Over the past two thousand years, countless personalities have been projected onto the enigma we know as Jesus: a first-century rabbi, capable of miraculous healing, or a magician faking cures; a Prophet, or a deluded visionary; a heretical Jew, or God in human form. In this work of accessible scholarship, Pagels explores a wide range of sources–including the Bible, the earliest reports of Jesus’s life, and the secret ‘gnostic gospels, ‘ discovered in the 20th century–to break down these contradictions and paint a richer and more complex portrait of Jesus in his own time. As Christians became the largest community of any religious tradition in the world, Pagels argues, people have constructed and reconstructed Jesus through the lens of imagination, his image shaped by the social, political, and economic challenges of their own time.
