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On Monday, April 5, ABC News will broadcast a three-hour prime-time special, Peter Jennings Reporting: Jesus and Paul—The Word and the Witness. Robin Griffith-Jones, author of the new book The Gospel According to Paul (Harper-San Francisco), participated in the special. Griffith-Jones took time out of his busy schedule as Master of the Temple Church in London to talk to Today's Christian about his ministry, his love of the Bible as story, and his role in the ABC special.

You participated in the ABC News special with Peter Jennings about the way in which the apostle Paul impacted the spread of the gospel. Have you seen the special yet?

I have not seen the Jennings special. I can only say that I was really impressed by Peter Jennings himself when he was here in the Temple Church to interview me. He was clearly concerned to get a full picture of Paul's life and travels and of the different ways in which Paul can be understood now—the list of scholars who appear on the program (available now on the ABC News website ) is as good as it gets. I am only sorry I will have to wait until I get a tape in the UK before I can see the program.

What do you think of our culture's current desire to know the historical truth about biblical figures?

I would like to take a different route to knowing Jesus. We've been using the Gospels and letters as if they were history texts, or trying to examine them like a witness in a trial. Often we just believe them without allowing any doubt to arise, or we start investigating and quizzing them and begin to believe they are unreliable witnesses. We think that if only we could get back to how it really was at the beginning, we'd recover the great purity of the early church. We want to find what Jesus was really like—what he really said, and what the community was like at the beginning because if we could do this, we think we'd be freed from all of the corruptions and abuse of power that have gone on since. This instinct is in our bones now.

But my real interest is in what the Gospels and Paul's letters themselves are trying to do. If we would stop going to them as we would an archeological dig, we would learn a great deal about how the early church saw Jesus. If we want to learn what the real Jesus was like, by far the best evidence we have is what the early church thought of him. What they recorded about him is much less significant than how they thought they were going to get other people to believe in him.

You should read the Gospels as complete stories, and the letters of Paul as from a real man. When you can figure out what John and Mark and Paul are trying to do, you will have your clue of who and what they thought Jesus was. The church began to think and speak the way they did because it was the way that Jesus spoke.

So with your new book, The Gospel According to Paul, you're attempting to read Paul as though you are the recipient of this letter from an actual man.

All we have of Paul are these letters, and so we forget that what the converts who got the message had was a memory of this extraordinary, dynamic figure that claimed he effectively "re-presented" in his own person the death of Christ. The letters were a substitute for himself, because what his readers and converts really needed was him. He embodied the message. It was only when he couldn't be there that he had to write a letter. We've forgotten this because it's been nearly 2,000 years since Paul trod this earth, and we have lost all sight of him as a person, as a presence.

Can you give me just a brief sketch of the man those churches would have known and loved?

The most powerful thing you could conceive on earth at the time was the Roman Emperor. Paul comes to the synagogues and insists that Jesus outranks the Emperor. This is a pretty subversive message. People wonder whether he's crazy, hoodwinking them, or telling them the truth. He is certainly brave—clearly indomitable, and he will undergo anything for the sake of the gospel.

He becomes something of a father figure, and like a father, he sometimes finds his adolescent children vexing. Paul was not always successful at maintaining friendly relations with people, but he preached fervently. When he left a church, and his charisma was gone, there was a danger that everyone would slip back into the way they used to be. Then within six months they'd have a furious letter from Paul. If the phrase "I've got eyes in the back of my head" had existed, he'd have used it.

In most evangelical churches, it's normal that people have a moment of conversion that symbolizes the beginning of their relationship with Christ. Would you characterize Paul's experience—his Damascus Road encounter—in this way?

The momentary conversion, this sense that you had your moment, is often more like a feeling that something is coming. In a romantic relationship, you wonder if you're going to ask the person you love to marry you—you feel it building up, then eventually "Ta Da!" You get on your knees and you ask, but you could sort of see it coming. So many people who have instant conversions have in fact been agonizing about it for months. People grow into love of a community and start to feel connected to it before their conversion. So when the moment comes, it's often the climax of something that's already been brewing.

Paul had been trained in the methods and visions of earlier prophets, like Isaiah and Ezekiel, who saw a human figure on the throne of God. He knew what the followers of Jesus were saying, and he must have been furious, because they were beginning to describe Jesus as some sort of second god. The moment comes on the road to Damascus, and he recognizes that the figure on the throne of God, whom he used to think couldn't possibly be one human individual, was actually Jesus.

People come to faith in many different ways. I think that like Paul, for many of us, the moment of conversion is just the striking realization of something that we have been preparing for over a long period of time.

We often think that the world of Jesus and the apostle Paul is too different to really understand, but you believe it was remarkably similar to our times. What are the similarities?

There are a huge number of people who are rather suspicious of the spiritual realm but recognize that the rat race we inhabit doesn't say everything that we believe about the world. When we realize that we've missed saying goodnight to the children again, we realize that there's more to this world than the driven success that we see paraded around on the television.

The ancient world was full of gods. We wouldn't call them gods now, but we're surrounded by powers that look for our allegiance, either the material world around us, or these escapes from the material world which seem to offer some sort of healing way of life. In the Roman Empire, huge fortunes were being made. It was an active world, with huge numbers of people traveling and seeing other cultures, meeting other ways, just as ours is.

At the heart of it, people really just want to know how to interact with the things that they love, hate, and fear. Unfortunately, for many people in our time, Christianity is no longer what they would consider a viable answer. They can no longer hear what Paul and the Gospel writers were singing—that God, whose power is called Love, created the whole world. That this Love has disclosed itself to us in the person of Jesus Christ, who opens up new ways of living in this world.

You minister mostly to lawyers and others in the legal world.

Yes, my job is to minister to the legal community because the whole area where the Temple Church is located is owned, run, and occupied by lawyers, attorneys, and judges. Not surprisingly, our music attracts far more than just lawyers, so in fact the ministry here is to anybody who makes this church their home.

What is the spiritual climate like where you minister?

I think that there are a huge number of people who are quite taken by the thought of Christian faith. They're not against it—they probably learned about it at Sunday school, but they left it behind. The trouble is that it seems childish to them. It just seems so naïve and incredible that they never really explore it again.

We need to recapture the sense that the New Testament authors knew their message was beyond normal human understanding. They didn't think that they could simply present the story as evidence and have everyone say, "Oh yes, I see and I believe." Instead, they are trying to crack us open to perceive something that is very easily missed. One of the things that I hope I've done in the Paul book is to encourage people who may feel rather uncertain of the Christian faith that it is a bit strange and different. It asks us to think in new ways. Paul uses language as it has never been used before in order to bring his readers to this completely new way of seeing themselves and the world.

What is it about the world you serve in that drove you to study the apostle Paul?

This is the second book I've written, and I recognize that the places where I minister affect what I write. The first book was about the Gospels, called The Four Witnesses. I started thinking about it when I was an assistant clergyman at a public housing project in Liverpool, where nobody read books, and when I served as a chaplain at Lincoln College, Oxford, where even many theology students never opened the Bible. Many people who are devout Christians and serious members of the church find that the Bible itself is a closed book—a frightening, small print, double-column book, and they never open it.

That fortified my sense that we have to get the stories of the Gospels back out into the public mind and recapture people's imaginations. These are gripping stories! The first way to make the New Testament accessible is just to enjoy these wonderful stories.

In our contemporary culture, people want things that fit neatly into their preconceived ideas of the world. How do we break through to someone who mistrusts spiritual language?

I think the key for our generation is poetry. The Gospel writers knew that they would need to tell their message in a variety of story forms and use all of this vivid physical imagery of heaven and earth and thrones, because that poetic language was all they had.

We can be a bit suspicious of things being too spiritual. When people talk in grand language about the spiritual, we often think, "Come on, how many millions is he making out of this?" But we can see that there are some extraordinarily talented people who, either in the language of words, or drama, or cinema, can evoke a world that we almost inhabit. You know, you go to The Lord of the Rings and you feel you're there. You go to a Shakespeare play, hear the language, and you feel that you're part of the drama. I think we ought to recognize Paul as the Shakespeare of Christianity, struggling with the words he has to help his converts learn a new way of seeing the world in which they live.

I hope that by trying to do justice to the poetry of Paul's letters, it will attract a lot of people who are suspicious of big claims. If we start by accepting that it's poetry, then critics of the Bible may drop their guard a bit and say, "All right, I will listen to this." Paul's way of speaking was new. It described something weird and wonderful.

But poetry is usually about how people are, not how they should live. How would you respond to people who are nervous about the idea that Paul was giving us a set of rules to live by?

I'm certainly not saying that we should pretend Scripture doesn't say what it clearly says. On the contrary, I would like to claim that my approach to Scripture is radically orthodox. Take the four Gospels for instance: if we want to do justice to Scripture, the one thing we should not do is merge the four Gospels into one. When you read each of the New Testament writers, you realize what it is that each one is doing and you begin to see that the writers themselves are wrestling with the mystery of Jesus. They are absolutely sympathetic to those of us who find ourselves wrestling with it too.

This brings us back to the idea of finding new ways of stating things so that we can understand the spiritual realm.

The New Testament is written mostly to people who have some interest in Christianity already. If we read the letters and stories as they were meant to be read, we realize that we, the readers, are just like Nicodemus and the cripple man and the blind man. We are being invited to undergo the process of healing and rebirth just as Jesus invited those whom he encountered every day to be healed.

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