'Frontline' shows a blind spot.

There was a recent two-part edition of "Frontline," the PBS program, called "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians." The title indicated a bit of the show's bias, which is a current fashionable line in scholarship - the idea that Jesus was "made" the Christ, the anointed one, by the community which had to deal, after his death, with everything his life and death had meant, including a resurrection with which many of our contemporaries are terribly uncomfortable, as well they might be. There are any number of hidden and not-so-hidden assumptions here.

It was good to see a presentation of church history on public television, even with the bias, which became more clear in the second episode. The fact is that PBS made a somewhat serious attempt at looking at the beginning of Christianity, and the producers gave us more time and space than might have been expected for anything that was potentially so controversial. They managed to avoid the controversy and the discussion needed to make the discussion truly serious, but people who complain that public broadcasting gives too little time and attention to religion have to take this effort into account.

Nevertheless, the series reveals a tendency in a lot of modern religious thinking to read the image of the church as we would like it to be, or think it should be, back into the early years of the church. As far as Christ is concerned, the series began, "every age has done its own interpretation. Now it's our turn." And how. And how neatly the series reflected our Zeitgeist, more than that of the period in question. Much of the history was there, but without the sense of the strangeness, the otherness, of a time we must strain to understand.

Some forms of popular journalism must rely on the grave generalization: "Historians believe it more likely that Jesus was born and raised in Nazareth" than in Bethlehem - but is this all historians? No contrary voices? No qualifications? "Very few scholars believe that Jesus was of such lowly birth...." All right, so far.

But then we bump into the familiar notion that the early church, having had a sense of Jesus' continuing relevance even after his death, embellishes the experience into a resurrection tale. This is a form of rationalist fundamentalism at least as intellectually objectionable as biblical literalism, since it has nothing to do with the text, or with anything that can be demonstrated. It can only be said to reflect the distaste of people who are offended by the idea that the Resurrection might refer to something real, in a way that makes a claim on us. "The community experiences an absent Jesus," we are told, and the Gospels turn this into the story of the Resurrection.

And of course by the time we get to Constantine, the party line is clear: Constantine persecutes gnostics, dualists, Marcionites, in order to create one church, which is meant to reflect one empire. The pluralism and diversity which characterized the early "Jesus movement" have been replaced by orthodoxy.

What is striking is the way this reads the concerns of a certain sort of post-modern liberal Protestantism back into ancient history. We are asked to see a church which at first was less concerned with consensus about the meaning of the crucified Messiah and his Resurrection than with all the possible ways of reacting to the excitement caused by a rabbi whose teachings were subject to instant distortion, about which lots of people had lots of different opinions. This ignores Paul and Acts, but it does reflect our times.

Elaine Pagels did the same sort of thing in The Gnostic Gospels (Random House, 1979). It struck me, reading Pagels, that despite her claim that the Nag Hammadi manuscripts reveal all sorts of new things about gnostic belief, she relies in her footnotes almost entirely on Irenaeus (one of the old boys) for her account of gnostic doctrine; she also said that the Thomas Christians of India are so-called because of their reliance on such gnostic books as the Gospel of Thomas. That is a real howler: the Oriental Orthodox Christians of South India have no reliance on the Gospel of Thomas. They believe that their church was founded by the apostle - hence the name. No matter: mainstream reviewers raved, neglecting to notice the conventional footnotes and the amateur history, because it was nice to think of the gnostics as proto-feminists who had been crushed by patriarchal imperialists. "Frontline" no doubt met the same sort of reception with a lot of people, and for similarly shallow reasons.

It was good to see a serious treatment of religion on public television, but the bias was clear: John Dominic Crossan was there, but not Raymond Brown or Jaroslav Pelikan. The line of thought avoided studiously was that there is a living and relatively stable belief, and a continuing witness in Christian tradition from the time of the empty tomb until now, that what Paul proclaims in 1 Thessalonians, the oldest of the New Testament writings, is not only a metaphor, not only a consoling way of responding to a martyred leader, but true in a way we could not have imagined (and still cannot), and it changes everything.