And TVLand’s endless reruns of Leave It to Jesus (“Ward, I’m worried about the Jeez”).
Fox isn’t alone in this. As others have noted, it’s pretty common place for the news media to do occasional specials on Jesus. Time, Newsweek, CNN, The History Channel, A&E and others do these specials all the time. My problem isn’t that they do them but that they do so in such a glurgey, pseudo-journalistic manner. They pretend that they are “pulling back veils” and so forth to find the “real Jesus” but they don’t have the courage to examine the Jesus myth in a truly journalistic fashion (which would force them to conclude that virtually nothing can be concluded). They treat miracle stories as if they merit any sort of serious historical consideration. They are extremely uncritical of the gospels, they interview Christian clergy about their personal or denominational interpretations of the gospels as if that has any historical probative value. They are usually careful to include at least one Jew and one “liberal” scholar (it seems like they always trot out Crossan for this role) but they do it in a token fashion while they give breathless, credulous attention to more traditional views.
They usually draw fallacious conclusions like “We may never know exactly what happened on that first Easter sunday, but something changed the apostles lives forever.”
Of course, this relies on a number of unproven assumptions (such as an unproven assumption that Jesus and the apostles existed at all, much less that there was an empty tomb or an “Easter Sunday.”)
These are not journalistic excercises, they’re ratings gimmicks. The last thing they want to do is offend their target demographic for these things by really reporting what hard critical scholarship says about the gospels and the historicity of Jesus, so they just ask pointless questions (“was Jesus really the Son of God? Millions say yes”) as if that amounts to any sort of edification of the audience.
The annual showings of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur are just around the corner. Y’know, they are actually pretty good movies if you can overlook some of the more amusing anachronisms…
Christ, this Jesus guy … he’s bigger than the Beatles!
I’m in the audience, and I’m edified by it. Hard critical scholarship is just as speculative as hard sympathetic scholarship, so it’s not like cynics have the high ground or anything. And by the way, that’s billions, not millions.
Lib, I think you may have the wrong idea of what I mean by “hard critical scholarship.” True critical scholarship avoids speculation as much as possible and simply searches for what can be known with certainty. As I said in my first post what can be concluded about historical Jesus from a critical analysis is that virtually nothing can be concluded.
Any serious attempt a a journaistic investigation of Jesus would simply have to conclude that almost no information can be verified in any direction. It was not my intention to imply that these shows should run with any of the myriad naturalistic theories about Jesus as an itinerrant rabbi, or a magician, or a mediterranean Cynic, or a Hindu mystic or any of that "Holy Blood/Holy Grail/DaVinci Code stuff, all of which I agree is still speculative at best and complete rot at worst.
What I’m saying is that they are never intellectually honest enough to simply admit that this is a story that’s almost impossible to “investigate” in any journalistic sense.
Which? or Both?
Well, I was referring to the Left Behind book, but now that you mention it… 
I did a blog entry on a comment O’reilly stated about Jesus once before.
On November 19, 2003, Bill O’reilly said ,
For the record, I’d like to kick Bill O’reilly’s ass.
“The Apostle”
Jesus-’“You’re fired!”
Well I did like Fox’s coverage of the big Jesus/Satan bout. I mean usually you can only get a fight that big on PPV. I still think Satan took a dive though.
If so, then this thread brings all of your posts into question.
adjusts pentacle necklace
Well, it is to ME!
I’m with Dio, as usual.
Signed,
kfl, SDMB Crackpot (and proud)
Moses didn’t actually wear Dockers slacks?
Are you saying the New Testament doesn’t predict Jesus coming again, or is there something about the way he comes back in the Lahaye book that contradicts?
Jesus would probably answer, “We angels spar like that all the time, without using wires.”
I never said I wasn’t biased… the introduction is a list of reasons I hate Fox. This is only one point of view, its good to get a few in there.
Yeah, but that’s not why you hate Fox News. If it were, you would hate the other ones as well.
Jesus: “You think that’s air you’re breathing?”