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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 WitnessRobin 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.

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