It’s Always Open Season on Christianity

ROBERT BARRON APRIL 2, 2025

As surely as the swallows return each spring to Capistrano, so the elite media can be counted on to write pieces debunking Christianity precisely at the holiest time in the Christian calendar. In the March 31 edition of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a lengthy review of Elaine Pagels’s latest book, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Pagels, a scholar of ancient Gnosticism, has been questioning orthodox Christianity for decades. Gopnik’s deeply appreciative piece is a masterclass in condescension toward a religion that boasts 2.4 billion adherents worldwide. In an objective assessment of a controversial text, one might expect the author at least to consult some dissenting viewpoints. But in the course of a substantial article, Gopnik quotes numerous scholarly figures who support Pagels’s skepticism but not one biblical expert who espouses the Christian faith. If he had asked, I might have recommended N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington III, Brant Pitre, James D. G. Dunn, Richard Bauckham, Gary Anderson, or Matthew Levering—all of whom would sharply contest Pagels’s conclusions. But the game here isn’t honest scholarship; it’s attacking Christianity. 

Gopnik, following Pagels, speaks of the “surprisingly unsettled sources that seem to relate the events of Jesus’ life and death.” In point of fact, in the manuscript tradition of the Gospels and the epistles of Paul, we have more historically reliable information than we have about practically any other figure from the ancient world—more than we have concerning Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, or Hammurabi. But who doubts the fundamental historicity of the accounts surrounding those worthies? 

What we are dealing with in the skeptics is not objective historiography but a deep prejudice against the supernatural, born of Enlightenment rationalism. Gopnik dismisses the central Christian texts with a sadly typical wave of the hand: “Most important, there are the four Gospels, written in Greek some forty to sixty years after the Crucifixion is thought to have happened.” First, I’m not sure at all what the language has to do with the facticity of what is being described. Would an account of the French Revolution in English, Edmund Burke’s for instance, have nothing true to say about what happened in Paris in 1789? Besides, since the evangelists wanted the message of Christ to go far and wide, they naturally turned to Greek, the lingua franca of that time and place, the language spoken by both the cultural elite and much of the merchant class. 

But more importantly, I’m not sure why being written decades after the Crucifixion would necessarily undermine the Gospels’ historical reliability. Would an account of the JFK assassination written in, say, 2003 have nothing truthful to say about what happened on November 22, 1963? Even if the author of that text was not himself there that day in Dallas, he would, presumably, rely upon reams of evidence coming directly or indirectly from eyewitnesses. And this is precisely what we have in the Gospels. Listen to what St. Luke, for example, writes in the prologue to his Gospel: “Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. . . . I have decided to write an orderly account.” If the requirement for historical veracity is that the author of a text must have been himself a witness to the events described, we would rule out 99 percent of the historical accounts that we have. 

Another argument employed by both Pagels and Gopnik is one that goes back to James George Frazer and his colleagues in the nineteenth century. This is the contention that the Resurrection narratives in the Gospels are simply iterations of the old mythic trope of the dying-and-rising hero that can be found in innumerable religions. The problem is that this attempt at “debunking” was, long ago, itself debunked. Even the most casual survey of the relevant literature shows the difference between mythic stories that are detached from history and are purely archetypal in form and the Gospel accounts that are historically specific and correlated to the experience of identifiable witnesses. One of the telltale demarcations is this: There are no evangelists of the obviously mythic figures of Osiris or Dionysus or Hercules, but the evangelists of Jesus’s Resurrection went careering around the world and to their deaths declaring the truthfulness of their message. As C. S. Lewis put it, “Those who think that Christianity is just one more myth haven’t read many myths.” 

Gopnik seems very happy with the manner in which Christianity inverted attitudes toward suffering and power relationships in the ancient world. Here, he would make common cause with the popular historian Tom Holland, who has argued persuasively that many of the values that we take for granted and consider universal—human rights, the dignity of the individual, sympathy for the victim, and so forth—are in fact distinctive to Christianity. But Gopnik is much less enamored of what he calls an “apocalyptic interpretation of the New Testament,” which makes “Christianity’s blood logic unsettlingly plain.” He means the doctrine that Jesus’s death on the cross was a sacrifice that satisfied the blood lust of God the Father and hence saved us from our sins. 

He might have benefitted from a conversation with a serious Christian who could have clarified matters. The Gospel of John couldn’t be more insistent that the Father did not send the Son into the world out of anger; on the contrary, “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son.” Moreover, the perfect God has no need of sacrifice to make up some defect or to change some unpleasant emotional state in which he finds himself. Gopnik quotes William Empson to the effect that the doctrine of the cross depicts “a cosmos ruled by an irrational deity whose rage toward humanity can be placated only by his son’s torture and death.” Well, that is just a silly caricature. What pleases the Father is the Son’s obedience in bearing the divine love even to the limits of godforsakenness, in going all the way down, into death itself, in order to save the lost. 

Perhaps Gopnik’s most outrageous assault on Christianity is his embrace of Candida Moss’s claim that early Christianity wasn’t “forged in suffering,” that the age of martyrdom is a historical fiction amounting to a “cult of victimhood.” Well, tell that to St. Stephen, to St. Peter and St. Paul (indeed to all of the apostles save St. John), to every pope of the first century, to St. Polycarp, to St. Justin, to St. Cyprian of Carthage, to St. Lawrence, to St. Sebastian, to St. Lucy, to St. Cecelia, to St. Agatha, to Sts. Felicity and Perpetua—a tiny fraction of those killed in brutal persecutions in the first few centuries of the Church’s life. This was no cult of victimhood; these were real victims whose courageous witness had a great deal to do with the spread of Christianity. 

A final observation, which I realize is more than a tad provocative: Why, I wonder, are there no similar pieces on Islam written during Ramadan? Why is Upper East Side condescension not directed toward the Qur’an, a book sacred to 1.8 billion people? The questions answer themselves of course. Yet, it’s always open season on Christianity. Even as Pagels and Gopnik trot out tired old arguments, Christianity is experiencing a rather surprising revival in the West, especially among young people. In that, I find a good deal of Easter hope.