He says the reporter was obviously being fed gotcha questions on her ear piece and was asking them without having a chance to think them over. He expressed sympathy for her, knowing she really was not prepared to talk to him, and her handlers were so eager to intimidate their guest and get him to say something unacceptable to their evangelical audience that they just kept on burying her deeper and deeper.

I guess the Foxies thought they had themselves a trifecta: a liberal, a perfesser, and a Muslim, too! Hot damn! We're gonna git that boy!

BTW, this is not the first time someone has analyzed Jesus' career from the point of view of a political activist fighting to free his people from Roman rule and Hellenistic cultural influences, both of them anathema to the 1st century Jews of Palestine (the Roman name for the province where Jerusalem was located). A lot of Christian scholars have written about this. You will recall I mentioned a book I read in college written by a Christian on this same theme, The Passover Plot by Hugh Schonfield (1965). This does not mean they don't believe he was a religious leader, but that he may have been much more besides. Of course, the gospels do not emphasize this aspect--for a reason.

When the Christians started trying to spread their faith in Rome itself, and when the Gentile and Jewish (Greek and Palestinian) factions of the early Christian church came into conflict, a great effort was made to rewrite the gospels so the Jewish priesthood were the bad guys and the Romans were innocent of his execution. (Hence the whole Pontius Pilate dialogue). The Gentile Christians did not want to alienate the Roman authorities by emphasizing their Jewish, revolutionary roots, especially since Jewish freedom fighters were fighting pitched battles with the Roman Legions. This is the kind of stuff these scholars study: the history of the church, not its religious doctrine.