Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

Readers familiar with award-winning Pagels’s (religion, Princeton Univ.; The Gnostic Gospels; Why Religion??) work will know she never shies away from deeply philosophical, historical, complex, and controversial topics. There is, of course, an audacity that readers, especially Christian-identifying readers, will attach to her project to question and explore the identity and iconography of Jesus, but for Pagels, it is an audacity born of deep personal reflection that she describes in her introduction. Her teenage transformation away from religion to born-again-Christian and back again will be easy for many to connect with. Her scholarly efforts to textually interrogate why the story of Jesus had such a powerful pull on her and billions of others bring together her many years’ research on the Gnostic gospels, along with historical texts, many newly discovered (some translated by Padels), as she attempts to tell the story of not just who Jesus was but also who he is for people today.