In the New York Times over the weekend, Nicholas Kristof interviewed Elaine Pagels, who has apparently written another book. Here's the whole article.
Christians hold the story of Jesus' mother giving birth to him without having sex with a man as essential. You cannot accurately call yourself a Christian without clamming up for part of the definitive Creeds. The problem has always centered on how we believe it, what believing it means, and what we do with this belief.
On the one hand, Empire has always twisted the Virgin Birth story in ways that perpetuate imperial power. Medieval theologians decided it was all about Mary's "purity" because they learned from St. Augustine that sex was evil. This of course saddled real women with impossible standards -- virgin and mother -- and served to keep them subservient and subject to guilt-trips for centuries. Modern theologians like Pagels attack the doctrine mainly because, in reaction to that Medieval view, they have judged it as non-historical and contrary to what we know of gynecology, therefore untrue. In searching for the "truth" they assumed that some man impregnated Mary. They dismiss the Virgin Birth story as concocted mainly to imitate other mythic and political miraculous births.
Kristof insists Pagels talk about how her book points "to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape."
First of all, that's not our story. I have zero patience with people who need to contradict the Christian story. As if everything needs to happen in order to gratify our needs and preferences. So if I don't like some aspect of a story, I should feel free to adapt it to something more satisfying to me. When we do this to our own personal memories, we call it delusion or lying to ourself. When we do it to someone else's story, it is slander.
Perhaps Pagels dredges up this "Mary was raped" lie because she feels it has the underscores Mary's situation as an oppressed woman. It supposedly shows God bringing good out of evil. While this interpretation may theologically redeem the slander, Empire can easily utilize it like an opiate, excusing its own evil. "Too bad this happened to you, but think of our new baby!"
If we want to hear what the story means when not whitewashed by Empire, coming from the mouth of an actual oppressed woman, we might listen to abolitionist and former slave, Sojourner Truth. In 1851, she stated that Christ came "from God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him." In other words, the Virgin Birth separates Jesus from patriarchy. It prevents any man from claiming to have brought him into the world. Completely cut off from a male line, he has no inheritance, his bloodline comes through King David and Abraham by adoption. According to the alternative exhumed by Pagels, the Empire, represented by a soldier, may claim parental rights over God. Jesus isn't even fully Jewish, anymore, but half something else. It makes Jesus white. Now the Empire owns him. The DNA would show it.
That's good news for Empires, at any rate. Our own version of Empire, Modernity, has very effectively exercised paternity over God by basically reducing Jesus Christ to a harmless mascot while using his image as a cynical spiritual warrant for its regime of eco-cide, vivisection, exploitation, and domination. Modernity sired a "historical Jesus," different from the One in the gospels, who only says and does what Modernity decides measures up to its criteria for "truth." Just as Rome used the cross as a warning of what will happen to resisters, the effect of Pagels' story is to remind women on behalf of Empire: "your body, my choice." "You will bring into the world what we make you bring into the world."
It does not surprise me that Pagels has so much enthusiasm for this. Her entire career has been an aggressive affirmation and articulation of the hold that Empire -- that is, Modernity -- has over Jesus Christ. For her, the categories, methodologies, mentality, demands, and assumptions of Modernity determine who Jesus is. Modernity thus "liberates" Jesus from his own family, the community of his disciples, the Church.
In the article she seems to try to move away from historicity and understand the stories more as stories, "They are not written simply as history; often they speak in metaphor. We can take them seriously without taking everything literally," she says. "I left Christianity behind," she relates, after having experienced one of its more toxic aberrations in particular church. But compelled by "something powerful" she went back, "asking questions. How were these stories written? How do they affect us so powerfully? They speak to a deep human longing for a sense of transcendence and spiritual experience. For we can respond to the same story in more than one way. As a historian, I question the literal truth of the virgin birth story. But I still love the midnight service on Christmas Eve, where the story is gloriously told and sung as miracle." So she balances her welding the machete of scientific method with a saccharine sentimentality.
I get the impression she believes these stories are mainly entertainment, spectacle, written for what kind of feelings they produce. They can't possibly be about God; it always has to be about what we want and what we feel. Such is the Modern view of everything. It's all about us, me.
Uh, no. I realize that Pagels merely reflects the confusion, chaos, and compromise that hobbles churches this time of year. But these invented reimaginings of the story tell us nothing about Jesus, God, the world, or us. They only push the empty, novel, desperate ideas of the inventors. They are certainly not worth a trip to church to hear about.
I'm sorry Pagels had a bad experience in some church somewhere. It does not justify her for poisoning our stories with such malicious nonsense. I say, let the stories shine in the radical, deeply subversive, highly transformational glory they have without her redactions. Pagels appears to be too thoroughly indoctrinated into the ideology of our own Empire to see that.
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