The Death of Peter Jennings
9 Aug 2005
When I heard about Peter Jennings’ death Sunday night, I could not help but think about his documentary, “Peter Jennings Reporting: The Search for Jesus.” This ABC News special, aired on June 26, 2000 and watched by 16 ½ million viewers, called into question most of the New Testament’s claims about Christ. Based primarily on the findings of the “Jesus Seminar”—a group of skeptical scholars who dismiss 80% of our Lord’s teachings as bogus—the documentary suggested that Christ was illegitimate rather than virgin born, that His temptation in the wilderness was a hallucination brought on by hunger, that His miraculous healings were for the most part psychosomatic, and that the story of His resurrection was invented by His disciples. All in all, the documentary presented Christ as a social reformer and political radical, not as the Jewish Messiah and Savior of the world.
During the special, Jennings asserted that “It [was] pretty much agreed” that the Gospel writers “were not,” as they claimed, “eyewitnesses” to the life of Christ. On the profound subject of Christ’s deity, Jennings nonchalantly referred to it as “a [mere] matter of taste.” And when it came to Christ’s resurrection, an historic event that the Apostle Paul claimed the entire Christian faith rests upon (1 Corinthians 15:14-19), Jennings cavalierly suggested that there is “a wide range of opinions” about whether or not it actually happened.
It is my hope and prayer that ABC’s famous anchorman’s search for Jesus did not end where his documentary did, but continued until he uncovered the truth about Jesus Christ. I hope and pray that Peter Jennings slipped out of time into eternity this past Sunday night as someone who had found Christ, not as someone still searching for Him.
Don Walton
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