A couple of weeks is a long time in American politics.
After Jesus, the New Testament of the Bible is hugely about Paul.
Al Gore has dedicated his life to detail. George W. Bush has not. He's the first to admit it.
Al Gore was not yet 40 when he charged into the bright sun of the national media spotlight.
All of us who live in New York are quite struck about how hard the positions are at the moment. It's a bit like the national election. So many people appear to have made up their minds.
As a journalist, one tends to think there's nothing off limits.
As a reporter, I could set out and see what I could find about Jesus, the man, as he lived in this part of the world in the first century.
Because people are so busy these days, they haven't had a chance to hear the candidates on various issues-so they're going to hold out for the longest period of time possible.
Canada has a parliamentary system. We have a republican system here.
Canada is becoming more like the United States in many ways, so politics are changing.
Candidates attempt to appeal to this tiny pool of people left.
Cosmetics have become more important in Canadian politics, I think, in recent years. But they're entirely different systems.
Do I think I was put here on earth to be a journalist and to seek truth? No, I don't.
Do we elect a man because of what he stands for, because of where he stands on the issues, because how he makes the nation feel?
Don't be confused that my interest in religion, faith, and spirituality is driven by any sense of faith or spirituality of my own.
Every candidate goes into every debate hoping that they can own a particular moment.
George W. Bush is a man who I think feels more comfortable with himself historically than Mr. Gore has. Those are each qualities which we look to in a president.
George W. had a plan. He arranged to join the Air National Guard in Texas, which meant he would not be sent to Vietnam.
Have a sense of humor about life - you will need it. And be courteous.
I am sensitive to the value of faith and religion and spirituality in people's lives because I'm a journalist.
I am utterly struck how, 300 years after his execution, Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
I am very conscious of the fact that in looking at Jesus the man-what we think we saw was a young man who was seeking a solution for people then.
I became much more conscious of a religion as a political or more widely embracing notion.
I carry this book, The Power of the Presidency, around with me. It's a collection of wonderful essays about the presidency.
I didn't meet many Iranians who believed that we were Satan in America, but that we represented Satanic ideas, and they were afraid.
I don't think a reporter should give advice or make predictions.
I don't think anybody who looks carefully at us thinks that we are a left-wing or a right-wing organization.
I don't want to be identified as someone who, at any given moment in their life, gets down on his knees and seeks whatever.
I don't want to feel that we intrude on people's New Year's celebrations, unless we have something that is really great.
I have gone through a period of seeking to understand what or how strong or what are the connections I have to God.
I have prayed. But I am quick to qualify that I was taught to pray as a child. We went to a chapel every day and three times on Sunday. I carried the cross, all that stuff.
I have to be very faith conscious in order to be aware that many people believe what Jesus was doing then as a young man had a direct relationship to their sins two millennia later.
I remember coming to ABC when I was very young, and Murphy Martin had a voice that practically ran you off the block.
I think Chris Matthews is a very bright guy. I'd listen to him even if he didn't shout at people.
I think I am very mainstream - I'm committed to good works in my life.
I think I came to see Islam, or at least one part of Islam, as an important defense mechanism against the commercialization of the world.
I think it's impossible for any of us not to find television, and the political process at its best on television, compelling.
I think journalists in the main are quite good at fighting past labels and taking labels off people once they began to peel the onion.
I think most people have a sense of what a president can and can't accomplish when in the complex relationship we have here between the executive and the legislative branch.
I think Mr. Bush has some difficulty in terms of a team.
I think sometimes negative campaigning, like so much, is in the eye of the beholder, and I don't think we'll ever get rid of it.
I think the country ultimately looks to a man who it's comfortable with.
I think there have been some great presidents in this century.
I think we were all struck at the beginning of the campaign year how openly both these men were espousing their religious associations.
I think you can be cynical about religion on occasion, and certainly skeptical about the degree to which some people use religion to manipulate other people.
I try not to make judgments or give advice. But I did think it went on a tad long.
I was interested in trying to find out: Who was Jesus as a person? Where did he preach? Where did he go? Who did he see in this short period of his life?
I was raised with the notion that it was OK to ask questions, and it was OK to say, I'm not sure. I believe, but I'm not quite so certain about the resurrection.
I went with the president to India. I've always been struck with why the country will miss the president. He came to grasp with their issues. That is what the country will miss about Clinton.
I'm a big fan of CNN. I watched it from the beginning.
I'm a little concerned about this notion everybody wants us to be objective.
I'm a reporter. I'm not a scholar.
I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.
I'm not a slave to objectivity. I'm never quite sure what it means. And it means different things to different people.
I've always shied away from conventional wisdom, though I know the power of it.
I've heard Paul called more than once as the great salesman of Christianity.
I've never believed that the whole country was romantic about John F. Kennedy at all.
If you believe literally everything written in the New Testament and much of the Old Testament is to be taken literally, then I think there will be parts of the broadcast that should be quite objectionable.
If you tailor your news viewing so that you only get one point of view, well of course you're going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong.
If you tailor your news viewing, as some people are now doing, so that you only get one point of view, well of course you're going to think somebody else has got a different point of view, and it may be wrong.
If you take the three of us and put our audiences together on a daily basis, that's as big an audience as you're getting in television.
If you want to see the Olympics live, and you don't want to wait 12 hours, as NBC's going to make us wait, then you should be thankful you live along the border.
In all parts of the world, people of other faiths struggle to be conscious of that which they have been taught.
In his early 40s Bush claims to have found a relationship with Jesus that helped him turn his life around.
In this new generation in which wives and husbands get cast off more readily than they did in our parents' generations, these two guys, Gore and Busy, are very solid with their same wives.
It is essential for politicians to make a connection with us, as Franklin Roosevelt did, as Teddy Roosevelt did, as John F. Kennedy did, as Ronald Reagan did.
It'll be very hard for large corporations, which are, after all, using the public airwaves for nothing, to give up a daily national news service.
It's just so easy for all of us to have opinions. But to have working opinions is a much more important thing.
Like most people, you do some things naturally and you do other things not so naturally.
Mr. Gore is doing well in the polls in New York, compared to the president.
Mrs. Bush, former first lady, talks quite openly about the decision to give up drinking when he was 40. We talk about the impact of his wife on his life. We talk about his reckless years.
No one knows the pain of politics more than the children of politics who have been defeated. And George W. saw his father defeated. And Al Gore saw his father very, very badly beaten up.
Often people are leaning in one direction or the other.
Other people in newsrooms are not as lucky as I am.
Paul was a persecutor of the early Jesus movement. Paul was indeed Jewish.
Scholars will argue with each other about everything.
Senator Albert Gore Sr. was one of the first outspoken critics of the Vietnam War.
Some people continue to pretend that anchor people are reporters.
Sometimes you simply get carried along by that sort of magic of this relationship between television and politics.
The candidate out front on Labor Day has historically been the one who stayed ahead in November.
The country has this extraordinary sense of endurance, and when the country gets attacked it takes time, but it picks itself up and goes on.
The last book was a success, and somebody said, What do you want to do next?
The one thing that I have done really well in my life is be a father.
The president made an enormous effort to normalize relations with Vietnam, to enhance the trade relationship with Vietnam.
The two presidential candidates are fighting for a very small pool of voters.
There is a paucity of good liberal commentators in the country at the moment.
There's no question the trial lawyers have been strong supporters of the Democratic Party.
There's no such thing as an independent person.
Times have changed. But I think the politicians and their campaign staffs spend an enormous amount of time testing the public waters.
Using Iraqi government figures, which we cannot verify - they may be high or they may be low, we do not know - almost 700 civilians have been killed in the country since the U.S. invaded.
We call our program Family Business, and it's all the kinds of things you cannot do on World News Tonight.
We have been through a period where we see power leaching away from Washington. Who is more important in the world today: Bill Clinton or Bill Gates? I don't know.
We in the media get a little caught up in the candidates' notion of what is a negative campaign.
We set out to find what we could learn about Paul in the first century, and we're helped immeasurably by his writings.
We talked to about 46 people who know either Al Gore or George W. Bush from birth, and the parallels are astonishing.
We understand through Paul's letters and teachings how different early Christianity in the first century was.
We're up against the opening of the Olympic Games on NBC. But by the time we come on tomorrow night, all of the great events will be over.
What became so vast in the subsequent centuries probably was in the first century very small, very risky.
What the three networks provide is a news universe in which we're not shouting at each other and at people all the time.
Whatever you may think about Bill Clinton professionally, you think about him in personal terms, in moral terms.
Whatever you may think of Mrs. Clinton as a character, I think she believes quite strongly in public service.
When I report on religion, faith, spirituality, it is just so easy to put a label on something.
When we get down to it, it is the character in terms of the quality of leadership that ultimately makes the difference.
Without Paul carrying the message to the early communities that were being established, we might not have Christianity as we practice it today.
You would not find me in the corner which said President Kennedy was the best president of the century.
Peter was married four times and had two children.
On April 5, 2005, Peter Jennings announced on World News Tonight that he had lung cancer.
Peter Jennings was the anchor and senior editor of ABC News' World News Tonight from 1983 to 2005.
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