Frontline - Season 16 / Year 1998

In this FRONTLINE report, correspondent Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard scholar, explores the gaping chasm between the upper and lower classes of black America and probes why it has happened: "How have we reached this point where we have both the largest black middle class and the largest black underclass in our history?"

His personal essay draws a picture of growing black success along with deepening black despair and argues that black upper classes now have more in common with their white colleagues and peers than with those they have left behind in the inner cities.

Reviewing the thirty years that have passed since the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gates shows that while many blacks reaped the reward of the civil rights movement and affirmative action and gained middle-class status, just as many were left behind in an expanding underclass of poverty.

This FRONTLINE series is an intellectual and visual guide to the new and controversial historical evidence which challenges familiar assumptions about the life of Jesus and the epic rise of Christianity.

From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians tells the epic story of the rise of Christianity. The four hours explore the life and death of Jesus, and the men and women whose belief, conviction, and martyrdom created the religion we now know as Christianity.

Drawing upon historical evidence, the series challenges familiar assumptions and conventional notions about Christian origins. Archaeological finds have yielded new understandings of Jesus' class and social status; fresh interpretations have transformed earlier ideas about the identity of the early Christians and their communities.

Through engaging on-camera interviews with twelve scholars--New Testament theologians, archaeologists, and historians--the series presents their contributions to this intellectual revolution. For example, they talk about thequest for the historical Jesus - what can we really know? And how do we know it?

The scholars together represent a range of viewpoints and diversity of faiths and a shared commitment to bring new ways of thinking about Christianity to a public audience. They discuss the value in a historical approach to Jesus and the Bible and whether Christian faith can be reconciled with such an approach.