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We're Still Not Done with Jesus

Scholars debate whether the Gospel stories preserve ancient memories or are just Greek literature in disguise. But there’s a reason they won’t stay dead and buried.

Matthew’s account of the empty tomb, followed by ever more elaborate resurrection narratives, serves, Pagels suggests, both to address the practical difficulties of reclaiming the bodies of the executed and to counter skeptical claims that Jesus’ corpse had simply been stolen. “Others endow their subjects with extraordinary abilities of a different kind—‘superpowers,’ if you will—that involve what one might term ‘magic’ or other sorts of wonder-working.” Many of these protagonists also possess a keen wit, outfoxing their opponents with “clever ripostes and wise sayings, sometimes in the form of parables,” she notes. As Stephen Greenblatt reminded readers in his Lucretian adventure, “ The Swerve,” some of these largely vanished thinkers, especially those at the Epicurean edge, seem to have already grasped what remains a core truth: the world is material and values are made by us, often shaped through poetic myths and transcendent metaphors.

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