Who Was Jesus? The World May Never Know.

MIRACLES AND WONDER: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, by Elaine Pagels

In 1835, a young German scholar named David Friedrich Strauss published an innovative study of the life of Jesus, titled simply “The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined.”

Strauss offered a new, mythographical reading of the Gospels, discounting the historical veracity of the miracles attributed to Jesus, but affirming their status as expressions of moral truth. The book was an international sensation, elevating its author to widespread fame and notoriety.

Though hardly the first author to try to understand the central figure of Christianity by scientific, historical and other rationalist means, Strauss particularly intrigued and enraged readers by suggesting that these methods be brought out of the academy and into the world of public discourse and religious practice. The truth of the historical Jesus and his life was not, in other words, just a scholarly debate, but a burning question that each individual, and society as a whole, must answer: not just how to be a Christian, but whether to be one at all.

Elaine Pagels, the best-selling author and Princeton professor, explains her interest in the life of Jesus in much the same terms. She opens her new book, “Miracles and Wonder,” with an account of her youthful dissatisfaction with the milquetoast Methodism of her suburban-California youth, with the more richly sacramental yet dourly punitive Catholicism and, finally, with the firebrand evangelism of Billy Graham that, despite its apparent joie de vivre, indulged the same willingness to condemn nonbelievers to eternal hellfire. But there persisted in her a fascination with Jesus, from whose personal existence the whole imaginative galaxy of Christianity seems to have sprung.

The “quest” for Jesus, as the prominent 20th-century theologian Albert Schweitzer memorably called it, has taken on many forms. Pagels takes the historical approach — which, since Strauss’s day, has proliferated widely, transforming from a philosophical insurgency to a mainstay of academic and even theological inquiry — drawing on the Gospels, contemporaneous primary source accounts and centuries of academic research to answer the questions of who, in fact, Jesus was.