Understanding the Miracle Stories in the Gospel

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Good morning, everybody. Well, bravo. You get an extra jewel in your crown for coming out this morning because it is freezing. I've already confessed to Emma I should have worn a hat. My ears are just now coming back to life. Well, welcome. I'm Thais Carter. I'm a member of the Adult Education Committee. We are starting a new series for February, Faith that exploring Christian faith with wonder, courage and community. We are extraordinarily fortunate to be kicking off today's series with the esteemed Dr. Elaine Pagels. For those of you who haven't heard, Elaine is the Harrington Spear Payne foundation professor of Religion emerita at Princeton University and a widely respected scholar of early Christianity. Her groundbreaking research, especially on the text of the Nag Hammadi Library, has helped reveal the diversity of early Christian beliefs and challenge long held assumptions about Christian origins. You can get her full bio on the flyer which is out there and read about everybody else who's going to be sharing with us during the series. But before we welcome Elaine up, please join me me in a word of prayer. God, we are so grateful that we can gather together in this warm room and hear what you have for us this morning. We thank you for the gift of your word, your holy text. We thank you for the gift of community. We thank you that you want us to love you with not just our whole hearts, but our whole minds. And we are eager for what you have. In your name we pray. Amen. Dr. Pagels. [00:01:35] Speaker B: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here and talk about something that I've never thought about before. This recent. There you are. This recent book, you will have heard this. It came at the end of my career of teaching, so I thought I finally would talk about questions that I still have. The question came up to me is why do I still love reading these texts, the New Testament? And what surprised me is that this time around, reading them after teaching undergraduate courses in early Christianity for a long time, is the question of what about the miracles and wonders. I got captivated before about the teachings of Jesus, but this became a question much more about why all of the miracles. What's going on? Why are the Gospels just filled with miracles? Mark's Gospel, which is my favorite, is miracles from start to finish. And it shows that the earliest, some of the earliest followers of Jesus saw him as somebody who could do miracles. Here he is with a magic wand. Some people imagined him, others show the the man who's paralyzed, his bed. This is a woman who touches his garment and is healed. These are some Very earliest images we have of Jesus. And some people said, some of his critics said, how did he do those miracles? Did he go to Egypt and learn magic spells? These are the kind of gems that you would use if you were a magician. They have magic spells on them and they have images of divine beings that do magic healings. And this is one thing that Jesus was accused of by people who disliked him. How did he do it? Well, if you look at Mark here it is in Mark 8. Let's see. It's in Mark 8. Yes. That he heals a man who is blind. And that image goes like this. And it said that Jesus put his hands on the. And he did the kind of gestures that magicians often did when he heals a deaf man. In chapter seven, he uses the word Epaphtha. I hope I spelled it right here. Using Aramaic, his dialect of Hebrew. And he's using the kind of words that magicians might use. Story of raising a dead girl. The people who tell the story later. It says in Greek that. That she is. He says she's sleeping, which would suggest the word for sleeping. But we don't know whether she was dead or in a coma. But again, he uses Aramaic words. Now, why do they put the Aramaic words in? Some people have suggested it's because if you, as a follower of Jesus, want to do a healing, you could get the words right. And the words right would be the words Jesus used in his language because it would probably be more effective. However, not everybody likes miracles. Thomas Jefferson said, get them out of here. So if you go to Monticello and some of you have been there and you see his Bible, he literally cut the miracles out because he said, they're totally irrelevant. What we need are the life and morals of the great prophet of Nazareth. So let's get rid of the miracles. 20 years after him, however, Mary Baker Eddy declared that she had been cured from an incurable disease through prayer and started the Church of Christ. Scientist. So many people do, to this day, of course, value the miracles. I just thought in this few minutes we have today, let's just focus on the big ones. Virgin birthday. I'll try to be brief about this because there are more questions than any answers here. The earliest written gospel, as you likely know, is the Gospel of Mark. And in Mark, there's no birth story. Jesus first appears as a young man in that first episode in Mark, and he's baptized by John the Baptist. In the third chapter. It says when Jesus speaks in prophecy and is healing people, his family comes out to Seize him and say he's out of his mind or he's beside himself. This translation varies in English sometimes, but this is a translation that is widely used. When Jesus went to his home in Nazareth, According to Mark 6, his neighbors treat him with scorn when he is speaking and acting as a prophet. They say, where did he get this? Where did this person get this, this Jesus, the son of Mary, and we know his brothers and sisters. I mean, what does he think he's doing? Now, the odd thing to me, and in the context of my colleague here who knows a lot more about these texts, calling a Jewish boy son of Mary in this context, culturally and plurally is an odd thing, right? This is a. It's a patriarchal system in which a boy would be called by the son of. The son of his father, Jesus, son of Joseph, Jesus, son of David, King David, but you wouldn't call him son of Mary. So what you see in account is that some people were disappointed with him and that at the same time, the critics who didn't like Jesus rumored that he was illegitimate. In Hebrew, the word mamser is used. And the Gospel of John makes a similar suggestion that people said things like that. It doesn't mean that that's true, but it could have. There certainly was a problem about the birth of Jes. About 10 to 20 years later, two followers of Jesus, Matthew and Luke, each took March's story and thought, this is wrong. We need a birth story. We need a story that treats the genealogy of Jesus, whom we're calling the Messiah, back to King David. He has to have a royal genealogy. So each of them adds a birth story. And if you look where they got the birth stories, if you read Matthew and Luke separately, you see that the birth stories are very different. Matthew goes back to the story of Abraham and Sarah. She's far too old to have a baby at the age of 99. And nevertheless, it is a biological miracle. And so he invokes the story of Abraham and Sarah, talking about the old couple at the beginning of the Gospels who have a son far after the woman would normally have a child. And it also calls upon the story of the birth of the prophet Samuel, for which his mother prays and the child is given by God as a miracle. Matthew puts in a completely different story, which is patterned instead on the birth of Moses. How he was hidden, how a wicked king tried to kill all the Jewish babies, and how this child was miraculously rescued. So Luke tells a story about a young couple they have. It's a very Humble story. The child is born in a manger. You know the story, and the angels sing. That's one kind of story. And Matthew's story is quite different. There are kings who see a star in the sky, a miraculous sign. The king of Judea at the time hears of the birth of an infant prince. And he's very concerned. Once the child dead, orders the slaughter of babies. This is like the slaughter of babies in the story of Moses. So it's pat. And the infant Jesus is already a ruler of the world. He's not a humble child. He is the child of. Of glory and the king of the world in future time. And later stories just thought they couldn't choose between Matthew and Luke. But they did what you see on Christmas cards, they put them together. Here you have the, you know, the. The ox and the cow in the stable and the trough where the baby was laid. That's Luke. And you have the kings coming at the stable. So they just add it together into a complete soup and we get this wonderful Christmas story as a result. The Gospel of John has no birth story of Jesus in that way. It just says, where does he come from? He comes from God. In the beginning was the Logos, and Jesus comes from God. That's all you need, Mark. As we and more recent scholars have struggled with this question, I was reading primarily the Birth of the Messiah. This is the most comprehensive book by a scholar, a Roman Catholic scholar, Raymond Brown, who taught at Union Seminary for years. And he goes the historical discussions of the birth of Jesus. Then he ends up saying, well, the virgin birth is a theological statement, not a biological one. That's as close as Raymond gets to suggesting that the literal virgin birth is not what was not his conviction. A stronger story was written by Jane Schaberg, for which she was nearly killed. Actually, somebody bombed her car after she wrote this book. I didn't even read this book for years because I thought it sounded so derogatory, the illegitimate. But nevertheless, she does discuss the various arguments about the birth of Jesus. So I don't want to go into that because that's a question that I can't answer at all. But later I realized that Mark did not ignore the question of Jesus paternity. How do you know that Jesus is the son of God in Mark's Gospel? Remember the very first scene? This goes to be baptized by John the Baptist. And suddenly he sees the heavens open and a voice from heaven says, this is my beloved son. Listen to him. So God himself, Mark. The way Mark tells the story validates the paternity of Jesus. So I don't think it's meant to be literal language. It's poetic and mystical language, the language of mysteries and miracles. So, quickly, let's move to a more. A different kind of topic. What about resurrection? Mark's original ending, so I've been told, has a strange ending. It ends, they say, at mark 16 8. That's at least what I was taught. And it just simply says that the women who went to the grave of Jesus found it empty, and they were shocked and horrified and they ran away and told nobody. That's where the story might have ended originally. Later writers, Matthew, Luke, John, and also people who found the ending to Mark unsatisfactory, added new endings and put Jesus into the picture. We have many stories, and Matthew takes the traditional Jewish conviction that at the end of time, the dead will rise all over the world. The righteous dead. This is the Mount of Olives. Probably many of you have been there. And that's where there are many graves, especially of Orthodox Jews, because when the Messiah comes, he will appear there first. And those buried there will be the first to greet the coming of the Messiah. You can see the graves there. There are thousands of them. Actually, Matthew says that when Jesus died, the dead rose out of. He says the bodies of the died came out of the graves and went into Jerusalem. And many people saw them. In case you haven't noticed, there were many people appearing in Jerusalem who had died when Jesus died. And then Matthew adds another miracle. An angel descends from heaven. The guards are terrified. They fall down as dead, and the angel announces the resurrection. You know the story. And then at the end of Matthew and other gospels, Matthew, particularly in 28, Jesus has been to heaven and back, and he gives the great commission to his disciples. Go and make disciples of all nations. And then, as Luke tells it, Jesus ascends into heaven bodily. This is a famous painting by Hans von Kohlbach. As the disciples watch in astonishment as his physical body is raised into heaven. That's one version. But Paul had asked, when the dead are raised, with what body do they come? And since he was a Pharisee, you'd think he'd give the traditional answer that the dead come in, their bodies restored. But actually, in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus appears to his followers in a locked room, and they're shocked. They think he's a ghost. And then he says, touch me and see I'm not a ghost. And then, as you may recall, because they don't believe it, he says, do you have something to eat? And he eats fish because ghosts don't eat. And the point is that he is physically present, at least as this story pictures that eventually. But Luke also tells different kinds of stories that you remember the story about Emmaus, that these followers of Jesus are walking to the town of Emmaus and a stranger joins them and they say, they tell them about Jesus of Nazareth and they invite him to dinner with them. And then suddenly, as he's blessing the bread and the wine, they suddenly see that it is Jesus present with them, and he vanishes. So there are different kinds of stories. The Gospel of John speaks about a physical resurrection, particularly for Thomas, who Jesus makes a second trip back to the disciples, appearing in the flesh for Thomas. As this Carvaggio painting shows, John can also tell a different kind of story. This is one by Rembrandt in which you remember that Mary goes to the tomb and she thinks that she asked the gardener, where's Jesus? Where have you put him? And here's Jesus with a trowel and a gardener's hat. And suddenly she looks at this person that she thought was the gardener and says. He says, mary. And she says, rabuni, my rabbi. And he says, here, don't touch me. I haven't yet ascended to my Father. So there are different kinds of stories about resurrection. Now, when I read this and looked at different stories about resurrection, I kept thinking, why don't Luke and John realize that these stories aren't consistent? They're really quite different. But then I thought, well, if you're trying to show that the resurrection actually happened, and you're writing about Jesus of Nazareth, who's your divine guide and leader, you might include all the stories you heard, even if they're different, just to show that there are many witnesses who saw him in many different ways. That's my guess about why there were so many. But Paul had a different view. I suggest Paul was quite specific when asked about resurrection. When the dead are raised, with what body do they come? He says, well, there's something that's planted in the ground, the body, like a seed. And what is in the ground is not the life that comes from it. The life that comes from it is a different kind of life. And this image suggests that the body is sown like a seed in the ground, and it is raised a spiritual body, a different kind of body. And Paul also says, well, you know, there are different kinds of bodies on earth. Animals have bodies and elephants and tigers and all sorts of animals. And he says, fish have bodies and birds have bodies. These are Physical bodies, of course, like our physical bodies. And he says, these are bodies we can see and touch, but there are other kinds of bodies. The body of the sun, the body of the moon, the body of the stars. And he calls them instead, unlike the animals, body of glory. And that word glory, the word here, doxa in Greek or kavod in Hebrew. It has often the meaning of radiance, shining light. So these light bodies are different from this kind of body that we see here. So as I read Paul, he says, that's how it is with the resurrection of the dead. The glory of heavenly bodies is different from the glory of earthly bodies. He uses glory for both. But as I read him, he says, our earthly bodies are planted in the ground when we die, as ordinary, psychic human bodies, but they will be raised, pneumatic bodies, they will be raised in glory. In that famous writing, I tell you a mystery, we shall not all die. So as I read him, and this is an interpretation, Paul focuses on discontinuity. It's not that you have one body in two forms, like as in some of the gospel stories about the resurrection. But he says, well, there's a psychic body like this, which consists of flesh and breath. We're alive but transformed. The body will be immaterial and spiritual, as Christ is now. So I was thinking about this, about how did Paul see Jesus? I mean, the gospel stories like Luke say, well, we saw him, we touched him. And many people today, as you know, have appearances of people they love who died. They can often say they've seen someone, maybe not quite seen them in a physical way, or maybe they have seen this person physically. They could even touch the person who has died after the death of the person they love. But what Paul says is, I saw a blinding light. It was so bright that he was temporarily blinded, as the story goes. He said, I saw light. So what he saw was not a person, I'm guessing, not a human form in this form that we are. But he saw a radiant body. He might have seen a body of light, a body that looked like it was fully light, but it certainly was different. And so his view of resurrection is like that in the treatise on Resurrection, where someone asks a famous teacher, do we have to believe in resurrection really? And the teacher says, yes. Jesus transformed himself into an imperishable being, opening the way for us. Don't imagine resurrection is an illusion. It is the truth. Resurrection is the discovery of what actually is real, a transformation, a transition into a new reality. So to this day, right, many Christians use two different wordings of the creed. I don't know which is used here. I know the one used in Trinity. They're often used interchangeably that suggest two different visions. I believe in the resurrection of the body, the Apostles Creed, an ancient creed. That's one kind of statement. I believe in the resurrection of the dead. That's different. That could be the dead body and the resurrection and the life of the world to come. That's the nicened formulation typically. So it's not resolved in the creeds. Exactly. These are different. And I thought about the poets. These are in Anglican tradition, which is more familiar to me. People like John Donne writing, death, be not proud, though some have called thee mighty and greedy, mighty and powerful, for thou art not so Death, thou shalt die. He ends that famous poem. Gerald Manley Hopkins speaks about resurrection as a fire and a comfort of the resurrection. And Dylan Thomas, after writing about the bomb, London, horrible destruction of human life and even the death of a child, about which he writes so movingly, he writes this famous poem, and death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked, they shall be one with a man and the west wind. And then he continues every phrase, and death shall have dominion. So that's a different kind of faith. It doesn't have answers exactly, but it has conviction and faith. And finally, I just want to say, because I'm being very brief so we can have time to talk. What struck me about the Gospels at this time is that previously I was looking primarily for teachings, the teachings of Jesus, which to me seemed like the primary and important part. And I do think it is that the teachings of Jesus about how do you treat other people, which he takes from his own tradition. But there's something else about these stories that struck me this time, and that is that from the very first story, I'm thinking of the story of Moses, okay? The stories in the Bible, from the Hebrew Bible through the New Testament, have a pattern. And that's what the miracle stories do. The pattern is that they start in this world that we live in, in a world of suffering, of war, of killing, oppression, a world of all kinds of terrible suffering. And then they shift gears into hope. For example, the story of Moses is about people, as you know, who are enslaved and oppressed and suffering. And they pray and God delivers them into their own land and they become a great people, right? And the other stories, the miracle stories in the Hebrew Bible, Daniel goes into the lion's den, certain death, but he comes out alive. And Jonah goes into the. Is swallowed by a whale. But he comes out alive and well. So all of these stories talk about situations that look hopeless, but then they shift into the key of hope. The blind man, he's blind from birth, the story says, and suddenly he can see for the first time the woman who might have been disgraced if she were pregnant in a way that her culture would shame her. She would not be marriageable at all. She would have lost her opportunity for a normal life entirely. She becomes the mother of the Messiah. So another possibly painful and difficult situation, if it were an unwanted pregnancy, which we don't know, but if it were, it nevertheless becomes a blessing. That's the shift that happens here. And the greatest story of at least the most powerful, to me, of suffering is the suffering of Jesus. Abandoned by all of his friends, betrayed, executed on a charge that is wrong, it turns into resurrection. So that's what I'm suggesting is a pattern in biblical stories because it tells us that no matter what the situation is, how desperately impossible it may look, how hopeless any situation might look, it can shift. So it offers us a sense of hope in any situation, no matter what. So I just want to stop with that and let's open it up. All right. [00:29:31] Speaker A: I'm sure you have questions. Let us bring the mic to you so that we can capture them on the recording. What? [00:29:41] Speaker B: Any questions? I mean, not that there are a lot of answers here. Thanks, Elaine. This was really informative and helpful for me. Did you finally read Jane Schaberg's book and what. Yes, I did say a little bit more about what happened there and your reactions. This is Raymond Brown's book. It's very extensive. I guarantee you it's only about the birth stories. I read this finally, and I realized she was a Roman Catholic, and she came to the conclusion that the birth of Jesus was likely an unwanted pregnancy. And, you know, I don't claim, as she interprets it, to think that she's right, but I think there's a good chance of that. And it's just that I was put off by the title. And, you know, because she was so positive about it, I was explaining to one of the people here that a close friend of mine who was a Presbyterian minister, Tom Boslooper, wrote a book about the birth of Jesus, suggesting that Jesus was the child of Mary and Joseph and excluded from the ministry. They stripped him of his ministry at the Presbyterian Church. That was. I think, you know, it would probably be a different situation now. I don't know. But, you know, I didn't write it to offend People. I was trying to figure out what sounded likely and what doesn't. So that's the question left for you. Great running. [00:31:35] Speaker A: How are my speakers for you? [00:31:37] Speaker B: Good job. So I'm really intrigued with your final piece about this. Everything points to hope, which seems to me exactly what we need to hear today. So did it take you a long time to come to that kind of conclusion? How did that happen? Well, it was just story. I kept thinking, why so many miracles? Why do they all. And the miracles have different functions in the Gospels. I mean, some of them are parables of various kinds. I mean, it's more complicated than this. But it was only after reading them for a few years, because a book like that takes seven years or so to write, especially if you're teaching. But only. And that this was a pattern from all the stories, and I love that about these texts. I think that's what, as you say, I think that's what they offer us is, as I wrote it, an outburst of hope. Yes. So these miracles have predecessors in the Old Testament as well. Yes. And I'm wondering one if that might also have been part of the genesis of the New Testament miracles, sort of building on that. And have Jewish writers and theologians thought about the Old Testament miracles and how do they talk about them? I'm sure they have. I mean, I learned recently that there are many more allusions to the birth of Moses as a miraculous birth, thanks to my colleague, Professor Ellison from the seminary. Yes, I do think that the pattern in the New Testament absolutely follows the pattern of the Hebrew Bible. That becomes the whole basis of the way that stories are told, say, in Mark and in Matthew and Luke. Elaine, your comment about the defrocked pastor reminded me of a book that I got at Chautauqua. It was what pastors believe, but won't tell you because they want to keep their jobs. Actually, a reviewer of my book made a similar comment. That was Diamed McCullough. He said many people won't talk about what they're thinking about this. But of course, many people think different things. [00:34:22] Speaker C: Thank you, Dr. Pagels. This actually kind of piggybacks on Whannell's question. Who just asked a question. So have you discovered that your scholarship and some of the other scholarship on some of these stories and the Scripture, some of which have been around for quite a few years. Have you discovered any of that entering into the theology and understanding of everyday churchgoers, even down to children's Sunday school classes? Or have you sensed that it primarily stays in academia or among maybe Some clergy that are not telling their congregants. [00:35:03] Speaker B: Or. [00:35:04] Speaker C: Yeah. Or is it kind of staying in a certain place and not actually ever entering into a shift in theology and understanding of regular Christians? [00:35:13] Speaker B: That's a good question, but I really don't know. Not being a theologian, I think it depends on the person and how they understand the mysteries of faith, as we call them. Yes. I was just curious if any of your studies indicated or involved at all in any potential crises of faith among the evangelicals? Well, yes, a lot of people. Any of us who look at the historical Jesus studies. There are many of them. Many people follow that in order to deprecate the tradition. And I don't do that. And a few people don't do that, including my colleague, because they think it demean tradition. I don't think it does. I think this is a different way of understanding what the stories do and how they're shaped and how they continue to give inspiration and hope to people. To share with you just for a minute, at the end of the book, I decided to write about why people today still use certain people, artists particularly use the stories of Jesus. How do they. Why do they choose the stories of Jesus as a vehicle for their own messages? These are just a couple examples. I just choose three or four. This is a crucifixion by Salvador Dali in 1950. His name was Salvador, which means, of course, savior. He was named also for his brother who had died, who was two years older than he. And he pictured him, I think, as Jung said, Christ as the symbol of the self, the lake where he lived, and Spain underneath him and himself and his brother, sort of a young Spaniard with a beautiful, unblemished body in between. Between heaven and earth, suspended in that kind of. In that kind of paradox. Marc Chagall, of course, Jewish painter, saw Jesus as an embodiment of truth and love and a counter to hate and violence. And yet between 1938, when the Nazis defined his painting as degenerate and he had to escape from Austria, he went to France, and then the Nazis went to France, of course, and he escaped across the mountains. He painted one subject, and that was crucifixions. So he was basically saying to European Christians, you think we killed Jesus and that's why you're killing us. What an irony. So he pictures Jesus with a prayer shawl around his loins. The Lord speaking in Hebrew, saying, this is my beloved son and Sarah and Abraham and probably Isaac above his head. And people escaping from the Nazi horror. This man carrying the Torah scrolls This woman below carrying her child, trying to escape the horror of what was going on. He painted these until 1955, even picturing Jesus crucifixion as an. As an image for Jews going to Israel. And this one, I just wanted to show you one more particularly. This is the 16th Street Baptist Church, built in 1911. And this is the window in that church in Birmingham, Alabama. This picture you may have seen. It's all over the. All over the country in Protestant churches. Jesus standing at the door of the heart and knocking. When that church was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in the name of Jesus. And those four little were killed in 1966, this is how the church looked on that side. And one part of that window was blown out by the blessed. And that is only the face of Jesus, the white face of Jesus. So glass blower in Wales donated to the people of Birmingham, this glass window they did. Of course, it's a crucified Christ, black, and it says warningly, whatever you do to my brothers and sisters, you have done to me. So that's a way they use story of Jesus to speak about their convictions. This is one done by Titus Kaphar, who lives in Connecticut. He studied art at Yale and he spoke here at Princeton recently. What he did, being brought up intensely Christian family and also kind of bombarded by his mother with claims that he had to act like Jesus in a way that was impossible for him to feel that he could ever be adequate, he started to paint. He took traditional paintings of Jesus like this one from the 17th century, with of course, Mary Magdalene and John and the mother of Jesus allegedly standing at the foot of the cross. And he thought, well, people like me are never there. We've been following Jesus all this time. Why aren't we in the picture? So he took the faces out, changed the painting and put his own face in as somebody witnessing to and to its meaning. So I just as a few ways that people today find this story so powerful that they are using it in very different ways. [00:41:55] Speaker A: Amazing. Can we get one more round of applause for Dr. Pagels. This was so wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so, so much. A couple of just announcements. I want to invite you all to join us again next week. We'll have our own Ed Madsen talking about Faith in Action, the Danish Church and some lessons that we can kind of learn in our moment from how the Danish church kind of has responded to different moments of crises in its own history. And then also small group signups have started. You'll be able to sign up in the back during coffee hour and also signing up online. But if you have any questions about that, the adult Ed team and Laurnier are available to help you out. Thanks so much.