Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus
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Who is Elaine Pagels and what is her significance?
Her new book out next week, a kind of culmination of her career, is called Miracles and Wonder. It takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection. Meeting Pagels again 30 years later, I was struck by just how focused she is on the topic of belief in Christian history and how the world of two millennia ago and the historical landscape, the world of the Jews and the Romans and Jesus, is to her so vividly alive. We first met, you're not going to believe this, 30 years ago. And shortly thereafter, you published a book and I decided to write about you. You had suffered unimaginable loss. First, one of your children had died after a long illness. And then your husband, Heinz Pagels, had an accident and died while hiking. And you told me, and this is a quote from you at that time, I found that in times of grief, the church has little to say. It's just too remote.
How did those losses affect your relationship to faith at that time?
I didn't think of my work as a relationship with faith exactly. It was more a relationship with curiosity. I had given up on faith, you know, much earlier. My family wasn't religious. I mean, they would say the grandparents would call themselves Christians, but my father had given it up, you know, for science. He was a scientist. Yeah, he was a biologist. Darwin.
But you as a teenager.
Well, that was just an accident. I mean, religion was not on the spectrum for me. until somebody took me to San Francisco for something, and it turned out it was an evangelical crusade. I didn't know who this guy was, Billy Graham, but he was powerful, and the whole event was extraordinary. You get invited to be born again and have a new family and start your life over, and I thought, that's great.
You describe this scene... It was, I think, at the old Cow Palace in San Francisco where basketball games were played. And you were so taken with Billy Graham, who was, I guess for younger people who are listening, don't know, but Billy Graham was the great evangelist of his day and filled Yankee Stadium and other such places. That's it.
Quickly. From everywhere. That's it. Come on. There are many people streaming down every aisle here. Hundreds of people here in the car palace. And there are many of you sitting in your living room at home. You'd like to be here and come down this aisle and stand here and give your life to Christ. You can right where you are.
And you were so swept away as a teenager that in the course of the evening, you were called to Christ.
Yes. I mean, he had, you know, this 6,000 people singing. And, you know, you can have this experience with God and all this. And I was just totally captivated. He was charismatic. And he surprised me. The whole thing surprised me. But I did feel like the sky opened up. You know, it was like something happened.
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