Contra Pagels on Christmas

 Apropos my last post, the New York Times (NYT) has since released an interview with Elaine Pagels on Christmas. To be fair to Nicholas Kristof, the interviewer, he has interviewed more evangelical writers, like Tim Keller and Beth Moore. I wish he had reached out to more conservative scholars to discuss the Nativity--like Darrell Bock, Craig Blomberg, Craig Keener or Richard Bauckham--but alas, we all fall short! 

"They are not written simply as history; often they speak in metaphor. We can take them seriously without taking everything literally."

But Pagels does not give us any reason for thinking that the infancy narratives are metaphorical/not history. On the contrary, the Gospels are histories. My co-bloggers and I have posted several different essays on the subject, the reader should consult those. 

"Yes, these stories circulated after Jesus’ death among members of the Jewish community who regarded him as a false messiah, saying that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier. I used to dismiss such stories as ancient slander. Yet while we do not know what happened, there are too many points of circumstantial evidence to simply ignore them. The name Panthera, sometimes spelled differently in ancient sources, may refer to a panther skin that certain soldiers wore. The discovery of the grave of a Roman soldier named Tiberius Panthera, member of a cohort of Syrian archers stationed in Palestine in the first century, might support those ancient rumors."

So, a rumor proposed by Celsus in response to the infancy narratives--not a pre-Matthean or Lukan tradition--is what Pagels is hanging her hat on? Interesting. Furthermore, how does Pagels make the jump from "we have some evidence a man called Panthera existed" to "He impregnated Mary?" It is these sort of logical leaps that allowed J. Gresham Machen to observe long ago: “But however early the story of the adultery of Mary may be, it is now agreed by all serious historians that far from representing any independent tradition, it is based merely (by way of polemic) upon the Christian story of the virgin birth" (The Virgin Birth of Christ, p. 11).

"Calling something a miracle is a way of interpreting an event. A friend of mine was hit by a car and thrown about 20 feet, and was unharmed. She told me that this was a miracle. Someone else might have said, “I was lucky.” Calling it a miracle interprets an event that others might see differently. This often happens with remissions of illness: Some people see many miracles, and some never see any."

1) We need to distinguish between an act of providence and the miraculous. We as Christians can observe divine providence in our day to day lives; we make it home with just enough gas in our car. The boss, for no apparent reason, allows us to leave work early in order that we can make some sort of important event. You get the point. On the other hand, you have miracles, an event that would not have happened if the laws of nature were left to their own devices absent intervention from an outside agent. Something like a dead man coming back to life after prayer; spontaneous healing from terminal cancer, or, in this case, a virgin giving birth. 

I would like to also to note that miracles are also acts of providence, but not all acts of providence are miraculous; for if naturalism were true, and the laws of nature were all that governed our lives, the case of the boss letting us off early could still easily obtain. I just draw a sharp distinction here, in this essay, so the reader can further understand the subtle differences. 

 2) So, yes, one can interpret an act of providence however they may like--but interpreting a miracle in a different way is to be in outright denial. 

"The Gospels most often speak in the language of stories and poetry. Intellectualizing these traditions — or turning them into dogma — doesn’t make them spiritually deep. What we call Christianity is not a single thing."

What "stories" and "poetry" is Pagels referring to? The parables? We know the parables didn't happen (though Christ's telling the parables did), but that is the whole point of them being parables. Furthermore, if the Gospels were intended to be poetry, why aren't they just written in the form of what we find in, say, Revelation 5:9-13? As previously mentioned, the Gospels were written as histories [1], we can dispute whether the events contained therein actually occurred, but the authors and earliest followers of Christianity certainty thought they did.