Book reviews: 'Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus' and 'When the Going Was Good: An Editor's Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines'

'Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus' by Elaine Pagels

The compelling latest book from the best-selling religious scholar Elaine Pagels is "a kind of culminating work," said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. For the first time, the author of The Gnostic Gospels has written a volume focused on Jesus, and it charts "a reasonable middle ground" between scholarly skepticism and an appreciation of the extra-rational power of the stories told about Jesus in the New Testament. Pagels accepts as a given that Jesus existed. But starting with the Bible's claims that he was born to a virgin, Pagels unpacks the miracles ascribed to him to explain what Scripture's writers were up to when they recorded such tales. Instead of scolding the faith's early Evangelists for the Gospels' departures from verifiable fact, "Pagels revels in the contradictions and the inconsistencies not as flaws to be explained away but as signs of the faith's capaciousness."

"As Pagels portrays them, the Evangelists were men of creative genius," said Judith Shulevitz in The Atlantic. While the idea of Jesus as savior was spreading during the first decades after his crucifixion, the writers of the four canonical Gospels were busy turning the evidence against the claims of his divinity into the foundation of a faith that soon swept the world. When skeptics charged that he was the son of an unmarried woman and a Roman soldier, two Gospels put forth the idea of his virgin birth. Confronted with Jesus' later trial and execution, the Gospel writers presented that ignominious end as central to his divine mission. A side effect of the story's recasting, Pagels tells us, is that Pontius Pilate, Judea's notoriously cruel Roman ruler, emerged in the New Testament as a fair-minded man who perceived Jesus' righteousness. The faith's proselytizers apparently thought it better to appease Rome's rulers than to further provoke them.

When I finished my journey through Pagels' book, "the mystery of Jesus himself had deepened," said Leigh Haber in the Los Angeles Times. Though I'd learned much about the early history of Christianity, including about the noncanonical gospels that Pagels had explored in her break-through 1979 book, it struck me as "nothing short of miraculous that one person's words and actions—and the storytelling around that individual—continue to resonate in all realms of society and culture, in all corners of the world." Pagels credits the faith's enduring popularity to its promotion of the potent and norm-breaking idea that all people are created equal. To me, an even better explanation is that the story that recast Jesus as Christ is "a tale of hope emerging from darkness."

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'When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines' by Graydon Carter

Graydon Carter's new memoir "will make some readers itchy," said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. The former Vanity Fair editor is the opposite of immune to name-dropping, to tales of the glitterati, to listing his posh possessions. Still, "I quickly and (mostly) happily consumed it anyway." It's the rags-to-riches tale of a college dropout who came to lord over a magazine era of top ad dollars, budgets without ceilings, bottomless expense accounts, even eyebrow specialists on staff. Before assuming the Vanity Fair mantle in 1992, Carter co-founded the satirical glossy Spy, but those who remember Spy's "ironic, wised-up" style will be disappointed that Carter's own prose is bland here. No matter. The gossip is "first-rate."

"Carter's great strength is dispositional: He's happy," said Virginia Heffernan in The Washington Post. He's not digging up memories of dark days in his own life or looking a decade or two ahead to the rise of today's sadistic American oligarchs. His pre-vailing mood is instead "never-ending awe" that he, a Canadian nobody, rose to perches in both Manhattan and Hollywood that allowed him to live well, surround himself with witty friends, and call out venality where he saw it. His innate buoyancy, in fact, may have "afforded him a clarity denied to writers of more self-absorbed temperaments," as when he judged 2003's Iraq invasion a crime long before his mainstream peers and used his magazine to savage the escapade.

The bountifulness of print media's fat years is described in "exquisite, excruciating detail," said Jenny G. Zhang in Slate. One of Carter's top writers recently admitted that he was paid half a million to produce just three features a year. Unfortunately, the collapse of the media world Carter knew is "curiously absent" from his account, especially given that the book's readers are most likely to be envious members of today's hollowed-out news trade. If Carter were a writer "interested more in truth-telling than in burnishing his own legacy," he might have used his memoir to tell us where the money and public trust that the media once enjoyed have gone to, and further, "who won and who lost."