This post is a follow-up to my 3-part series on “saving Jesus” (which begins here). Coincidentally, a major new book on the historical Jesus is being published today. Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus is coming to us from esteemed New Testament and early church scholar Elaine Pagels. Now professor emeritus at Princeton, Pagels is a prolific bestselling author and popular speaker.

(As an aside, I have a fondness for Pagels, not only for the quality of her writing, but because of how her humanity shines through her work and life, not always a trait of academics. No doubt this reflects how Pagles has overcome multiple painful episodes in her life: a period of sexual abuse by a well-known scholar who was her PhD advisor, the death from disease of a six-year-old son, and the death fifteen months later of her husband, internationally renowned physicist, Heinz Pagels, in a mount climbing accident. She talks movingly about these events and her own religious and spiritual life in her autobiographical Why Religion?: A Personal Story.)

By way of review of Pagels’ new book, The New Yorker has published an essay by writer Adam Gopnik titled, “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus”. Not surprisingly, Gopnik obviously likes this book a lot (and I ordered it in response to his review). But he also wisely brings in the work of other writers to demonstrate that Pagels’ book is part of a new and growing stream which is heading in a significantly different direction from scholarship of the past.

When I was in seminary, the standard theory explaining the gospels was that the bulk of their stories was a community memory, usually called “the oral tradition.” In other words, we know the gospel writers weren’t witnesses of what they told about. Nor did they likely have written accounts from those who were. So, it was assumed that what they wrote was based upon passed on memories, originating with Jesus’ disciples and others who heard and saw him.

Oral tradition is still the commonly taught explanation for the gospels but it is being challenged. This is one of the main points of Gopnik’s article, Pagels’ book, and the others he cites.

There are two problems with the theory. The first is obvious: ancient oral tradition, of course, can never be found, so it’s hypothetical. At best, it can be shown to be plausible, which many researchers have tried to do. It’s now common knowledge that pre-literate indigenous peoples often preserve their history by stories passed on verbally, often by a designated tribal story teller. Nonetheless, there is no evidence of such practices among the people of Jesus’ day.

The second problem has begun to be recognized more recently but it is close to toppling the oral tradition theory of the gospels. Put simply: the gospels just don’t look like written versions of oral tradition. Rather, they are much more easily explained as traditional Greco-Roman literature, in this case centered on a character named Jesus. In Gopnik’s words,

The new paradigm rejects the idea that there is a base layer of historical fact that writing partially conceals, in a kind of dance of the seven literary veils. All there is beneath those literary veils is more dancing.

Or, to adapt another metaphor, instead of turtles it’s stories all the way down.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t a historical Jesus. It’s just that the New Testament tells us little about him because its writers didn’t know of such a person. This then explains the conundrum of Paul’s letters. Why, though writing closer to Jesus’ life than the gospels, does Paul say nothing about that life as told in the gospels? Answer: because the gospels hadn’t created “the Jesus story” yet. Paul shows no interest in Jesus of Nazareth and likely knew little or nothing about him. He knows Jesus (through a revelation, he says) only as the Christ, the crucified and risen savior of the world.

Gopnik expands on the new scholarly view of the gospels with this summary:

The interpretive approach that Pagels represents is skeptical—nothing happened quite as related—but inclined to accept that something happened, in something like the sequence suggested. A scholarly paradigm that has shone in recent years shifts the focus: the Gospels are now seen as literary constructions from the start. There were no rips in the fabric of memory, in this view, because there were no memories to mend—no foundational oral tradition beneath the narratives, only a lattice of tropes. The Gospel authors, far from being community leaders preserving oral sayings for largely illiterate followers, were highly literate members of a small, erudite upper crust, distant in experience, attitude, and geography from any Galilean peasant preachers. Their writings bear all the marks of that sharp-elbowed circle and none of the gentle gatherings of group memory.

As another example of this viewpoint, Gopnik cites University of Miami scholar, Robin Faith Walsh.

A pugnacious writer and a charismatic public speaker, Walsh argues in her 2021 book, The Origins of Early Christian Literature, that the Gospels, whatever else they may be, are, first and foremost, Greek literature. Their closest affinities, she contends, are not with Jewish folklore or communal memory but with the miraculous novels and excitable bioi, or lives, that filled the Hellenistic world—stories often centered on wonder-workers from a humble social caste.

So, what’s the bottom line? That we know with certainty nothing about the so-called historical Jesus. It is, however, reasonable to believe that he did exist, that he was an itinerant rabbi, often called a prophet, who taught remarkable things and performed remarkable deeds seen as miracles, and that he was crucified by Roman authorities.

A consensus has been growing for some time that an unreasonable thing to attribute to Jesus is the founding of a religion, later called Christianity. The literary view of the gospels only adds support to that view. Gopnik quotes another New Testament scholar, Richard C. Miller, about the startling significance of this.

Jesus, whether a historical figure or not, exists for us only as a literary character in a series of polemical exchanges. Even if he existed, his actual purposes, whatever they might have been, are marginal to the development of Christianity as a religion.

The corollary to my question, “Can Jesus be saved?” is the question, “Can Christianity be saved?” But there are other questions more to the point. We should probably begin by asking, “Do we want Christianity to be saved?” There are certainly many today who would give that a thumbs down. But even if we are inclined to say we do, then the question to ask could be, “What about Christianity do we want to save?”

For this is the gift that scholars like Pagels, Walsh, and Miller are giving us: permission to change Christianity however we see fit. Of course, this isn’t one person’s decision to make by fiat. But we can have a clear conscience in beginning that conversation. Want to dump Jesus as the sacrifice for the sins of the world? Go ahead. It’s just a story. You won’t be stepping on Jesus’ toes, only Paul’s and those who followed his way of thinking. Tired of the Trinity? Get rid of it. Another story. Jesus didn’t talk about it or even imagine it.

The flip side of this freedom is that a new honesty is being forced on the church. It can continue with traditional Christianity if it wants to, but its claim that in doing so it’s practicing the religion of Jesus is a façade. Jesus started no religion and there is an unbridgeable gap between him and the religion identifying itself with him that developed in the decades and centuries afterward. It would certainly be unrecognizable to him.

In the third and concluding part of my series, I tried to “construct” a Jesus that was relevant and meaningful for our world today. It presented Jesus as a spiritual guide and symbol but no more. I didn’t present Jesus as the central figure of a religion.

Does Jesus need to be? I don’t think so, but he could be for those who want a religious practice centered on Jesus. But the need for religion in general is increasingly in question. It could well be a holdover from a past that is all but gone. That is a question our culture is wrestling with now. I suspect, however, that Jesus, like the Buddha before him, can give us guidance on what a meaningful and important “spiritual, not religious” life looks like. And at least for that reason, Jesus does still matter.

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