Kevin Williamson of ‘The Dispatch’ recently gave his take on the popular religious TV show The Chosen. Noting how the producers took liberty to focus on the ordinary human concerns of the characters rather than on moral lessons that “slide into mythology”, he writes:
There isn’t any way to make a series about the life and career of Jesus that keeps religion at arm’s length (it would be a mistake even to try, I think) but what The Chosen gets right is that what it communicates is a Christian sensibility rather than dogma, theology, or other subjects best left to formal religious instruction per se. It begins with a Jesus and a Jesus movement that are distinctly Jewish and distinctly more than Jewish, a Jesus and an emerging faith that often do not solve followers’ here-and-now problems but instead add significantly to them, putting them at odds with political power, civic and religious authorities, their own friends and families, their own material and social self-interests. Set aside the religious significance of that for the moment and appreciate that this is why The Chosen works as drama rather than as evangelism or apologetics. The Chosen is in fact at its best when it is at its least sentimental and its least comforting. And at its best, The Chosen is very good.
I think he’s right about this. Unintentionally or not, the show presents a kind of realism and “ordinariness” about how genuine faith plays out. Becoming a follower of Jesus doesn’t mean you will have less friction or conflict in your life. It may actually multiply your suffering. You won’t necessarily (or even likely) be healed of your diseases or given all the answers or material comforts. You might find yourself in a minority with a lot enemies and critics and neighbors who laugh at you for your superstitions. To the extent that The Chosen dramatizes these realities, it stands as an antithesis to feel-good sentimentality and prosperity gospel thinking that Christians so easily fall into. I only hope that the show continues to drive this point (er, sensibility) home.
There is one other thing I would add to Williamson’s thoughts. Though The Chosen is at times anachronistic and overblown for the sake of accessibility to a modern audience, it seems to have a mostly accurate understanding of what the historian N.T. Wright in his book Simply Jesus calls the three tensions of history which clashed into a “perfect storm” at the time of Jesus: the Roman Empire, the Jewish religion, and God himself.
The Roman Empire. The first episode of The Chosen opens in Capernaum, a fishing village or town on the Sea of Galilee. Quintus, the local Roman magistrate, is a shrewd and ruthless man with no shortage of ambition. Throughout the show we see him mock, pressure, and threaten the Jews so he can maintain order and collect taxes.
As Americans living many generations after the Revolutionary War, it is hard for us to appreciate the pain and humiliation of living under a violent foreign empire. We have to imagine many things about what the Hebrews would have known and felt, and what historical events were stamped on their collective memory. The Roman general Pompeii had conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC, which means it would have been almost a century of Roman rule by the time Jesus began his ministry. To understand just how agonizing this was and why it sparked so much civil unrest, consider this description from The Drama of Scripture, by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen:
The Romans ruled by force, fear, and intimidation, trampling on the cultural sensitivities of their conquered peoples, taxing them into penury, forcing their own brand of Hellenistic culture down stubborn Jewish throats, and meting out savage punishments for any who opposed their will.
Under this oppressive regime, racial hatred of gentiles increased in Israel. It spilled over to include hatred of any of those among the Jews who would collaborate with Rome, including many of the priests and tax collectors, as well as Roman-appointed King Herod and his cronies. Stronger and stronger grew the common people’s urgent longing for God to return to them and to rule the world from Jerusalem. (p. 128)
The Jewish Faith. At the time of Jesus, there were several competing Jewish factions: the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Sadducees, and the Zealots. These factions disagreed not only in their interpretation of the Old Testament scriptures but over the extent to which they should reject or adopt Greco-Roman culture. The Pharisees became one of the more dominant and influential groups in the synagogues. “The Pharisees were successful because they gave voice to some of the deepest desires of the people of Israel: their longing for liberation, their loyalty to the Torah, and their long-held hope for a renewed kingdom in which God himself would reign over his people” (Bartholomew and Goheen, p. 132).
In The Chosen, it is striking indeed how ardently the Pharisees dedicate themselves to their vocation, and also how they contrast with the surrounding populace. There are constant visuals and character interactions that cast light on the chasm between them, the Roman authorities, the common people, and the ministry of Jesus. And yet when you consider the motives of the Pharisees against the backdrop of foreign occupation and nationalistic fervor, it is easier to understand their religious impulse. They wished to preserve Jewish tradition and remain faithful to the Torah in a time when other Jewish leaders (notably the Sadducees and priests, who were appointed by Rome) frequently sold themselves out and did little to protect the people from an oppressive empire. It also easier to see how the zeal of the Pharisees would have inspired deep feelings of nationalism and revolution among the people.
God Himself. The Jews believed they were chosen by God and that God would liberate his people from the pagans and usher in a new kingdom. But among the Jewish factions there were different, and often conflicting, ideas about how and when this would happen, and how to prepare for it (see again Bartholomew and Goheen, p. 131). The people’s anticipation of a Messiah was thus mingled with disagreement, and therefore a sense of mystery, over how exactly God would act.
When Jesus comes onto the scene, he defies all expectations. The gospel accounts are filled with stories of him claiming to be God’s own son and announcing the arrival of God’s kingdom in himself, thereby subverting the conventional theories about the establishment of a new civil order. What’s more, Jesus predicted that he would suffer, an idea almost totally absent from the prophecies (a key exception being Isaiah 53). N.T. Wright puts it like this:
[The Jews] were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but [God] was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate.” ~Simply Jesus
What I think The Chosen does well is that it dramatizes these three major tensions in a way that feels compelling and basically faithful to the historical context. The Romans are brutal and oppressive; the Jews are full of expectation and poised to revolt; Jesus is always doing things in an upside-down, counter-intuitive fashion. Something big is brewing—something that transcends the personal and the political. And when it explodes the dust won’t necessarily settle into your predictable Hollywood ending.
Richard Rabil, Jr. 