We're Still Not Done with Jesus

The Passion and the Resurrection are, of course, at the heart of the Jesus story. 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. Stories of resurrection and rebirth, after all, recur throughout history. Bereavement hallucinations—intensely vivid encounters with the deceased—are reported by as many as half of all grieving people. Elvis, for one, was seen by many in the years following his death, with a newspaper report of a sighting in Kalamazoo at least as reliable as the spotty accounts shared by fervent believers two millennia ago. And Paul depicts his own explicitly visionary encounters with a long-dead Jesus as equivalent to the earlier encounters reported by the apostles. Pagels, rightly but audaciously, likens the evolving belief in Jesus’ Resurrection ... Read full article.