Responding to The New Yorker’s ‘We’re Still Not Done with Jesus’
“I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.”
—William F. Buckley Jr.
“Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.”
—G. K. Chesterton
In recent days, Adam Gopnik’s “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus,” a 2025 essay in The New Yorker, was circulated yet again around social media. The timing of its resurrection is no mystery: Christians are deep into the contemplative and sacrificial days of Lent and anticipating the high, holy days of the Triduum. What better time to pour cold water on the faith of billions?
And yet, a casual read of this essay should soothe the anxious believer that their faith won’t be upended any time soon. Mr. Gopnik’s “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus” reminds us that—sigh—we’ve been here before. Thick with condescension, plump with scholarly assertions, and steeped in theories, The New Yorker’s essay reminds us why Ecclesiastes’ Qoheleth muttered, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
The essay centers on Miracles and Wonder, a work by Princeton professor emeritus Elaine Pagels. To reassure us, Mr. Gopnik explains that Dr. Pagels is “working within a tradition of historical-Jesus studies that took shape in earnest more than two centuries ago, and for her the Gospels are palimpsests of lore, legend, and propaganda, beneath which a core of oral transmission and shared recollection remains detectable.” In other words, Dr. Pagels subscribes to a materialist worldview that denies the transcendence of almost any miracle performed, received, or witnessed. Miracles are merely moments of “radical amazement” finding the divine in the mundane—easily dismissed with the wave of a scholarly hand.
Mr. Gopnik delights in these theories and emphasizes the gravitas of “studies that took shape in earnest more than two centuries ago,” starring the modern likes of Dr. Pagels and Dr. Bart Ehrman, whereas we are encouraged to dismiss two thousand years of scholarship and reflection starring the likes of Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, Aquinas, Newman, Chesterton, and Stein.
In addressing the mysteries of the Gospels, the skeptical scholars in Mr. Gopnik’s essay are brimming with pat answers: A virgin birth? No, no, no. “An early Jewish polemic,” we are told, “claimed that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier nicknamed Panther.” Even more, Pagels espouses “a delicate rereading of the Magnificat, suggesting that Mary’s gratitude is not for the child himself but for the miracle that transforms an illegitimate birth into a blessing—an occasion of shame recast as a song of salvation.” Well, I guess that case is closed. Shepherds and magi at the nativity? Harumph. This is, according to Mr. Gopnik’s essay, mere “purposeful mimesis, shaped by the needs of their authors.” That’s that.
Christ’s healing of lepers? Tut-tut. That’s explained by Dr. Pagels, who “adds a deeper insight: the outlook of Jesus’s world made it particularly receptive to psychosomatic illness and its cures” and “scholar John Dominic Crossan’s claim that Jesus’ originality lay in his ‘commensality’—his willingness to touch lepers he could not heal and to dine with prostitutes he neither patronized nor liberated. His miracles were ecumenical, often involving the untouchable. He may not have cured those he healed, but the act of trying to heal anyone who asked was in itself a kind of miracle.” Well, there you have it.
Contrary to the scholar’s insistence, not everything is explainable.
From Christ’s missing body being “a local confusion” to post-resurrection Christ encounters being little more than “bereavement hallucinations,” Mr. Gopnik and his band of disbelievers have an explanation for everything. Struggle to reconcile faith with historical evidence? Mr. Gopnik writes,
A scholarly paradigm that has shone in recent years shifts the focus: the Gospels are now seen as literary constructions from the start. There were no rips in the fabric of memory, in this view, because there were no memories to mend—no foundational oral tradition beneath the narratives, only a lattice of tropes. (Emphasis mine)
In other words, all we need to do is wish any Gospel perplexities away by branding them fiction without foundation. Ah, the theories! The glorious theories! But as Flannery O’Connor once warned, “The theories are worse than the Furies.”—They chase us and harry us forever just like the mythical dark goddesses of vengeance and retribution. “Some ideas,” George Orwell mused darkly, “are so absurd that only an intellectual would believe them.”
Never mind the rootedness of the Old Testament in the three major faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) of the day. Disregard the thousands upon thousands touched by or witnesses of Christ, evangelized by the disciples, or converted by Paul. Pay no attention to the exquisitely reflective Acts and Letters of the New Testament, much less the testimony of countless saints and popes, priests and councils, scholars and poets (who mercifully didn’t haunt the halls of Princeton or Columbia) who have typhooned us with fathomless intellectual and mystical depth for two millennia. Mr. Gopnik and his latter-day scholars simply embrace that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are merely alternative versions of Aesop, Hans Christian Andersen, and the Brothers Grimm. And so, apparently, should we.
The greatest trouble with the credulity of Mr. Gopnik and his scholars is their refusal to entertain the fact that they may be wrong. It is a hubris that is unbecoming of authentic scholarship. True science, at its best, is humble and forever learning. Even in the medical literature that I study, a hypothesis is proposed and a study is performed before a conclusion is drawn, not the other way around.
Contrary to the scholars’ insistence, not everything is explainable. Nearly every Christian struggles with their faith at one time or another (and, likely, innumerable times). Scholars should too. We are, after all, human. As such, we wrestle (or should) with the transcendent, the mysterious, the ineffable. And even when those who deem themselves elite pronounce their infallible academic verities on all matters of life, most of us tend to cock our eyebrows. Live your life honestly and intelligently and you will, time and again, consider the theory from this scientist, the hypothesis from that academic, or the explanation from that intellectual to be a bit suspect. Too often, the theory seems a bit too neat. What is said often doesn’t fully reflect the facts, comport with our own experience, or align with common sense.
Why are the scholars in “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus” so fixed in their own unprovable assertions? In 1957, Flannery O’Connor wrote about this perspective in a letter to her friend Cecil Dawkins:
The miracles seem in fact to be the great embarrassment to the modern man, a kind of scandal. If the miracles could be argued away and Christ reduced to the status of a teacher, domesticated and fallible, then there’d be no problem. Anyway, to discover the Church you have to set out by yourself. . . . Discovering the Church is apt to be a slow procedure but it can only take place if you have a free mind and no vested interest in disbelief.
Expounding on a “vested interest in disbelief,” G. K. Chesterton, when criticized by an intellectual for being Catholic, asserted, “There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.” Interestingly, secular scholars and essayists for The New Yorker have dogmas of their own, they just don’t know it. Chesterton went on to say, “Perhaps . . . this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad.”
As “We’re Still Not Done with Jesus” concludes, I find myself finally in agreement with Mr. Gopnik. “The authority always fails,” he writes. “The anxiety reasserts itself. A new, amended authority emerges.” In offering his plaga mortifera, I think he is right—only he is talking about the scholars’ failures and not Jesus. Indeed, we are still not done with Jesus. Instead, we are done with shoddy science and meager theories struggling to dethrone him.
To explore a few excellent responses to atheism new and old, check out Bishop Barron’s treatment: