Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Historical Jesus and Mary
| “What can be recovered of the real Jesus and his circumstances?” asks Diarmaid MacCulloch in The New York Review’s Holiday Issue. “The question can never be adequately answered in this sublunary world,” he continues, but two recent books, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels and The Lost Mary: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus by James D. Tabor, pore over the Bible and an array of ancient sources in order to piece together the life and times of Jesus and Mary, respectively. Pagels and Tabor are, MacCulloch observes, part of a long line: Scholars from a Western Christian or Enlightenment background have spent a quarter-millennium peering through the filters of the four Gospels and earlier textual material contained in the seven or eight genuine Epistles of Paul of Tarsus, to look for a “real” Jesus and an “authentic” version of what he actually said. It has been perhaps the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated analysis of any texts in the history of human thought.
Below, alongside MacCulloch’s essay, are five articles from our archives about Jesus and Mary. Sifting the contradictions of the Bible can bring Jesus and Mary into sharper focus and illuminate their surprisingly human features. “If the Church and world persist for another two thousand years, the subject [of Mary’s virginity] will still be maddeningly controversial. Why is this particular doctrine of the faith so deeply important?” —November 21, 2019 “For many Christians, the historical Jesus—a great and good man—emerged as a fresh and vital alternative to traditional Christianity. The creeds were stuffy, ponderous, and so burdened with metaphysical issues that they obscured the living voice of the Man from Galilee. The historical Jesus would give them someone to follow—if only they could get a firm grip on him.” —November 15, 2001 “More surprising than all such tales, for those of us brought up with a picture of Jefferson as the skeptic, is the fact—which Jefferson’s Extracts from the Gospels documents—that the third president, converted to a cult of Jesus while he was in the White House, spent the last years of his life reading himself to sleep over the Gospels.” —November 24, 1983 “Whether he was tattooed or crazy or a crook, Jesus can easily be fitted into a general view of what magicians were at the time thought to be: anything on the scale from mountebanks and peddlers of amulets to great sages and ‘divine men.’ It was the business of Christians to prevent his identification with practitioners at the lower end of the scale.” —October 26, 1978 “How many present-day worshippers of the Virgin realize just how few references there are to her in the New Testament and how flimsy a foundation they provide for the massive doctrinal structure which has been reared upon them?” —November 11, 1976 Special Offer
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