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I was allowed to ask a question: Did Jesus have a sense of humor? And it led to a great discussion of Jesus' sayings and character on this subject.

What would you like to have asked Jesus yourself?

I would have been interested in talking to him as a preacher. I would also, given what I grew up with, be interested in talking to him about quite simple things: How difficult was it, for example, to ally yourself so specifically with the outcasts, with Mary Magdalene, with tax collectors? What did you think the consequences of your preaching would be?

Would Jesus be willing to grant interviews to journalists?

Oh, there's no doubt in my mind that he would have. I must re-create for you a scene in our editing room. The editor of the special is Ralph Avelino, who is probably a better Jesus scholar than I am. We all agreed from the outset that if we were going to do this historically, we had to acknowledge the fact that the Gospels were written many years after Jesus lived. They were written under different circumstances, by different people, and some of them may have been advertisements for early Christianity when Christians were competing for followers.

So we all said, "OK, the Gospels are only so good as evidence." And then we'd have these fierce fights: Of course the Gospel said this! Of course the Gospel said that! More than anything else, that speaks to the power of the stories; you are drawn in and suddenly find yourself arguing with the next person about a piece of evidence of which even you are unsure. Of course that's exactly what scholars do. They look at the same evidence, then go off searching on their own for historical context, and in many cases, they reach different conclusions.

Would Jesus' answers to reporters be good sound bites, or would they be too cryptic for typical journalism?

I'm going to take that as a frivolous question& amp;mdash;that may be insulting, but I sort of mean it to be. I would never want to reduce the notion of learning about, or the hypothetical exercise of talking to Jesus, to a sound-bite debate, especially in the pages of Christianity Today.

One of the things we did do early in the program was raise the question of what Jesus looked like. Unfortunately in this television day and age, what people look like and how they present themselves has a lot to do with the impact of their message.

I meant it more as a question of whether we, in our media-saturated age, could hear what Jesus says.

Your question is answered by the effectiveness and power of those who preach on television. A wonderful guy from Memphis, G. E. Patterson, was here at Madison Square Garden the other night. Here's a man whose power around the country has become known by television.

To what extent has your background as an Anglican helped you report on religion?

I went to a school in Canada where we went to chapel every day. I grew up in a fairly traditional, middle-class family that took Communion seriously. But I also grew up with a much more social sense of religion (which I don't demean at all) than with a primarily spiritual sense.

I'm sympathetic to the notion that people are moved by faith. I once gave a brief talk here at ABC in which I said to reporters, "When you go to an airplane accident and you ask people what they think it was that got them through this crisis, and they say, 'God did,' don't ever ask them, 'No, I mean what really got you through?' " I'm sensitive to faith to that extent. But on this project, what interested me most was the reportage.

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June 12 2000, Vol. 44, No. 7