesus as they perceive it.

The fact that we don't have historical sources to get back to the so-called real Jesus has never stopped the movement from existing. It's very powerful, and that to me is totally fascinating. The sense that millions of people all over the world have found, in the figure of Jesus, a spiritual focus for their lives is absolutely extraordinary, it's fascinating. How does that happen, particularly when we don't have a guaranteed way to get you back there in some factual way?

Note that Pagels is a Christian.