David Remnick: This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Decades ago, in fact, 30 years ago precisely, I published a piece in The New Yorker with the title The Devil Problem. It was a profile of Elaine Pagels, a scholar of early Christianity who had also improbably become a best selling author. Pagels' 1979 book, The Gnostic Gospels was scholarly and rigorous, but also accessible outside the academy and widely read.

She changed how a lot of people, Christian and those we might call Christian-curious, how they thought about the Bible itself. Pagels went on to write The Origin of Satan, as well as works on Adam and Eve and the book of Revelation. 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 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. 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?

Elaine Pagels: 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 much earlier. My family wasn't religious. They would say-- The grandparents would call themselves Christians, but my father had given it up.

David Remnick: He was a scientist.

Elaine Pagels: Yes, he was a biologist. Darwin.

David Remnick: But you as a teenager?

Elaine Pagels: That was just an accident. 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. 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.

David Remnick: You describe this scene as-- It was, I think, at the old Cow Palace in San Francisco where basketball games were played. You were so taken with Billy Graham, who's-- 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.

Billy Graham: That's it. Quickly, from everywhere, you just come.

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That's it. Come on. There are many people streaming down every aisle here. Hundreds of people here in the Cow Palace. 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.

David Remnick: You were so swept away as a teenager that in the course of the evening you were called to Christ.

Elaine Pagels: Yes. He had this 6,000 people singing and 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. It was like something happened.

David Remnick: But it was brief.

Elaine Pagels: Well, it lasted until-- The church I went to told me something I couldn't stand. It was a friend of mine in high school had been killed in an automobile accident. I went back to this evangelical church of which I'd been a part for a year, quite intensely, and I said, "My friend has been killed in an accident." They said, "That's terrible. Was he born again?" I said, "No, he was Jewish." Then someone said, "Well, then he's in hell." I just felt like I'd been-

David Remnick: That was out. You were out.

Elaine Pagels: -socked in the stomach and I just walked out. I never went back.

David Remnick: How did you decide to make a life of scholarship in religion? You've now published the latest book in what I consider a lifelong project. There's a real continuity to all these books. Why did you come to focus on Christianity and some of the lesser known narratives of Christianity, books that aren't part of the official canon? You've given your professional life to this, your intellectual life to this. Why?

Elaine Pagels: Because I had some kind of powerful experience with that conversion. It didn't last. I left that group. That whole evangelical perspective on Christianity didn't work for me but there was something transformative about it and it was important. It opened up elements of my experience that nothing else did.

David Remnick: Describe that because not everybody's had that. How did it change your life and your mind?

Elaine Pagels: It's about the imagination. I was living in a world which science defines what you can see and there's nothing else. That's at least what I was brought up hearing but this was about opening up the imagination. I always thought about it later as the way I felt about The Wizard of Oz as a child. Just suddenly I was out there with Dorothy. The wicked witch gets killed, and there's Glinda the Good, and there's all of this action going on, this adventure, which is internal but very powerful.

That book's become a template for my life when I was maybe eight years old. These stories of Jesus do that as well and it did it for me in that moment. Even though I left it, I thought, wait a minute, why are religions still part of culture? It is true that there's no culture that doesn't have some form of claims about invisible beings and how we interact with them so I thought, could it be Buddhism? Could it be Judaism? Could it be Islam, or is it Christianity? I decided I wanted to find out. How does that work and why do people continue those traditions even long after they're discredited rationally?

David Remnick: When you were a kid and had this kind of evangelical breakthrough, no matter how fleeting it was, did you think of Jesus as a real person existing in a real historical time among political currents, as well as think of him in terms of a kind of supernatural or religious presence?

Elaine Pagels: That's an interesting question. It makes me realize that I didn't think of him as a real person. I thought of some grand mythological drama going on in the sky. There's God and Satan and Jesus, and you're in part of a drama. That's why I mentioned The Wizard of Oz. It's part of a imaginary world.

David Remnick: It was cinematic metaphor, but not real.

Elaine Pagels: Yes. I didn't think about that he wasn't real. I just thought whoever that might have been, this was now some grand drama played out in the universe. That's how it felt.

David Remnick: If you could and I know it's an elementary question, but it's crucial to understand it if we're going to get at your work in a deep way. We know the New Testament and we know that there are four Gospels. Four Gospels emerged and somehow became canonical in what we know as the New Testament. There was a discovery at a certain point of a gigantic jar by somebody who basically came across it and broke it open. Inside were texts, some of which were used as-- I hate to even think about it. Half of them seem to have been burned up, most likely. Right?

Elaine Pagels: Used as kindling for the fire.

David Remnick: What Survived are what's called the Gnostic Gospels. What are they and how do they compare to the book of Mark and Matthew and so on?

Elaine Pagels: When those Gospels now in the New Testament were written, there were others as well. We know that because people at the time said, "Oh, well, there's the Gospel of Truth and there's the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel to the Egyptians." They name these. Some of the earliest writers say, "Well, there are genuine gospels and then there are terrible ones. Avoid those. They're written by heretics. They will lead you astray." We knew there were far more than four, but four became part of a canon, which means a standard.

David Remnick: Why did they emerge and become the canon and the others fell away?

Elaine Pagels: I think they became the canon because they talk about actual narratives of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. These others are not that. They usually consist of sayings, just teachings which are different from those in the New Testament. The ones in the New Testament, as Mark points out when he writes about them, are the public teaching of Jesus, what he taught when he was out with crowds on the hills of Galilee.

That's repeated in Luke and Matthew as well, also in the Gospel of Thomas. These other gospels, which are called gnostic for all the wrong reasons, by the way, it was partly my fault, claim to give private teaching that he gave secretly to certain disciples, the way any rabbi teaches today. There's one thing to the congregation that's preached and that teacher will say different things to his closest followers and advanced level students.

David Remnick: Why would they be considered heretical?

Elaine Pagels: Because you can't confirm what's said, I suppose.

David Remnick: One part of your new book that's already received some, let's just say, attention in the Catholic hierarchy long before publication is your investigation of the narratives of Immaculate conception. Tell me how this is still controversial and uncertain 2,000 years later.

Elaine Pagels: 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 semen.

David Remnick: Or any Joseph.

Elaine Pagels: Or any Joseph, yes. 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. 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. It's clear that the neighbors think that he might have been an illegitimate child. That's an early attack.

David Remnick: How long has that been in the scholarly discussion, the possibility that Jesus might have been an illegitimate child, to use the old phrase?

Elaine Pagels: I think it's in Mark's narrative.

David Remnick: In a direct way?

Elaine Pagels: 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 was some kind of prophet? Why is he trying to heal people." 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.

David Remnick: Is it an unspeakable thing among Catholic prelates and in Catholic academia to raise this question?

Elaine Pagels: 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.

David Remnick: Who was that?

Elaine Pagels: Raymond Brown. What it said is these texts were rubbish in the first century. They're still rubbish.

David Remnick: It wasn't an entirely positive review.

Elaine Pagels: Oh, not at all. It was written by a Catholic scholar and he--

David Remnick: He thought you were making a mountain out of a molehill?

Elaine Pagels: He thought I was making a sacred book out of trash. 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. He considers the possibility that Jesus' birth involves something different from some miraculous event.

David Remnick: Not supernatural.

Elaine Pagels: Yes. He says some people say that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier. He wasn't even Jewish. He said that's impossible because there were no Roman soldiers until after the Jewish war. 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.

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.

David Remnick: As I was reading this book, I asked myself if we are today in the modern world, more or less inclined to believe in miracles than the contemporaries of Jesus?

Elaine Pagels: I would say less inclined.

David Remnick: Now?

Elaine Pagels: 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. 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.

David Remnick: You've said that you left the faith as a teenager after briefly entering it. You've been through everything in life and more that has to offer, whether it's life and loss and love and its loss and all these things, and have had an incredibly rich, scholarly, intellectual life. Does religion as such play any role in your life beyond its being a source of your intellectual commitment and study?

Elaine Pagels: Yes. It is not what people call organized religion.

David Remnick: You don't go to church?

Elaine Pagels: I have sometimes and sometimes I do because--

David Remnick: In what spirit?

Elaine Pagels: 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.

David Remnick: But it's not belief as such.

Elaine Pagels: It's not belief. Actually, David, I really think belief is far overrated.

David Remnick: Tell me about that.

Elaine Pagels: After the advent of Christianity, which in the fourth century, as you know, it becomes a code of beliefs, I believe in one God, Father Almighty, Maker. That's it. 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?" 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? In Buddhism, it's much the same. It's about the prayers. It's about participation in certain rituals.

David Remnick: Judaism also is the one that I know where it's closest to me. It's also a matter of its being a civilization and a language and what language is, and a great deal more. It's not just, do I believe in God? Do I not believe in God?

Elaine Pagels: Exactly. It's a set of values and it's an ethical tradition.

David Remnick: Or set of arguments.

Elaine Pagels: Yes, a set of arguments, but it also has very deep emotional support in the practices that people do.

David Remnick: Is it too banal to ask you if you are a Christian or not?

Elaine Pagels: It's a hard question. Yes, I feel identified with Christian tradition from the way I grew up. It speaks to me sort of like English. That's the language I grew up with. I find it compelling in many ways but it's not the only kind of tradition that compels me. I'm engaged with some friends in New York in a Buddhist meditation group, which we meet often, and other traditions as well. I would say Christian, I love that tradition in some ways.

Jesus seems like he was a historical person, but he's not just that. There are myths woven into the stories. There are elaborations, there are miracles. There are signs and symbols that play in the stories. It's not just a history at all. These texts are called Good News because they're publications of the message of Jesus, which is, God is going to come into the world and transform it, and your world can be transformed. Come and be part of that transformation. The world, which now contains so much suffering and pain, will explode into a glorious new reality.

David Remnick: What does all your study and experience lead you to think what happens after we die?

Elaine Pagels: I don't know. It leads me to at least have an open question. I assumed until some time ago that after we die, it's sort of what Steve Jobs was said to say, lights out. Even stories I've heard about his death suggest that at some point, he suggested there was something else. Maybe that's just the thing people need when they go into death to allow them to do it but there may be something else. I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.

I think about this in the way that Tanya Luhrmann at Stanford wrote a brilliant book called How God Becomes Real. She's talking about Jewish tradition, she's talking about Muslim tradition, about witchcraft, and about Christianity, various kinds. She says people don't just talk to invisible beings because they believe they're there. They actually engage in practices like prayer, meditation, opening themselves up to a larger sense of expectation of what's real. As they practice that, they become susceptible to envisioning more reality than the visible world or seeing the transcendent in the visible world.

David Remnick: You include yourself in that?

Elaine Pagels: I do. Tanya does herself in the book. It need not be spirits and gods, it could be the beauty of nature, the way it transforms people, or of art or music that seems to open up a wider reality than the visible. I'm now bizarrely open to that. [laughs]

David Remnick: Do you think about death a lot?

Elaine Pagels: No, not too much. Except-

David Remnick: Except when I bring it up.

Elaine Pagels: -as we get older, it does come in.

David Remnick: It does cross the mind from time to time.

Elaine Pagels: It's very interesting. I had some experiences with people I love who died that I couldn't explain at all and totally didn't expect. I thought this was-- I couldn't imagine it would happen.

David Remnick: What were they?

Elaine Pagels: Even after my husband's sudden death in a mountain climbing accident, it was just an utter, total shock. I went to Trappist monastery in Colorado, where I happened to have gone with musicians who were playing music for the monks from the Juilliard Quartet, Robert Mann. I got to know the monks, and I often went there and meditated in this very beautiful well of silence in the chapel. I couldn't be a Catholic. Just against my Protestant resistance to that kind of authority.

There was something very deep and powerful about those experiences with those monks. After my husband's death and after planning the funeral in a very spiritually deprived Protestant church in town, I went out there and meditated with one of the monks who was an amazing man. I thought I heard a voice saying to me, I thought I could-- Suddenly, after we meditated for an hour, I had the idea that I could ask my husband a question.

I said, "Well, what do you think about this?" A voice came into my head, not auditory. "This is fine with me. It's you I think about now." I said, "Fine with you? What do you mean fine with you? You leave me with two tiny babies. One is three months old, one is a year and a half, and you're gone. What do you expect me to do with this?" I was irate at first. Then I thought, "Wait a minute, who said that?" I don't think it was my unconscious. It was not fine with me then.

David Remnick: What was it?

Elaine Pagels: It seemed like his voice. It seemed like my husband's voice. I thought, "How dare you ask. How dare you say it's fine with you?"

David Remnick: You had a marital argument-

Elaine Pagels: We had a marital argument.

David Remnick: -in his absence?

Elaine Pagels: Yes.

David Remnick: At this late date, do you pray?

Elaine Pagels: Sometimes, yes, but not usually a lot of words. Meditate, maybe. That wasn't the only experience with unexpected events like that.

David Remnick: Elaine Pagels, thank you so much.

Elaine Pagels: Thank you very much, David.

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David Remnick: Elaine Pagels is a professor of religion at Princeton University, and her new book is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. My colleague Adam Gopnik wrote a long, terrific, thoughtful piece about the book, which you can find at newyorker.com and you can subscribe to the magazine at newyorker.com as well, newyorker.com.

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