
Miracles and Wonder
The Historical Mystery of Jesus
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Narrated by:
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Eunice Wong
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By:
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Elaine Pagels
About this listen
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From a renowned National Book Award-winning scholar, an extraordinary new account of the life of Jesus that explores the mystery of how a poor young man inspired a religion that reshaped the world.
“This a brilliant and necessary book. Sober, wise, respectful, and fearless."—Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America
"Pagels’ story is for believers and non-believers alike.”—Tara Westover, author of Educated
"The depth of spirituality she uncovers is profound.”—The New York Times Book Review
Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish man inspired a religion that shaped the world.
The book comes across like a historical mystery, with each chapter addressing a fascinating question and answering it based on the gospels Jesus's followers left behind. Why is Jesus said to have had a virgin birth? Why do we say he rose from the dead? Did his miracles really happen and what did they mean?
The story Pagels tells is thrilling and tense. Not just does Jesus comes to life but his desperate, hunted followers do as well. We realize that some of the most compelling details of Jesus's life are the explanations his disciples created to paper over inconvenient facts. So Jesus wasn't illegitimate, his mother conceived by God; Jesus's body wasn't humiliatingly left to rot and tossed into a common grave—no, he rose from the dead and was seen whole by his followers; Jesus isn't a failed messiah, his kingdom is a metaphor: he lives in us. These necessary fabrications were the very details and promises that electrified their listeners and helped his followers' numbers grow.
In Miracles and Wonder, Pagels does more than solve a historical mystery. She sheds light on Jesus's enduring power to inspire and attract.
©2025 Elaine Pagels (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Pagels, rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect, revels in the contradictions and the inconsistencies not as flaws to be explained away but as signs of the faith’s capaciousness.”—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
“The ‘quest’ for Jesus . . . has taken on many forms. Pagels takes the historical approach. . . . The depth of spirituality she uncovers is profound.”—The New York Times Book Review
"Using the tools of the historian as well as the literary critic, she tries to unearth the [gospel] writers’ concerns and influences. . . . recontextualizing the old stories gives them an unexpected poignancy."—The Atlantic
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-
-
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- By Diane on 05-13-12
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Story
The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Christianity—or rather, of early Christianities—through five centuries of Empire, mapping its pathways from the hills of Judea to the halls of Rome and Constantinople.
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Among the best
- By Jacob Kilgore on 04-17-25
By: Paula Fredriksen
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Lower than the Angels
- A History of Sex and Christianity
- By: Diarmaid MacCulloch
- Narrated by: Diarmaid MacCulloch
- Length: 25 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Few matters produce more public interest and public anxiety than sex and religion. Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. The issue goes to the heart of present-day religion.
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How God Becomes Real
- Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others
- By: T.M. Luhrmann
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people - as if they were standing right next to them? But it isn't easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort helps to explain the enduring power of faith.
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An Exquisite and Thoughtful Reflection on Belief
- By L. Alexandra on 05-08-22
By: T.M. Luhrmann
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Shots Heard Round the World
- America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War
- By: John Ferling
- Narrated by: Jason Keller
- Length: 20 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Shots Heard Round the World is a bold, comprehensive rendering of the world war that erupted out of America’s battle for independence. Ferling highlights underestimated pivotal moments to reveal why the British should have put down the rebellion within a couple years of fighting. As European rivals France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic entered the fray, Britain’s problems grew, but after seven long years, the war’s outcome remained very much in doubt.
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A high school history
- By mona berrier on 04-02-25
By: John Ferling
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Beyond Belief
- The Secret Gospel of Thomas
- By: Elaine Pagels
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Abridged
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Elaine Pagels, one of the world’s most important writers and thinkers on religion and history, and winner of the National Book Award for her groundbreaking work The Gnostic Gospels, now reflects on what matters most about spiritual and religious exploration in the twenty-first century. This bold new book explores how Christianity began by tracing its earliest texts, including the secret Gospel of Thomas, rediscovered in Egypt in 1945.
By: Elaine Pagels
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The Last American Road Trip
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah Kendzior
- Narrated by: Sarah Kendzior
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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It is one thing to study the fall of democracy, another to have it hit your homeland—and yet another to raise children as it happens. The Last American Road Trip is one family’s journey to the most beautiful, fascinating, and bizarre places in the US during one of its most tumultuous eras. As Kendzior works as a journalist chronicling political turmoil, she becomes determined that her young children see America before it’s too late. So Kendzior, her husband, and the kids hit the road—again and again.
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Very interesting and educational
- By Lynne on 05-04-25
By: Sarah Kendzior
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The Music of 1967
- A weekly look at America's top singles in the year of 'The Summer of Love'
- By: Ken F. Jarrell
- Narrated by: Virtual Voice
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The year 1967 has been considered to be one of the greatest years ever for pop music. The often-used descriptor for 1967 is that it was the year of ‘The Summer Of Love’. It was the year of the Monterey Pop Music Festival, LSD, Haight-Ashbury, Flower Power, psychedelia, hippies, Timothy Leary, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and the counterculture. While it may have been billed as the year of ‘The Summer Of Love’, Billboard’s top year-end singles of 1967 don’t show the list filled with psychedelic love anthems, especially among the the Top 10 singles of the year. The top single of the...
By: Ken F. Jarrell
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The Little Book of Data
- Understanding the Powerful Analytics That Drive AI, Make or Break Careers, and Could Just End Up Saving the World
- By: Justin Evans
- Narrated by: Justin Evans
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Little Book of Data, each chapter illustrates one of the core principles of solving problems with data by featuring an expert who has solved a big problem with data—from the entrepreneur creating a “loneliness score” to the epidemiologist trying to save lives by finding disease “hotspots.”
By: Justin Evans
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The Last Dynasty
- Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra
- By: Toby Wilkinson
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Alexander the Great and Cleopatra may be two of the most famous figures from the ancient world, but the Egyptian era bookended by their lives—the Ptolemaic period (305-30 BC)—is little known. In The Last Dynasty, Toby Wilkinson unravels the incredible story of this turbulent era.
By: Toby Wilkinson
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Journeys of the Mind
- A Life in History
- By: Peter Brown
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 30 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and pathbreaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the "neglected half-millennium" now known as late antiquity was crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age.
By: Peter Brown
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Authority
- Essays
- By: Andrea Long Chu
- Narrated by: Andrea Long Chu
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1.
By: Andrea Long Chu
What listeners say about Miracles and Wonder
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cameron A.
- 04-10-25
An insightful read into Jesus Christ
This really opened my eyes to the world that surrounded Jesus. This made Jesus more human relatable rather than the washed version of Jesus always wearing white robes and having a soft voice like the white Michael Jackson. Jesus wasn’t just some untouchable spirit in human form. Jesus really came and experienced what it was like to be human. The world around him influenced how he taught and how he died. I once thought the cross was reserved for Jesus only. If Jesus was born in the 1700s or 1800s, he’d probably be hanged or killed by gun fire. Which makes me question if we should wear crosses. If Jesus died by the gun would we be wearing gun necklaces?
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- pespenshade
- 04-03-25
Super Compelling
A careful, respectful, well-researched, and cautiously stated study of the life of Christ that, due to its meticulous approach, proves to be kind of brilliant and revelatory.
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- Shannon Quick
- 04-14-25
Fantastic "Read"
I loved it. I have had an issue with having to believe Jesus literally rose from the dead since I was 13. I felt I had to make a choice and for a long time atheism was the choice. Books so thoughtfully and thoroughly written and researched, with the author's personal experiences and a thorough research and investigation of her own, is what I've been looking for since I was 13. Making Jesus more understandable and accessible is doing for me what preachers couldn't do.
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- Laurence R. Baker
- 04-20-25
All Wonders with One Exception
“Miracles and Wonders” is the third book that I have read by Elaine Pagels and it is my favorite with one of the major reservations that I will save for last. First, the scholarship is first rate and the way she expresses her interpretations seems eminently fair minded. She is skilled at looking at controversies from various perspectives. She writes with elegance and lucidity and this is supported in the audiobook by a first class narration. I found the book to be fascinating . . . except for the last major portion of it when she falls off the cliff into some kind of sampling anthropological history. She is determined to share how Christianity has been interpreted in this and that microculture, book and film. Her bent is to show how Christianity seems to still inspire in positive ways. This struck me as weirdly myopic. We are immersed in a giant, Christian Nationalist political movement. No mention is made of this or other popular faiths such as the Gospel of Prosperity. Spare me the butterflies and unicorns of today’s Christianity. I would grade this a 4.5 if the choice were available marking off only for my last criticism..
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- John M
- 04-09-25
Well Researched, Could Have Taken a Stand
Elaine Pagels is clearly brilliant and each section of the book was well written. The narrator was excellent and the book was easy to listen to. I just found the overall thesis just wasn't that compelling. She does talk in detail about the distinct phases of Jesus' life and then what happened after the crucifixion alongside the miracles that were reported in Paul's letters and the Gospels. It was interesting when she discusses how the story of Jesus morphed between the earliest writings (the letters of Paul) to the first Gospel (Mark) and then to the later Gospels. But she just doesn't drive an overall point home. How germain were the reported miracles to the eventual success of Christianity? Why did these miracle stories survive? Can the miracle stories be debunked? Overall the story doesn't seem to go anywhere. If you liked this book, I would strongly suggest reading some of Professor Bart Ehrman's work (or check out his website). He's playing in the same general vicinity, but his prose and conclusions are much punchier.
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- BethA
- 04-03-25
Pagels Does not Disappoint
In this book, Elaine Pagels, with courage, honesty, nuance, and erudition, finds a way to overcome the ages old divisions between faith, belonging, and thought. The ridiculous boundaries between dogma and learning, spirit and thought, discipline and rationality, may finally be breached and ignite the fully human post-civilization age of pisces long anticipated by love and faith in life. The pernicious division of "science" and "religion" breached by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, Einstein, and many others, may finally cease to enrich those who would instigate hate and support those who would atone for human crimes against creation by reversing the modern impulse toward extinction of evolved life. It support me in that way and I hope it will support others as well. Redemption is still an available choice, and old wisdom can guide us if we take responsibility for our actions and their consequences. Thanks for the many blessings of truth here offered.
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- Thomas A Bartlett
- 04-25-25
Distracting performance
I wish she had just read the text rather than trying to squeeze more significance out of every other word than belonged.
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- JDF
- 04-22-25
Not for the weak in faith
Dr. Pagels explores historically plausible explanations of the Gospel canon, She thus challenges the idea that Jesus is God, born, lived, and resurrected miraculously, But, she offers a way for even the atheist and agnostic to view Scripture, as a reminder of hope in the world. Scripture, and especially the Gospels, tell a story of hope against sufferings in this world. It is this hope that makes Christianity compelling now, some 2,000 years after its founding events took place.
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- Christine
- 04-02-25
I had high hopes for this title
Fill with gossip of the day and innuendos. I had great hopes about learning more of the history of the Bible. I was sorely disappointed. Wish I could return it for a credit.
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1 person found this helpful