Elaine Pagels & Eliza Griswold—Miracles and Wonder

Name: Elaine Pagels & Eliza Griswold—Miracles and Wonder
Start: 2025-04-08T18:00:00-04:00
End: 2025-04-08T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Labyrinth Books Princeton

Schedule

Tue Apr 08 2025 at 06:00 pm to 07:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Labyrinth Books Princeton | Princeton, NJ

From a renowned National Book Award-winning scholar, an extraordinary new account of the life of Jesus that explores the mystery of how a poor young man inspired a religion that reshaped the world.
Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.
The book reads like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question and answering it based on the gospels Jesus’s followers left behind. Why is Jesus said to have had a virgin birth? Why do we say he rose from the dead? Did his miracles really happen and what did they mean?
The story Pagels tells is thrilling and tense. Not just does Jesus comes to life but his desperate, hunted followers do as well. We realize that some of the most compelling details of Jesus’s life are the explanations his disciples created to paper over inconvenient facts. So Jesus wasn’t illegitimate, his mother conceived by God; Jesus’s body wasn’t humiliatingly left to rot and tossed into a common grave—no, he rose from the dead and was seen whole by his followers; Jesus isn’t a failed messiah, his kingdom is a metaphor: he lives in us. These necessary fabrications were the very details and promises that electrified their listeners and helped his followers’ numbers grow.
In Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, Pagels does more than solve a historical mystery. She sheds light on Jesus’s enduring power to inspire and attract.
Elaine Pagels is the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of several books, including Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, the New York Times bestseller Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, and The Gnostic Gospels, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award.
Eliza Griswold, a poet, a translator, and a contributing writer covering religion, politics, and the environment, has been writing for The New Yorker since 2003. Her books include Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church and Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. She is a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Journalism.