Last night I partially watched the ABC news special with Peter Jennings called "Jesus and Paul -- The Word and the Witness". What a joke that program was for anyone who has seriously studied the origins of the bible. I was offended, and I've only taken a few Sunday morning church sponsored bible classes.

First of all, the main Christian theologians they had on the show were the infamous authors of the "Jesus Seminar", which looked at the origins of the historical Jesus. Marcus Borg, who I wrote about in a earlier post, was his usual icky self. N.T. Wright, who despite all his historical objections about Jesus could only offer up at the end that he couldn't nor can anyone for that matter, expliain how Christianity became such a dominant religion. John Dominic Crossan, who wrote great books, but sounded like a non-believer as well.

Only Luke Timothy Johnson who wrote "The Real Jesus, The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, sounded like he was a Christian. Everyone else sounded so skeptical and so un-Christian.

I mean, how can you explain faith? How can you explain why you believe the way you do. It's such a personal thing, so individual and so wonderfully human. It's such a post-modernist mistake to try to explain faith in scientific terms.

And then that whole thing about Paul. The bit where Peter Jennings is asking people visiting the Vatican if they knew who Paul was, how dumb was that. Paul was a follower of Christ. He never claimed to be the messiah, Yeshua, he was doing his disciple thing and spreading christianity. I think Paul would have been so insulted if he was aware that people knew anything about him.

Paul's main mission was to spread Christianity to the gentile world. And yes, okay, Paul interpreted jewish beliefs through a greek lens so non-jews could understand Jesus' teachings, but so what. That's part of being a messenger of God; interpreting JC's word so it can easily be understood by the people who need to hear his message.

I'm not sure what Peter Jennings was trying to accomplish by comparing JC and Paul. Paul was a messenger of God, and not the messiah. Even Paul knew that.