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Friday, July 25, 2025

Review of Pagels, Miracles and Wonder

ON THE HISTORICAL JESUS: Book Review | ‘Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus’ by Elaine Pagels. An Exploration of the Mystery of How a Poor Young Man Inspired a Religion That Reshaped the World (David Starkey).
The book’s seven chapters each try to answer a separate question: What happened before, during and after the virgin birth? Who is Jesus? What is the Good News? And so on. Pagels is especially keen to examine how two elements of Jesus’s story that might have been Christianity’s most glaring weaknesses were transformed by his earliest biographers into two of its greatest strengths.
Cross-file under New Book.

For some of my own thoughts on the question of the historical Jesus, see especially here and here, plus there are links.

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