Elaine Pagels
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Elaine Pagels’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, we're talking about virgin birth story, which you find in two out of four New Testament Gospels, that Jesus was somehow conceived in some spiritual way without the intervention of any man or any seaman.
The claim that Jesus was spiritually conceived in some way. is a stunning claim, and it's always raised a lot of questions which are never answered. And the earliest account we have doesn't say that at all. It just says, Mary, his mother, was a rural woman in Nazareth. She had a lot of children. There's no man ever mentioned in her life. There's no father of Jesus.
And it's clear that the neighbors think that he might have been an illegitimate child. And that's an early...
Well, I think it's in Mark's narrative.
Indirectly. Mark doesn't say that. But the neighbors say, who is this? Who does he think he is? He's just Mary's son. He's a carpenter. Why is he out there preaching as if he were some kind of prophet? Why is he trying to heal people? And he can't do anything in his hometown because they scorn him.
But as early as the end of the first century, when Matthew is being written, there are critics in the Jewish communities who reject those claims about Jesus, that he's not the Messiah. The whole thing is a false trail.
It's not, because the person with whom I was most familiar, actually he wrote the review of the Gnostic Gospels on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
Raymond Brown. But what it said is, these texts were rubbish in the first century, they're still rubbish.
Oh, not at all. It was written by a Catholic scholar.
Well, he thought I was making a sacred book out of trash. Yeah. And he wrote a huge text, the largest one and the most comprehensively researched there is. It's about the virgin birth of Jesus, the birth of the Messiah. And he considers the possibility that Jesus' birth involves something different from some miraculous event.
Yes. He says some people say that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier. He wasn't even Jewish. But he said that's impossible because there were no Roman soldiers until after the Jewish war. But that's not true at all.
He didn't know about the insurrection of Judas the Galilean, which brought many Roman troops into the huge city of Sepphoris, which is a three-and-a-half-mile walk from Nazareth, and that those soldiers were stationed there after they burned the entire city down and enslaved the inhabitants for harboring a Jewish revolutionary against Rome.
And it's now well known among scholars of military history of the time that those soldiers were very disorderly and that any young person, male or female, who'd spent time with a Roman soldier was assumed to have been sexually assaulted.
I would say less inclined.
Yes. Because, as you know, I'm sure, people who wrote about the Roman emperors, Julius Caesar had an ancestor who was Venus, and Augustus had a divine ancestor. He was called Son of God on the Roman coins. And all great men were somehow also credited to have a divine being somewhere, in their genealogy, which adds a special sauce to their humanity and makes them more than human.
Well, yes. It is not what people call organized religion. You don't go to church? I have sometimes, and sometimes I do, because— In what spirit? Well, only if it's powerfully engaging. If the music and the service is powerful, it can be almost any kind of service. Whether a Christian service, it can be a bar mitzvah, it can be a Buddhist ritual.
There's a quality about sacred time and experience that evokes some element of experience that I can't articulate, really.
It's not belief. Actually, David, I really think belief is far overrated.
Well, after the advent of Christianity, you know, which in the fourth century, as you know, it becomes a code of beliefs, like, I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker of... Okay, that's it. And so later, people would talk about different traditions, and they'd say, well, what do Jews believe? And what do Muslims believe? And what do Buddhists believe?
Well, belief isn't really the point so much in Judaism. The point is, are you Orthodox? Are you secular? Are you Reform? To what degree do you practice or not? And in Buddhism, it's much the same. It's about the prayers. It's about participation in certain rituals.
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