I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source, considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels.

Your new book is a marvel, Elaine Pagels, crowning a lifetime of best-selling scholarship,

sifting the sources, and retuning the narrative in and around the Christian castles.

Your title is Miracles and Wonder, the Historical Mystery of Jesus.

By the way, we're in history class, not Sunday school,

but you're tackling the big questions.

A, just what happened to this restless young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth,

who got crucified for his ambition, in his battle with the chief priests of the temple,

and the Romans who ruled Jerusalem at the time. Then the second question, it seems just as important

to you, how is to account for the human and artistic power that comes with the telling of this almost impossible tale?

And I want to do it differently this time. I'd like to ask you to cut to the chase, start at the end really, right there.

What is the quality of this story

that keeps it alive and urgent? All over the world, century after century, in worship,

but also in literature, in art, and in your own life, too.

Well, thank you, Chris. That's the question I've been thinking about. All the time I've

been writing this book, it's taken about seven years, because I've been teaching about the beginning

of Christianity since I got fascinated with that subject, rather hooked on it, you know, a long time

ago, and went to a university that I felt wasn't going to brainwash me because it was a

secular one, and then discovered the secret gospels as well. This book tries to ask that really

big question. Not only, what do we think happened? What do we know about Jesus of Nazareth historically?

And what we don't know, and what we don't know is probably 90%.

But the other question that for me is more important than either of those is,

...