Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - 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.

"This a brilliant and necessary book. Sober, wise, respectful, and fearless." --Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America

"Pagels' story is for believers and non-believers alike." --Tara Westover, author of Educated

"The depth of spirituality she uncovers is profound." --The New York Times Book Review

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, Pagels does more than solve a historical mystery. She sheds light on Jesus's enduring power to inspire and attract.

Author: Elaine Pagels
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 04/01/2025
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9780385547468


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2025
Library Journal 03/01/2025 pg. 104
Publishers Weekly 02/24/2025
Booklist 03/01/2025 pg. 22

About the Author
ELAINE PAGELS is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. In 2015 she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, and earlier in her career was awarded a Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur fellowship in consecutive years. As a young researcher at Barnard College, she changed the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Church as a unified movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling book The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. Her subsequent books include Why Religion? Revelations, Reading Judas, Beyond Belief, The Origin of Satan, and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. She has been profiled in Time, The Atlantic, Vogue, The New Yorker, and Newsweek's issue "Women and Power."