Jesus Is News: ABC Weighs the Evidence

Plunging into sensitive and potentially controversial territory in an upcoming prime-time news special, ABC News and anchor Peter Jennings will examine what scholars believe is true, and not true, about Jesus’ life as detailed by the New Testament.

The unusual two-hour documentary, “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Search for Jesus” scheduled for Monday night, has been in the works, off and on, for nearly three years. It lays out the current state of academic thinking on everything from whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem (many scholars think not) to what message Jesus was giving when he celebrated the Last Supper (many scholars think it was political), if any (some scholars think the episode was invented by the Gospel writers).

Although the broadcast emphasizes that most scholars believe Jesus was a human being, academics who have rejected the findings aren’t represented, and the program stays almost completely away from questions of faith, noting: “We are very aware of our limitations: We cannot tell you whether or not Jesus is the son of God; that is a matter of faith.”

As drama, recent treatments of the subject--including CBS’ fictional miniseries “Jesus” in May, ABC’s Easter Claymation program about the life of Jesus and NBC’s movie about the Virgin Mary last fall--have been embraced by viewers. What the ABC documentary will test is whether they will be as accepting of a news-based interpretation of Jesus’ life.

News reporting on religion can inspire controversy in a way fiction doesn’t because “nonfiction ostensibly gets to the truth of the matter,” says Bill Moyers, whose work with religious subjects includes producing the “Genesis” video series. He would like someday to tackle the historical Jesus.

“If you’ve constructed a theology based on literature that’s sacred,” he says, a fact-based analysis that comes to different conclusions “threatens to undermine your faith.”

But there’s a seemingly contradictory element at work as well, he notes, in that “faith is not dependent on facts for most people.”

Indeed, Phil Boatwright, film and TV reviewer for the nonprofit Dove Foundation, which recommends family-friendly viewing for the Christian Ibelieve.com Web site, says he will recommend the program but notes: “Reporting on spiritual matters simply from a secular historic perspective is difficult at best. As in the case of the man from Galilee who claimed to be the way, the truth and the life, most of the scholars presented in this special are heard struggling with the inconsistencies of the four Gospels, not understanding that you can’t find him without the spiritual factor.”

“ ‘The Search for Jesus’ should cause discussion around the water cooler Tuesday morning, but although walking where Jesus walked is an interesting intellectual exercise, to truly find the Son of God, we must read the Bible, and believe,” Boatwright says in his review.

Many of the conclusions in the ABC special won’t surprise those who have followed the flood of reports and historical research on the topic in the last several years, including that of the controversial Jesus Seminar, a study group whose findings--including the contention that Jesus actually said a mere 18% of what he is quoted as saying in the Bible--are based on majority votes. Several Jesus Seminar members, including former co-chair John Dominic Crossan, are featured prominently in the program.

Executive producer Tom Yellin realized early on that the team was in potentially tricky territory given the combination of topic and format: “As soon as you start diving into this subject matter, you realize that the bulk of scholars believe things that fly in the face of things you were taught in Sunday School, if you are Christian.

“It’s one thing if that appears in an esoteric scholarly journal and another if it’s on national network television with Peter Jennings,” Yellin says. “It’s potentially explosive material.”

‘It Is Not Our Intention to Denigrate . . . Faith’

Indeed, some inside ABC are watching warily and bracing for a range of reactions, but Jennings says they are needlessly concerned.

“I think that it’s inevitable,” Jennings says, “when you have a big corporation like this one, that is allegedly sensitive to public opinion, that they want to know whether one of their reporters is beating up literalist Christians around the ears and insulting their faith.”

But, he adds, “I think anybody who has seen our broadcast realizes that it is not our intention to denigrate anyone’s faith.”

Yellin, who is half Jewish, was raised Unitarian and doesn’t practice a religion, says, “Some people will take issue with some of the things we report, because it’s something people feel very deeply about. We have profound respect for this, but that shouldn’t inhibit us.”

Indeed, a bit of controversy, Yellin says, could be a positive thing: “We hope it’s the kind of [program] that stimulates a lot of discussion.”

To that end, ABC’s morning news program, “Good Morning America,” is already planning for a next-day debate on the topic, and ABC’s Web site is planning extensive interactive “chats” around the broadcast, as is the spiritual Web site beliefnet.com. The network is also doing a Spanish-language track for the broadcast.

The project came about after Jennings, Yellin, producer Jeanmarie Condon and photographer Ben McCoy worked on the 1996 documentary “Jerusalem Stories,” about how the various religions coexist in that city. Calling it a “spontaneous” event, all agreed they wanted to do another program on the region, Jennings said.

Having read some of the recent literature for that program, Yellin says, the team decided that “[i]f you really want to get people intrigued, let’s get into what do we know, and not know, about the life of Jesus.” It quickly became apparent that to tackle a subject that arouses so much passion would have to be done with a great deal of sensitivity, he says.

Jennings, who calls himself a “practicing Christian” but declines to be more specific, says, “We went in search of Jesus as reporters.” He takes care in the program to couch the findings as those of a varied group of scholars and cautions that “Jesus scholars often disagree with each other, even when they are looking at exactly the same evidence.”

Indeed, the Pentecostals of Alexandria, a Louisiana church group whose music and drama ministry is featured throughout the program, would probably take issue with many of the scholars’ findings. Says leader Rev. Anthony Mangun, in an interview with The Times:

“I believe in the inerrancy of the word of God, from Genesis to Revelations, and if you start messing with the word of God, then you’re in trouble. If God gave scripture thousands of years ago, he’s not going to allow it to get to us in such deluded forms today.”

Mangun said he couldn’t comment specifically on the program, however, until he has seen it.

The team decided not to represent scholars who reject the research outright, however, because “in a lot of ways, they reject the whole concept of searching for the historical Jesus outside the Gospel,” Condon says.

ABC is already a controversial place for many theologically and socially conservative denominations, many of whom adhere to a literal interpretation of the Bible.

The Southern Baptist Convention, among others, has boycotted ABC and parent Disney for five years, although some congregations recently relented and encouraged their members to watch “The Miracle Maker,” ABC’s Easter program on Jesus, aimed at children.

Documentaries based on the flood of new Jesus research have increasingly found their way onto television in the last year. Tiny family network Pax, many of whose programs have a strong Christian bent, aired a one-hour program, “Uncovering the Truth About Jesus,” last fall and has since repeated it several times, most recently in April.

Though it quotes many of the same experts who appear in the ABC documentary, the Pax report, produced by Charles Sellier, also interviews a number of religious experts who disagree with many of the recent findings, and it comes to the opposite conclusion of ABC’s scholars, finding instead that despite all the recent challenges, the story of Jesus’ life, as reported in the Bible, is largely to be taken literally.

ABC’s corporate sibling, the A&E; cable network, has been airing a two-hour special, “The Unknown Jesus,” which explores many of the same issues.

‘News Divisions Have Ignored Religion’

Still, religion is a topic that the major network news divisions don’t often grapple with, ABC excepted. Jennings’ “World News Tonight” is the only network newscast with a full-time reporter on the religion beat, something that Jennings pushed for. He often counsels young reporters to be respectful when people they are interviewing credit their faith for getting them through tough times.

“By and large, the [network] news divisions have ignored religion, or not covered it in the way they cover other things,” says former NBC News President Larry Grossman.

“It always bothered me; we certainly did not do a good job at it while I was there.” He says he sees two reasons for it: Religious news falls outside the traditional notion of what news is and “news people tend to be very secular, and secular-minded, even if they are believers. It falls outside their radar screen.”

ABC recently screened the documentary for about a dozen religious leaders in New York. Dean Harry H. Pritchett, of New York City’s Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, called it a “very balanced, condensed and accessible work of something very complex. It avoided a lot of broad and deep and complex jargon.”

The documentary stops short of any in-depth exploration of the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. “To try to deal with resurrection is an enormous challenge in and of itself and would require a whole broadcast,” Jennings says. “We wanted to try to know Jesus, the man and his life.”

Of the program, Jennings says, “I do appreciate that not everyone will hear what we have to say. I’ve been in the situation before. People who have loud voices may try to preempt us. I don’t know the answer to that; we’ll tell people what we tried to do, but I don’t know what we can do beyond that.”

Meanwhile, Yellin says his reporting “has fundamentally changed my view of who Jesus was and what he did,” giving him “a much more heartfelt relationship with his courageousness and incredible commitment to justice.”

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* “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Search for Jesus” can be seen Monday on ABC at 9 p.m.