Interview With Peter Jennings

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, Peter Jennings of ABC News. He’s got a lot to say about Jesus’ times and teachings and about Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ.” Plus, atrocities in Iraq, investigating 9/11, presidential politics and a lot more. Peter Jennings next on LARRY KING LIVE.

This Monday night, Peter Jennings will have a three hour prime- time special that’s got rave advanced reviews called “Peter Jennings Reporting: Jesus and Paul, the Word and the Witness.” We’ll be showing clips from it.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JENNINGS: This letter to the Galatians has made Paul a favorite saint of the worst Christians in history. From the monks of the Spanish inquisition to the people who carried out the 20th Century Holocaust against the Jews in Europe, all those including Hitler who have claimed that Christian theology made it imperative to destroy Jews and Judaism but does Paul deserve the blame? Every expert we talked with said he does not.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: This coming Monday night, a three-hour special on ABC. That’s the whole night of prime time. It’s titled “Jesus and Paul.” It’s a Peter Jennings reporting special “The Word and the Witness.”

Was this the result of the Gibson movie that you did this or did you plan this before?

JENNINGS: No, no. We were actually finished before “The Passion of the Christ” I think was actually finished. I was very pleased that someone like Mel Gibson actually wanted to see our program.

This grows out of a long history we have at ABC News of doing programs about religion. In my own case, we first did a film about my many years’ visits “Off Again to Jerusalem” which got people interested and then we did Jesus and Jesus did very well in terms of audiences. People were very interested.

So we decided to do Paul who is an absolutely fascinating creature and I must say, thanks to ABC, it’s pretty unusual for a reporter to be given three hours of prime time to discuss the birth of Christianity but it’s been very exciting.

KING: What did you think of the movie first?

JENNINGS: Well, I — a little bit of me doesn’t want to say what I thought of the movie because I don’t want people to think that my point of view about the movie is brought to bear necessarily in the program on Monday night.

I was deeply moved as I think anybody who saw the movie and saw the reaction to the movie was about how people reacted to it in different ways, how some people found it to be much too excessively violent but other people, particularly evangelical Christians who were deeply moved by the notion of Jesus suffering to this extent in the name of mankind. I wasn’t — I wasn’t really surprised to see how well the film did because this is one of the great subjects of all time. It’s a subject on which people are quite dramatically divided in many ways and I think the whole conversation about Christianity and especially as it emerged out of the first century is really stunning.

KING: All right, Peter, who was Paul? To the boy like myself who grows up Jewish, he’s taught it was a man who was named Saul who was a fanatic. That’s the way the Jews teach. They teach Christ as a great rabbi and Paul as some sort of guy way out there. Who was Paul?

JENNINGS: Well, Paul was a persecutor of the early Jesus movement. Paul was indeed Jewish. Everybody, of course, in this story is Jewish in the first century and Paul was indeed a persecutor of the fledgling Jewish movement.

And then, as the Bible has it, on the road to Damascus to further persecute the members of the early Christian movement, of the Jesus movement, he was blinded and heard God and became an absolute convert to Jesus’ life and times and message, particularly to the idea that the embodiment of all this is the crucifixion and the resurrection and he became one of the great apostles of the Jesus movement.

And what makes Paul really interesting, at least to me, I want to say very quickly I’m a reporter. I’m not a scholar and we set out to find out what we could learn about Paul in the first century and we’re helped immeasurably by his writings because after Jesus, you know, the New Testament of the Bible is just hugely about Paul.

He is the person who really carried Jesus’ message, Jesus the Son of God’s message, the kingdom of heaven on earth to the non-Jewish community and he had a great — there was a great rupture in the Jewish community between him and the other apostles in Jerusalem as a result of this.

But I think it’s fair to say, though scholars will argue with each other about everything, I think it’s fair to say that without Paul carrying the message, first around the shores of the Mediterranean and then on beyond that to the early communities that were being established, we might not have Christianity as we practice it today.

And we understand through Paul’s letters, I think, and Paul’s teachings and his communication with all of these communities how different early Christianity in the first century was.

And so, he’s really, I’ve heard him called more than once as the great salesman of Christianity. I’ve heard him called a lot of other things as well but he clearly, without Paul I think we probably wouldn’t have Christianity today as we know it.

KING: Why did the name change Saul to Paul?

JENNINGS: Well, you know, it was a question of going from the local language into Greek and beyond that and there is not any particular significance. KING: Somewhere in the translation.

JENNINGS: There’s not any particular significance to the fact that it went from Saul to Paul. You would notice it much more today.

KING: What was the relationship of Paul and Christ?

JENNINGS: They didn’t know each other according to most historians. Now there are people who actually believe that it was possible that Paul and Jesus actually did know each other.

So, here’s a point of controversy. If I say I don’t believe that Paul and Jesus knew one another, someone in the evangelical community particularly will take exception to that.

So I’m a little careful here but most people would say that Paul did not know Jesus but that he was responsive to Jesus’ teachings without any doubt but that what he was particularly moved by — remember that in the first century Jews believed that the apocalypse was coming and they believed that the end of the world was coming.

So, Paul is a man whose entire attitude about behavior and about Christian — about Jewish law and about Jewish doctrine and about saving people is somewhat contingent upon the fact that he thought the world was going to end very quickly and that people had to prepare for the end of the world.

And but what is central to his teaching, I think everybody would accept, is the notion of the kingdom of heaven on earth and that the crucifixion and Jesus’ resurrection are central to the belief.

KING: Back with more of Peter Jennings. This special will air Monday night. We’ll tell him about some of the reaction to it right after this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JENNINGS: Paul says in his own writings that he supported himself on his missions by working with his hands. The book of Acts says that Paul was a tent maker. In those days, making leather tents for merchant caravans was a pretty good business. So, historians think that Paul probably got a foothold in cities like this by setting up shop and talking to his customers.

How does Paul get around convincing his audience that Jesus wasn’t just a criminal executed by the Roman authorities who, by the way, I as a gentile worship their Gods?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is a little bit tough.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I’m sure that I might be more part of the culture that they kind of looked askance upon.

JENNINGS: What do you think would have put you off?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It’s a cult. Who is this weird-looking guy running around talking about this other guy that some God raised from the dead? And I’ve never seen this guy that, you know, this guy says God raised from the dead. Where is he now?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Peter Jennings is our guest. The special airs Monday night, all of prime-time, the full three hours. If you’re not sure if they knew each other, and the general consensus is they didn’t, why the title, “Jesus and Paul?”

JENNINGS: Because, first of all, aside from the fact that they’re two principle characters in the New Testament, I think that Paul is responsible, I may get my figures wrong here, 13 out of the 27 books of the New Testament. But to repeat it, maybe I didn’t make it very clear in the first place, because I think it is widely believed, in fact I know it is widely believed, that without Paul, Christianity may not have survived. Christianity as we now call it might not have survived beyond the small cult that it was regarded to be in the 1st century on the eastern side of the Mediterranean.

You know, the Jesus movement, as historians will tell you much more eloquently than I’m able to, was one of many cults, and at least one of our quite conservative historians makes the point that there were any number of preachers in what was basically Palestine in the 1st century, believing that they had the answer in terms of the end of the world, and were going around preaching the end of the world. Jesus was one of them. Jesus is this — Jesus connection to God, as profound as it was on the eastern side of the Mediterranean, might not, now people will take exception to this in some cases, but might not have gone beyond those boundaries had it not been for Paul taking the message to and supporting the communities and nurturing the communities all the way to Rome.

KING: Why is he…

JENNINGS: It is Paul — it is Paul, you know, principally, who take Christianity to Romans, and what’s stunning about all this — again, some people will tell you it’s not stunning at all, it is absolutely the truth — is that 200 to 300 years later, Christianity is the official religion of the Roman Empire that had so profoundly persecuted the Jews in Palestine in the first place.

KING: And he is so associated with Catholicism, right?

JENNINGS: Not so much with…

KING: Isn’t he more…

(CROSSTALK)

KING: Catholics than among other sects? JENNINGS: I can’t answer that question, to be perfectly honest. I don’t know whether he is quoted more in Catholicism. You know, it is — it is part of Catholic doctrine that Paul, you know, lost his life just as where a small church is now settled, on the outside of Rome, and he died as a result of the persecution by Nero, of the Christians in Rome at the time. But he is held, just by virtue of his place in the Bible, the New Testament, by every what you call sect or Christian persuasion.

KING: Was he a good writer?

JENNINGS: Well, it’s a little hard to tell, isn’t it, because we’re reading an English language translation of the Bible today, but I think — but I think — I haven’t the vaguest idea whether the translation was good. But what you can say about Paul’s writings is that they are in many ways astonishingly relevant to the 21st — in the 21st century, because we are arguing today about some of the things that they were arguing about then that Paul was concerned about. He was concerned about sex. He was concerned about homosexuality. He was concerned about the treatment of women. He spoke and wrote to all of these various communities and preached, and he preached and he argued about Jewish law. It is the issue of circumcision and the Jewish dietary laws on which Paul the Jew separates from the other Jews in the early Jesus movement.

And this business of taking — of believing that you didn’t have to be a Jew, didn’t have to be a strictly observant Jew, therefore you didn’t have to be circumcised, in order to follow Jesus, in order to get the Jesus, to embrace the Jesus message, is what caused the rupture in the early Jesus movement, which was of course Jewish and led in part, to much of the accusation that over the years Paul is somehow responsible for the early seeds of anti-Semitism.

KING: Did Paul officially, or ever give up his Judaism?

JENNINGS: I can’t — I can’t answer that question either, because the movement we’re talking about in the 1st century, as best I understand it, is a Jewish movement. And certainly in the terms of our broadcast, in terms of following Paul’s life as he travels and he preaches and he wrestles with these ideas until the time of his death or disappearance — because some people believe he didn’t die, of course, at the hands of the Romans, but may have disappeared into Spain. The record is in the view of some historians unclear.

You notice how hesitant I am at times, because every time I think of one thing I realize there’s someone who has a different point of view about this.

KING: Scholars will disagree. We’ll pick up on that and other things with Peter Jennings. The book is — the book — he writes books too. Peter Jennings reporting, “Jesus and Paul: The Word and the Witness.” It airs Monday night all through prime-time, and a special later tonight, ABC’s “Prime Time Thursday” is Peter Jennings reporting on “Ecstasy Rising.” Back with Peter right after this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) JENNINGS: Here amid the artifacts of Roman power, we get some sense of how extraordinary it was that ultimately Christianity will prevail and even become the official religion of the Roman Empire.

So where are we?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

(CROSSTALK)

JENNINGS: Gianni Ponti (ph) is an archaeologist.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We’re going to go right under it onto…

JENNINGS: Back into the 1st century.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Back into the 1st century on a sacred way.

JENNINGS: Ponti (ph) is part of a team that is trying to reconstruct what Rome looked like in Paul’s day.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The forums are surrounded by temples, (UNINTELLIGIBLE) buildings known as basilicas, and honorary buildings, to honor victorious generals.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JENNINGS: It was not at all unusual for a boy in Jesus’ time to think something has really got to be done here, and possibly I’m the one to do it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Something has got to be done; maybe I’ll be the one to do it.

JENNINGS: And maybe I’m the Messiah?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I suspect that half of the Jewish mothers in Galilee at the time hoped that their son was going to be the Messiah.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: We’re back with Peter Jennings. A discussion of his special, “Jesus and Paul,” which airs on Monday night. The criticism has been…

JENNINGS: Larry?

KING: Yeah?

JENNINGS: I’ll tell you something, I would really feel remiss. I was watching that shot of walking down with Ponti (ph) through the old city of Rome, and it’s really important for audiences to know how these programs are made. We worked on all this series from Jerusalem all the way through “Jesus and Paul” with a cameraman named Ben McCoy (ph) from Denver, and Steve Lederer (ph), who is the sound recordist, and my producer, Gina Recondon (ph), without whom this program would never get made. She’s become a truly serious, quite brilliant Biblical scholar and they don’t get enough credit, so hope you don’t mind me mentioning them.

KING: Not at all. In fact, just looking at that one scene tells you you want to watch the whole three hours.

JENNINGS: It’s one of the great — it’s one of the great shots, and I remember seeing how Ben had managed to follow us down sort of astonishing walk that we were taking. This was an archaeologist taking me through Rome and through Nero’s palace and showing me where the fire was burned and where Peter and Paul may have perished. It was really quite stunning.

KING: Walking into yesterday. John Leonard (ph) gave you a rave in “New York” magazine, absolutely loved it, liked it better than the movie. He did, however, have one criticism which others have said. They’ve said, “too much of the music,” he said, “is contemporary Christian rock. Even, God help us, Christian rap.” Did you select the music and what’s your response?

JENNINGS: Well, I am fascinated, because I didn’t anticipate early on in the Jesus (UNINTELLIGIBLE) program and also now the reaction that a certain — members of a certain generation would have to Christian pop and to rock, and in the case of this program, even Christian rap. We are talking about one of the great music growth industries in the country. And in this program, I and Gina Recondon (ph) are very aware that we’re talking to more than one generation. And so I want to talk to young people as well as to old fogeys like myself, and so — as well as the traditional sacred music, which is in much of the program. There is indeed Christian pop and rock and rap, because it is in that music that many young people hear Christianity speaking to them today. Not always your taste or mine, but I think it has to be there.

KING: Paul, you said, relates to today, and he spoke about homosexuality, and now we have gay marriage. What did he say about it?

JENNINGS: Well, you know, he believed that women should keep their place. He didn’t believe people should marry or should bother to marry at the end. He was not in favor of marriage at the end, because the end of the world was coming and he believed that people should not, you know, waste their time with such matters. He was on the one hand a very, very stern disciplinarian. These small communities that were establishing themselves around the Mediterranean and then ultimately in Western Europe were sometimes very difficult to manage and were sometimes under huge pressure from Roman occupation, people who’ve celebrated the pagan gods or the imperial gods of the Roman Empire, other aspects of the Jewish movement. He was always struggling to repair his relations with people.

And you see this. I grew up, as you didn’t, but as many Christians did, I grew up sitting in the pews of a church on Sunday, where I always thought that they were reading an excerpt of Paul’s letter to somebody, the Romans, the Ephesians, or somebody, in order to remind me that I was doing something bad. But when you read about him and understand him as a man struggling in many cases for much of his life, it becomes a whole, fascinating, different exercise.

KING: But Peter, if his perspective was on a world coming to an end, why are his thoughts important? If you think that’s going to end tomorrow, how is that relevant, since that’s not the predominant thinking today?

JENNINGS: Well, I mean, Paul’s thoughts are very important on a great many subjects, including, I might add, love, as well as marriage and the role of women and the Jewish dietary laws.

Look, if you are a true believer in the literal word of the gospels today, it comes as no surprise to you that this tiny little sect from the first century has survived now, because it is the truth, it is the word, it is inevitable. But I think for other people in the world today it is, in some respects, astonishing that this tiny sect, one among many in this strange remote corner of the Roman Empire should have survived as it has done for 2,000 years. Survived and thrived beyond anybody’s imagination.

And I think it is widely and accurately held that without Paul that might not have been the case. That Paul carried the central message of resurrection to the non-Jewish world. Had great division in the Jewish world in the process of doing so. Because he was — I’m a little nervous about this phrase, but I think this is why people refer to him as the great salesperson, the great salesman for Christianity.

Some people think he preempted Jesus’ message. Some people would argue he started another religion in Jesus’ name. The scholars disagree on so much. But without him, the message might not have traveled as effectively as it did.

KING: Looking at the problem today, the war on terrorism, some see it as Christianity against Islam. Do you?

JENNINGS: I think we’re in danger at the moment of getting ourselves into a conflict between the West and Islam. And I think we in America would all — I don’t mean to sound pompous — at least I hope I don’t sound too pompous about this — we’d all be better served if we took Islam really seriously and focused not only on extremist Islam. Islam is, in some ways, I think, at war with itself in terms of its root and its modernity.

I think Islam struggles under the weight, to some extent, of the governments in the Middle East who are most autocratic, some of whom are our allies. I think we would all be better off if we learned more about Christianity, more about Islam, more about Judaism, and the relationship between the three.

KING: This is going to be a fantastic special, Monday night, throughout “Primetime.” Peter Jennings reporting, “Jesus and Paul: The Word and the Witness.”

When we come back, we’ll talk more about “Ecstasy,” a special he’s doing later tonight, and some other items in the news in our remaining moments with Peter. We’ll be right back.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Christian community has had a lot to offer you very tangibally. They took care of you.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Lord, we pray for him. We pray for his wife. We pray for his children.

JENNINGS: Paul says this idea came directly from Jesus.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You kind of knew that if you got old and sick, that there was going to be somebody there.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Jesus Christ, our lord.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
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