Interview with Peter Jennings: Faith and the Media

There may be some who would say the whole idea of searching for evidence [is misguided]. Religion is not about documentation--it's about faith.

I'm beginning to appreciate the notion that what I guess I correctly or incorrectly refer to as "literalists" will not accept the premise that you can go looking for evidence of the man.... I always knew that we might offend some people who think it's not a legitimate exercise in the first place. I don't know how to answer that except that as a journalist, one tends to think there's nothing off limits. I similarly hoped--maybe this is inadvertently intended as advertisement--but I do hope that for literalists, they may find that this broadcast makes Jesus the man accessible to a wider audience.

What effect did it have on you?

Well, first of all I want to keep my own faith out of this because it's not relevant to the broadcast. I think it's fairly widely known by anybody who pays attention that I'm raised an Anglican, I'm a practicing Christian, and that's about as far as I want to go with it because I would not want people to think that somehow I brought my own notion of faith or spirituality to bear on it. And I think and hope the broadcast will be seen by most people as trying conscientiously to keep faith and archaeology separate. It's inescapably fascinating to read the Gospels more seriously than I had before and think of them as documentation for a journalist rather than articles of the faith.

How should someone of faith process this show?

I think it depends to some extent how you parse faith. Because it struck me, with all of our characters, they

regard themselves as believers, and none of them regarded themselves as seekers to use conventional language, or contemporary. Therefore, we accepted their bona fides as being believers, and yet in several instances when discussing the resurrection, for example, or the authenticity of Mary's virginity, I think in some cases we are able to see that metaphorically.

So I think it depends--if you believe literally everything written in the New Testament, and much of [what] is written in the Old Testament is to be taken literally, without any examination, then I think there will be parts of the broadcast that should be quite objectionable and may be difficult to process--maybe not worth processing, probably more to the point, except maybe to get your dander up, which again was not our intention. But I am fascinated by how someone like Dominic Crossan and Tom Wright and Jerry Murphy-O'Connor, three of our very significant players, three extremely worthy scholars and churchmen, can process the resurrection in different ways.

Was there anything that surprised you through the course of this, things you learned?

Well, it

surprised me. I mean, yes, little things surprise me. I was quite fascinated by the scholarship that seems to find that the virgin birth may have its roots in Roman mythology--and these are very small examples--or that the water-into-wine miracle may have--notice how I hedge and qualify everything--a genesis in Greek mythology.

Father O'Connor and I were sitting outside the Valley of Kidron, and we're talking about Jesus arriving for Sabbath--Passover--and I said, "How many people do you think came with him?" He said, "Maybe a dozen," and I said, "A dozen?"--another reminder that what became so vast in the subsequent centuries probably was in the first century very small, very risky.

What can you tell me about how you practice your own faith?

That's a difficult question because...I don't want to be identified as someone who, at any given moment in their life, gets down on his knees and seeks whatever. But I certainly grew up in the Christian tradition in which I was taught, fairly young, that there was a set of rules, a set of recommendations, a set of standards by which a Christian could and should try to live.

[While working as a journalist overseas] I came to have an appreciation that in all parts of the world, people like me of other faiths struggle to be conscious of that which they have been taught. In time, I became much more conscious of a religion as a political or more widely embracing notion.

I think the fairest thing to say about myself is that I am sensitive to the value of faith and religion and spirituality in people's lives because I'm a journalist. I try to tell young producers here that when they go to interview the survivors of a plane crash, and they ask the woman, "How did you get through this?" and the woman answers, "God got me through it," they are never to then say, "I understand that madam, but what

got you through it?" That's the one thing I would say about myself. I've come to appreciate the value of that. I do not question people's literalism, even though I don't always share it. And as a reporter, I've come to realize that this is a terrific story, a terrific, wonderful story.

A couple of years ago, in a speech you said that there was a "new spark to my own faith." What did you mean by that?

I think a wider awareness led me to seek. I don't like the word--it's become a popular word, "Are you a believer or are you a seeker?" But I do think that I have gone through a subsequent period of seeking to understand what or how strong or what are the connections I have to God. So I've spent some time with other men who have tried to understand that about their own lives. I've spent a little more time in Bible study, though my goodness not enough, and I've sought to go out and find the value of this in other peoples lives...I suppose, subconsciously I'm finding it so invigorating, enthralling, that maybe--I haven't taken enough time to stop and examine it yet--in some time it will take me some other places.

I know very much what you mean. It is not dissimilar to my own situation --but it's not always easy to articulate this.

And I haven't been asked this before, and you can see I'm having difficulty.

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