Why We Can’t Quit Talking About Jesus

The Passion and the Resurrection are, of course, at the heart of the Jesus story. Matthew’s account of the empty tomb, followed by ever more elaborate resurrection narratives, serves, Pagels suggests, both to address the practical difficulties of reclaiming the bodies of the executed and to counter skeptical claims that Jesus’ corpse had simply been stolen. Stories of resurrection and rebirth, after all, recur throughout history. Bereavement hallucinations—intensely vivid encounters with the deceased—are reported by as many as half of all grieving people. Elvis, for one, was seen by many in the years following his death, with a newspaper report of a sighting in Kalamazoo at least as reliable as the spotty accounts shared by fervent believers two millennia ago. And Paul depicts his own explicitly visionary encounters with a long-dead Jesus as equivalent to the earlier encounters reported by the apostles.

Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus’ Resurrection to that of the followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson in our own time. During his life, many devotees of the Brooklyn rebbe believed he was the Messiah, a conviction that he encouraged without ever explicitly confirming—much like the Jesus of the Gospels. After Schneerson’s death, in 1994, only a small portion of believers insisted that he remained physically alive, but others continued to experience him as an enduring presence, a guide still available for inner light and intercession, as Jesus was for Paul.

In times of catastrophe, such beliefs tend to harden into certainty. If the Lubavitcher community had been struck by something on the scale of the Judeans’ loss of the Temple and their enslavement, what are now marginal, hallucinatory visions of the rebbe would almost certainly take on a more declarative, redemptive form. “Long live the Rebbe, King Moshiach forever!”—the Lubavitcher slogan seen on New York street corners—is, in essence, no different from “Christ is risen.” Both trace the same arc from comforting spiritual presence to asserted physical reality.

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.

Indeed, the Gospels don’t even present themselves as history, the way other chronicles of the time did. “Whether one considers the collection of early Christian gospels, the various apostolic acta, the assortment of apocalypses, or the burgeoning stock of hagiographa,” Richard C. Miller argues in his 2015 study, “Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity,” the reader finds “nothing deserving of the genus ‘historiography.’ ” The early Christian gospels show “no visible weighing of sources, no apology for the all-too-common occurrence of the supernatural, no endeavor to distinguish such accounts and conventions from analogous fictive narratives in classical literature.” From this perspective, the familiar elements of the Nativity—the stable, the shepherds, the Magi—were not meant to paper over the embarrassment at Jesus’ illegitimacy. Rather, they were simply the stories you told because that’s what the birth narratives of demigods were like. The tomb was not found empty because of local confusion or an effort to suppress the fate of a corpse; it was empty because an empty tomb was a standard signifier of divinity. Miller catalogues many comparable instances. The Gospel portrayals of Jesus, he concludes, offer nothing that couldn’t be found within the well-worn conventions of the Mediterranean demigod tradition.

Just as nineteenth-century criticism shaped the older paradigm, the new one is deeply informed by postmodern theory—Miller, for instance, approvingly cites Derrida—with its skepticism toward “foundationalist” thought. That is, 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.

The most accessible statement of this new paradigm may come from Robyn Faith Walsh, a professor at the University of Miami. 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.

These bioi—picaresque tales of magi, sages, and tricksters—are filled with miracles, dramatic confrontations, and recurring resurrection motifs. “Some bioi, for example, highlight the virtues of their subjects,” Walsh writes. “Others endow their subjects with extraordinary abilities of a different kind—‘superpowers,’ if you will—that involve what one might term ‘magic’ or other sorts of wonder-working.” Many of these protagonists also possess a keen wit, outfoxing their opponents with “clever ripostes and wise sayings, sometimes in the form of parables,” she notes. “Odd as it may seem to subsume the Alexander Romance, the Life of Aesop, and the gospels under the same genre, the narratives of Jesus’ deeds and sayings can be seen as pertaining to the same biographical tradition. Like Socrates or Aesop, Jesus is at the margins of society, a Judean peasant powerless in relation to the state. In his encounters with Pharisees or other interlocutors, he wins his victories by means of his wits and his ability to turn the words of his opponents against them.”

The habit of taking the Gospels as repositories of a community’s oral tradition, Walsh suggests, is an unexamined inheritance from nineteenth-century German Romanticism. Deeply invested in völkisch memory, German scholars envisioned the Gospel writers as culling and refining oral tradition, much like the Brothers Grimm, who collected and transcribed folktales. Just as the Grimms turned scattered oral traditions into polished literary narratives, so, the theory went, did the Gospel authors. But Walsh argues that no direct evidence supports the idea that the Gospels emerged from such a process. Instead, the Gospels seem to have more in common with the self-consciously crafted storytelling of Hans Christian Andersen—imaginative narratives shaped by skilled authors to fit a particular vision.

At the extreme edge of this revisionism is the work of Richard Carrier, whose book “On the Historicity of Jesus” (2014) forcefully presents the “mythicist” view—the argument that no historical Jesus ever existed. Carrier contends that early Christianity began as a purely visionary movement worshipping a celestial figure, an angelic being who took on human flesh to be crucified by Satan, buried, and reborn in the sky. Only later, he thinks, did a competing sect within the movement historicize this figure, placing him on earth.

Carrier, an independent scholar with a Columbia Ph.D., is a fascinating public figure—a YouTube intellectual (a term offered without snobbery) who is a regular presence in the energetic ecosystem of the platform’s myriad channels, mostly hosted by amateurs and improbably devoted to early-Christian history, including Gnostic Informant, Godless Engineer, MythVision, and History Valley. His polemical style, often sarcastic and combative, has made him a divisive figure, but his arguments in print are much more measured than his online persona might suggest. He’s cogent, for instance, about the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, the interpolated passage in Josephus’ history which seems to discuss, and extravagantly praise, Jesus. Though it is universally recognized to be at least in part Christian embroidery, Carrier offers convincing arguments for joining those who think that it is a forgery in its entirety. Unfortunately, he is one of those figures who, thinking for themselves, also think by themselves, and so he cannot always tell his strongest ideas from his weaker ones, defending both with sometimes undue aggression inside that ecosystem of videoed disputes. It is moving, in a way, that texts so ancient and arguments so obscure can continue to flame in an age where textuality and argument seem so remote.

Neither Miller nor Walsh would describe themselves as mythicists; indeed, both keep a wary if friendly distance from Carrier. (Neither mentions him in their bibliographies, but both have made peaceable references to him in interviews.) They could instead be described as postmodernists—Walsh regularly cites Bourdieu, as Miller cites Derrida—who think that asking “Did Jesus exist?” is naïve and off target, more a question for the History Channel than a question to be channelled through history. 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.

Yet even after absorbing the suspicions of the new scholars—accepting the empty tomb as a set-piece story, the Nativity as a shifting proscenium narrative—one returns to a basic truth: fables can be entirely fictional and still contain implicit facts; extravagant narratives often have an empirical core. We make our way back to Pagels’s reasonable middle ground, one that acknowledges both the constructed nature of the texts and the oddities and frictions that point the way out of pure textuality.

Spike Lee’s 1992 bio-pic, “Malcolm X,” is also a collection of tropes, figures, and familiar cinematic devices, stuffed with quotations, conscious and unconscious, from earlier movies—with direct visual borrowings from Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole” and a long climactic section quoting Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus.” That does not mean that there isn’t a very real figure being portrayed behind, and through, these devices. Indeed, the movie is separated from the life of its subject by about the same number of years that separate the Gospels from Jesus’ life, and, in the same way, it refashions Malcolm’s life and death to suit the political needs of its day. Lee emerges as Malcolm’s Mark, intent on diminishing the eccentricity of Malcolm’s religious beliefs—no flying saucers or human-making magicians—and, in a similarly prudent revisionist spirit, on diverting blame for his assassination from the Nation of Islam (eliminating Louis Farrakhan’s probable role in the murder) and instead affixing it to, so to speak, the Romans—the F.B.I. and the New York police. The film reshapes meanings, filters facts, and crafts a narrative around cinematic conventions, but it does not erase the essential outline of Malcolm’s life. It isn’t just a movie. The Gospels are certainly Greek literature. Yet they may well be Greek literature inspired by an actual Jewish life.