Every Source for The Chosen's "Anointing the Passover Lamb" Goes Back to the Same Person

The bananas process of chasing down a story in The Chosen, and how biblical misinformation spreads

Photo by matthew Feeney on Unsplash

So, if you follow me on social media, you might know I’ve had some grit in my mouth about something that happened on The Chosen. And I just can’t stop thinking about it. 

This comes from Season 4, Episode 8 of The Chosen. At the beginning of the episode, King David anoints his Passover Lamb’s feet, six days before the sacrifice. Then, of course, Mary anoints Jesus six days before his death on his feet. This also shows up in the novelization of the TV show.

I was curious about the origins of this claim, so I checked… well, I checked just about everything you could. I consulted the Old Testament, the New Testament, the apocrypha, Philo, Josephus, the Mishnah, both Talmuds, Maimonides, Melito of Sardis, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Ray Brown’s commentary on John, Craig Keener’s commentary on John, Sarna’s commentary on Exodus, Darrel Bock’s book on Jesus and the Passover, and I talked to (at last count) three rabbis. And I was stumped. At least with the stupid goat sex thing from The Chosen I could find a (weak) lead in Herodatus. This one was a total stumper. Where did this idea come from? (Hey Dallas Jenkins, put me on the show.)

Here is what we can say for sure: the story that a Passover lamb was anointed on the head and feet, like Jesus, at daily intervals before Passover, is not a rabbinic tradition in any sense of the word.¹ It’s not Second Temple, it’s not Mishnaic, it’s not Talmudic, it’s not medieval, it’s not kabbalistic, it’s not part of patristic adversus Judeaos literature, it’s not anything. It is, in no way, shape, or form, a genuine tradition that reflects actual Jewish practice at the time that Jesus lived, nor is it a product of later rabbinic scholarship. The anointing at Bethany has absolutely nothing to with the corresponding anointing of a Passover lamb, and there are no historical sources that show otherwise.

You know the old Jewish joke “if you ask three rabbis, you’ll get four opinions?” I asked three rabbis, two scholars of rabbinic literature, and every classic source for rabbinic literature I could think of, and got one opinion: “what the hell are you talking about?” 

The “two anointings of the lamb for Passover” story is probably a modern invention to explain the two anointings at Bethany, one of which is recorded in Matthew/Mark, and the other in John. The ninth of Nisan, six days before Passover, is not an important date in Hebrew or Jewish writing — but it is flagged in the Gospel of John, which strongly suggests the origins of the story are Christian, not Jewish. And, as we’ll see, it’s incredibly difficult to find evidence that this story is ancient. Most sources for it are modern. And by modern, I mean “in the last twenty years.” Everything I have ever been able to find about this story goes back to one guy. Or specifically, one guy and his guy. And they won’t tell me who that guy is. 

This is some real skullduggery, people.  

I am going to attempt to contact-trace this contagion back to its source through as many channels as I can reconstruct. Along the way, I kept talking to other people who had heard this, but after investigating it themselves, decided the story wasn’t reliable.

So here are my two big questions: how did this idea of anointing the Passover lamb end up in The Chosen? And, where did it come from?

2024: Jalein Abania and The Chosen

Jalein Abania is a social media influencer who is well known for her skits and and “Bible Tea.” She was brought on in some kind of capacity for The Chosen (I believe she’s a social media director, or at least aftershow participant — she’s listed in The Chosen credits as “behind the scenes”) because of her social media posts. (Mad respect, gal, from one terminally online lady to another). 

Anyway, Jalein Abania is the the reason why the idea of anointing the Passover lambs on the head and feet before Passover at daily intervals is in The Chosen at all (start at min 45). Jalein Abania describes the anointing as follows: six days before Passover, you anoint the lamb’s feet, and two days before Passover, you anoint his head. This corresponds to the two anointings of Jesus on his head (Matthew and Mark) and feet (Luke and John). Abania says this practice of anointing the lamb at daily intervals is a practice that comes from Exodus 12, in this video from September 2022.

But it’s not from Exodus 12. She’s just wrong about that. It didn’t come from Exodus or anywhere else in the Bible. In the Episode 4.8 aftershow Dallas Jenkins just talks through this section as though lots of scholars and theologians have seen this Exodus/John parallel, even though no one has any idea what he’s talking about because we read our Bibles and saw it wasn’t there. (As we’ll see, I think I have some ideas of why everyone seems so confident this is a real Exodus/John parallel.)

So where did Jalein Abania get it?

The most likely option, I believe, is the website Bible Reference. This is a website with psychotic search engine optimization and shows up basically every time you google a Bible story. Bible Reference is, probably, one of the “superspreaders” of the “Passover lamb’s anointing” myth. We’ll talk more about it later.

2022: Mount of Olives Blog

Another possible source for Jalein Abania, though, is this 2022 blog from Mount of Olives. Its source may also be Bible Reference, but the writer did not recall.

Six days before Passover, the lambs were selected. Then they could be brought in, often into the family home, and inspected for five days. The legs, ankles, and feet were carefully examined to ensure that they were free of blemishes, as they are easily damaged or marked on the rocky hillsides. The anointing oil would then be rubbed into the ankles and feet, after which they would be examined for another five days.

So six days before Passover, Jesus is at someone's house in Bethany and is anointed for burial through the application of pure nard on His feet and ankles. That was His first anointing before His crucifixion.

Two days before Passover, he received a second anointing. To announce that they were free from disease or blemishes, the Passover lamb was anointed a second time on their heads. This is in contrast to the first time, when they were on their feet six days earlier. Two days before His execution, Jesus was anointed on the head to indicate that he was well, without illness or defect.

Passover lambs were first anointed on the feet six days before Passover, then on the head two days before, and then they were sacrificed at the ninth hour on Passover (which is Nissan 14).

So I emailed them about this, and after an exchange and without me prompting them at all, the customer service team realized they were wrong about this, consulted an encyclopedia, and told me they intended to take it down. And they gave me a coupon.

What nice people!

The Mount of Olives people weren’t able to give me a definite source, but given their SEO I think Bible Reference is probably the most likely culprit. I wasn’t able to make any definitive claims but since it postdates the earliest Bible Reference quote of this tradition (below) I think it’s a safe bet.

2021: The Bible Reference Super Spreader Event

The big superspreader of this, which would show up when people googled Mark 14 on the first page of search results, is Bible Reference. The earliest reference to this anointing story is this page in 2021.

If you look at the Internet Archive version, you can see that the reference to anointing the lamb’s feet before Passover was published in 2021, and goes all the way up until July 5, 2024. That’s because July 5, 2024 is when I emailed with the editor of Bible Reference, whose name is Jeff. Jeff, who is a real gentleman and very pleasant to correspond with, is not the writer of the original entry — just the editor of Bible Reference in general. Jeff showed me some other examples in Bible Reference where writers have used sources like “there’s a later legend” or “I’ve heard,” but are clearly marked off as known just-so stories about the Bible with no particular source — only later legends attached to certain Bible verses and circulate in Christian spaces. (Which, I would argue, have value in being documented as such, as long as they are distinguished from historical claims.) When Jeff reached out to the original writer of this Mark commentary, the writer was not able to give Jeff a more firm source than “I’ve heard it.” This one, as Jeff put it, got by him. Mistakes happen.

So Bible Reference is probably our major superspreader for the myth. It is on the first page of every Google search for the Bible. It’s optimized to hell and back. This is where everyone who’s defended The Chosen on this point to me has pointed. I think as far as spreading this myth goes, they’re the information equivalent of a wedding in June 2020. And, we should note that to their immense credit they have taken down this reference after trying to find a historical source for it and failing. As they noted, this claim was sourced from the realm of “I heard it from someone” only.

In fact, the references to anointing the Passover Lamb start to show up before Bible Reference adds it, which is probably the source for the “I heard it” from the Mark editor in this Gospel. Triton World Missionary Center has it in May 12, 2018. The writer is Michael R., who is incredibly elusive, and the contact number on the website goes to a dead person. 

And, it shows up in this blog from 2017. This blog, Inspired2Think by Andy, is also the source in Erika Grey’s 2020 book Gifts of the Magi – which also makes the “anointing the feet and head” claim.

The source for Inspired2Think, and thus Erika Gray, is this sermon by Shane Willard.

So here’s where things get weird. The claim that a lamb’s feet and head were anointed in the week before Passover is, overall, not as common as other John typologies. It’s far more common to see Jesus’s triumphal entry likened to selecting a lamb for Passover on the 10th of Nissan – this goes back in secondary English language literature to at least Lightfoot. The claim of anointing the feet and head of the lamb is far more specific and difficult to pin down. 

The Bible Reference website’s writer’s claim that “he heard it somewhere” makes sense because you do see a number of textual references to this idea in pop Christian media through the 2010s. There’s hits for this idea on blogs, youtube videos, and social media between 2021 (when Bible Reference “heard it”) and 2010. You can find it in this 2022 sermon (which is more general about the idea of using oil on lambs to protect them from blemishes as a matter of course). You can also see it in these blog posts that cite sources for a number of claims but seem to conspicuously dodge a source for the “anointing the lamb’s feet” tradition. All after 2010.

But that’s the cutoff.

There are NO GOOGLEABLE RESULTS FOR THE LAMB ANOINTING TRADITION THAT PREDATE 2010 that I can find. And NONE in Google Books or in any academic source I can find.

NONE.

But they start appearing after 2010. Which is when a pastor named Shane Willard says it.

Who is Shane Willard?

Shane Willard is the director and owner of Shane Willard Ministries. He is an internationally touring speaker who teaches about a number of issues related to the Bible and theology, particularly focusing on the Jewish/Hebrew roots of the Bible:

Shane is mentored by a pastor with rabbinical training, and teaches the context of the Scriptures from a Hebraic perspective. This perspective helps people to see God’s Word in a completely new way and leads them into a more intimate relationship with the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

So, Shane Willard is a speaker, who you can hire to come teach your church about Jewish and Hebrew traditions. The reason why he is qualified to teach these things is because of his mentor, who taught them to him.

Shane Willard has degrees in theology and counseling, according to this byline. According to this sermon he has a MA in psychiatry. I have never been able to figure out exactly where he got these degrees – in his sermons he always calls it “Bible college,” and there’s a few possible suspects in the South Carolina area where he’s from and still based, but this would have probably been in the mid 1990s and I haven’t been able to confirm which one. Nonetheless- the claim to Shane Willard’s expertise is not his degrees, which are nowhere listed as coming from any particular school. (You can look yourself). The expertise, and the reason why you should hire him and buy his stuff, is that he has been taught this by a pastor with rabbinic training. 

I emailed Shane Willard’s secretary asking about the identity of the pastor trained in rabbinics who has taught Shane Willard. I was told I could not have that information. 

So, we have a guy with an anonymous teacher, and anonymous degrees, who is traveling the world and selling Bible classes. And you can’t know (in the information that is available for free online – maybe the works cited are behind paywalls) where he’s getting this information.

Okay, well, I’m no elitist. Just because you don’t have a high-end degree or have a super cool and widely admired teacher doesn’t mean you can’t learn and be a great teacher yourself. Let’s take a look at the teachings that are available online and see how they are!

Shane Willard and the Bible

I watched a few of Shane Willard’s sermons and read others in longform. This basically turned into a turkey shoot as I realized that basically every time Shane Willard turned to the text of the Bible itself it got bonkers, y’all. 

A lot of Shane Willard’s material is not attempting to be historical and just generally encourages the audience to love their neighbors, love God, and be good to each other. I can’t find a mean thing to say about that. If you find that material inspiring or helpful, please do. I’ll file that under the “rule of faith.” (Honestly, I had the same pained feeling while watching some of this that I had reading Joshua Butler last year — this would all be emotionally easier to debunk if I could detect the voice of a power-mad jackass in the material. But I really couldn’t. You may feel differently. You may know things I don’t.)

All I can speak to is the material I was able to access that wasn’t paywalled (I’m not going to spend hundreds of dollars on my own free blog — I give this away for free and I’ll even tell you where I went to “Bible college”), and specifically the historical claims made in them.

Let’s just do a quick hit list from this sermon right here:

15:54 - The Torah says you should stone prostitutes and can’t marry gentiles.

It doesn’t, and the Talmud doesn’t either. The Torah says a man must not make his daughter do sex work (Lev 19:29), and that the wages of sex work must not be used to fulfill a vow in the Temple (Deut 23:18). But neither text says anything about stoning a sex worker. 

Likewise, the Torah says that if a woman had defrauded her husband by pretending to be a virgin when she was married then she should be stoned, but it says nothing about sex work (Deut 22:13-21). Also, remember you have to pay more to marry a virgin than to marry another woman, so there’s also a financial crime here.

Nor does the Torah say you can’t marry a gentile. There’s a whole passage in Deuteronomy 21 about how to marry a war captive. Moses’s wife was a Cushite/Ethiopian, not a Hebrew (Num 12:1). The idea that marrying a gentile is suspect doesn’t start to show up until Ezra, and later rabbis allowed for marrying converted gentiles. But it’s only during the rocky start of the early Second Temple era that there’s general condemnation of marrying gentiles.

16:23 The Torah says you can’t touch your own poop.

No it doesn’t. Open-air excrement is presumed unclean in Deut 23:12-14 and God forbids defecating openly in camp, and excrement is assumed to be unclean in Ezekiel 4. But the Torah doesn’t say anything about not touching your poop. The assumption that poop itself is ritually unclean is a prophetic idea. It’s not in Torah. Also, these texts make no distinction between your poop and someone else’s poop. Finally, you CAN touch unclean things in Torah. You just can’t touch sacred objects or eat sacred foods until you’ve been clean. 

The Talmud does clarify some rules regarding poop and prayer. But there’s nothing about not touching your own poop, just how to poop and clean yourself off before prayer.

17:38 - In Acts Peter eats pork and brings it to Jerusalem.

He doesn’t. This seems like a creative rereading of Acts 10-11, where Peter actually never eats anything unclean at all. But the claim itself – Peter ate pork in Jerusalem – is false. God tells him in a vision to eat something unclean. Peter doesn’t do it either in the vision or in real life.

25:48 - The Torah and nomos are two different things.

Nope. Nomos is just a translation of the word “law.” While Paul uses the word nomos to refer to a number of “laws,” he does use it to mean “the Torah” too. Paul uses the word nomos to mean “the Torah” all over his letters (Rom 2:14, 3:21, 7:22, etc.) 

27:25 - Another form of the word Torah is ora, which means light.

No, they’re just different words. That’s like saying “do” is another form of the word “dog.”

I think you get the idea.

Now, I got this from an old video of Shane Willard’s that shares a title with a video that is now for sale on his website. Is it possible he’s improved since then? Maybe! But I’m not gonna pay any forty damn dollars to find out. 

But here’s the thing. These claims are not reducible to Shane Willard learning things from a rogue rabbi, or from a pastor who is repeating garbled things from a rabbi. A lot of this is much better explained by Shane Willard just not looking things up in his own Bible, which he has in his house, and is translated into English, and is his own scripture, and is a really short book, and he apparently went to college to learn about. And yet, from this publicly available material, it’s hard to make the claim that Shane Willard knows his Bible very well. Let alone rabbinic literature. 

And as for the rabbinic material… well, you’ll see.

Shane Willard and the Rabbis

So remember that the big claim throughout Shane Willard’s material is that he has learned all this Jewish background literature from a pastor who learned it from a rabbi whose name I am not allowed to know. So what can we learn about this pastor/rabbi?

The claim here is, of course, basically that at best Shane Willard can teach third hand information. Shane Willard heard it from A, who heard it from B. By the time we get to Shane Willard, it’s possible the information is hashed, as it is during the closer jump from “Shane Willard’s Bible” to “Shane Willard’s sermons.” But nonetheless – even in this form, can we discern anything about this pastor and this rabbi from these sermons?

One thing I noticed is that a lot of Shane Willard’s statements sound a lot like things that I’d heard Rob Bell say back in the Grand Rapids days and most of them appear in NOOMA videos. You may remember the following: the rabbis said that scripture is like a diamond with seventy facets and means many things, the phrase “healing in his wings” being the tassels on Jesus’s prayer shawl, Zebedee being proud his sons left the boat to go study with a famous rabbi, the name YHWH sounds like breath (he even makes the same old Rob Bell joke about Moses asking for God’s name and God saying jibberish), etc. A ton of these sermons are easily traceable to NOOMA videos and Rob Bell sermons. It’s possible Shane Willard is hearing some of this from some common source Rob Bell also learned from, but I think a lot of this is just directly cribbed from Rob Bell media produced between 2004-2008.² There’s also some more widespread myths in Shane Willard’s sermons that also show up in Rob Bell but probably predate him; i.e., the idea that the “yoke of a rabbi” is the rabbi’s way of living, which is a pretty standard way of reading Matthew and probably comes from Matthew itself.

At any rate, the bulk of Shane Willard’s claims about rabbis are familiar as material that generally circulates in Christian space; e.g., material that comes from from Rob Bell and from Ray Vander Laan (particularly the process of teaching a rabbi, which I’ve already evaluated the issues with here.) There’s also some material that’s possibly from dual stream – i.e., Shane Willard’s ideas about the “rabbi with authority”³ are discernable from Rob Bell and Ray Vander Laan (remember that Rob Bell drew heavily on Ray Vander Laan, they were both Grand Rapids products) and the “dust of the rabbi” idea in that same sermon come from Ray Vander Laan and was popularized by Lois Tverberg.

Heck, Shane Willard’s even got Ray Vander Laan’s dumb goat sex thing:

Remember this also made it into The Chosen.

There’s also a tendency in Shane Willard’s teaching to have some kind of actual historical reference but to mislabel it. In this sermon at 43:16 Willard describes a rabbinic parable about a rigid oak and a flexible reed in the wind. This is actually from Aesop, and the reed shaken by the wind in the Synoptic Gospels isn’t a positive image. Willard frames this as a bit of a judgment about John the Baptist – he wasn’t flexible. Which is just not what the passage says. There’s also some close-but-not-total mistakes, like saying that rabbinic literature teaches the soul remains around the body for three days and that’s why Lazarus being raised after four days is a big deal (45:07). Pirke Rabbi Eliezer and Genesis Rabbah actually have it as between three and seven – which is the origin of sitting shiva over a body.

So these are all things I believe that Shane Willard heard in a garbled form through standard issue Hebrew Roots Christians/Messianic Jewish circuits, or from pastors borrowing from that. Most of this could have come from Rob Bell, Ray Vander Laan, and Lois Tverberg, all of whose material would have been completely accessible at the time that Shane Willard was starting between 2008-2012. These could have been influences for the person who taught Shane Willard, too.

What I don’t believe these stories came from is from close attendance to a rabbi or from contact with anyone with rabbinic training. These claims do not seem like they were made with the oversight of a rabbi. They are just too wrong. The presence of an erudite rabbi cannot be detected in this material. Either rabbis were far removed from this process, or had no control over the final form of the teaching. The claim that this is all coming from someone who studied rabbinic literature does not hold water when it is compared to the teaching itself.

So that’s the “generalized bad history” strata – it seems like it comes from other pastors or teachers who are semi-competently or incompetently handling historical material. 

But: then there’s some total head-scratchers in the Shane Willard canon. Like this thing about the “disposition of the messiah.” The idea is that three judges would test a prophet among the rabbis by discerning whether or not he had the traits of God that are named in Exodus 34.

A three-person beit din is a pretty widely established Orthodox idea that comes from Tractate Sanhedrin about the smallest court. But Maimonides’s exhaustive treatment of how to test a prophet includes no mention of this – the prophet is tested for his fidelity to Torah and the Mosaic tradition and accuracy of his predictions.⁴ And none of the rabbis I spoke to had ever heard the term “disposition of messiah.” In fact, the only other place I can find a reference to this idea is this blog.

And LOOK WHO HE JUST WENT TO GO SEE SPEAK BEFORE HE WROTE THIS.

This screenshot was taken at 1:19 in the morning. There’s something wrong with me.

(I actually thought for a second that Fred Williams might be our elusive rabbinics-trained pastor/mentor since he’s also based in South Carolina and his blog has a decidedly Hebrew Roots flavor. He’s also older than Shane Willard. But I can’t make any personal link between them, and I can’t find any “rabbinic traditions” where Fred Williams makes an odd claim that obviously predates the same odd claim from Shame Willard. So I think this is excessively speculative.)

This is actually not the only thing you can find that Shane Willard has said that only appears online through people who have heard Shane Willard speak. Another one is this: that the “pictographic meaning” of the word “prayer” in Hebrew (because every letter of Hebrew is a picture, doncha know) is “a turning of the head, to face the one, who can bear the burden.” Shane Willard taught this in 2008, and so did Lawrence Kirby at Impact Church in New Zealand in 2021. Where Shane Willard spoke, in 2019. These are the only sources I can find for this.

So where is the voice coming from? Who is the pastor who taught Shane Willard these things, who learned from a rabbi?

Candidates for the Mentor

Suspect One: No mentor.

One possibility, of course, is that there is no mentor, or no single mentor. Rather this is a collection of pastors who absorb things from blogs and popular media (for example, the idea that Hebrew letters are a series of pictures, not just an alphabet) and then exchange ideas. Then, some of these stories are dressed up in the same way Shane Willard dressed up the Acts 10-11 narrative. In the Shane Willard version of Acts 10-11, instead of Peter learning not to treat any person as unclean through the image of eating unclean animals, Peter literally took pork to Jerusalem and ate it in front of his opponents to demonstrate what he had learned. In the same way, we might suppose that the traditional ideas of the thirteen attributes of God, testing prophets, and the three-person beit din are dressed up into one coherent narrative about determining if someone has the “disposition of a messiah.”

Suspect Two: Invisible mentor.

The second possibility is that there is a mentor, but he has left virtually no digital footprint for many of these claims in his own teaching and preaching and thus I have not been able to find him. Even so, this mentor’s training in rabbinics is highly suspect to the point that Shane Willard really should be asking him some questions. Maybe we could establish a beit din to see if this person actually knows very much about rabbis, but I leave that to my Jewish neighbors.

Suspect Three: Charismatic mentor.

I should note here that I actually asked Shane Willard Ministries directly about this theory and was told “no,” but I am including it here because, frankly, that’s exactly what I would expect them to say whether it was true or not.

There is only one other minister who is listed as a speaker with available media for sale on Shane Willard’s website, and that is a man named Clark Taylor. Clark Taylor is also said to be Shane Willard’s mentor:

Pastor Clark Taylor is a powerful biblical teacher and personal mentor of Shane Willard. Through looking at scripture from a Hebraic perspective, Pastor Clark enables followers of Jesus to embrace, through understanding, their spiritual heritage, while unlocking their God-given destiny. Clark's ministry has made significant impact in multi-generational cultures all over the world through his inspired insights in scripture. Through the practical teaching ministry of Clark Taylor you will learn how to apply God's Word to your everyday life in fresh and adventurous ways! 

On page 118 of Clark Taylor’s biography (more on that in a minute) he met Shane Willard circa 1997 when Shane would have been in his early 20s. Clark Taylor and Shane Willard met at the Cathedral of Praise in Charleston in the late 1990s, during a stretch in which Clark Taylor had departed from his home in Brisbane, Australia and left his ministry after he was found to be having an affair with his secretary.⁵ So Clark Taylor has definitely been there during most of Shane Willard’s ministry, and they clearly still collaborate today. Is this our mysterious rabbinics teacher?

Clark Taylor was arguably Australia’s first televangelist, founder of a long list of Christian organizations and schools, and has left an enormous paper trail over the course of his long and multi-national career. Do these record suggest he may be Shane Willard’s rabbinic mentor? 

So I bought Clark Taylor’s biography, and there’s not much in the book that suggests that Clark Taylor ever studied rabbinics – or much of anything in any formal settings. This owes in large part to Clark Taylor’s rough upbringing in rural Australia and a generalized sense of skepticism towards orders and authorities. We do learn from this book that Clark Taylor went to King’s College at the University of Queensland. In the book, Clark credits his ability to read Hebrew well with charismatic gifting:

(If this story is true, I think Clark Taylor’s Hebrew is probably much better than he lets on, or at least it was at the time of the exam.)

But this put a bug in my ear – that Clark Taylor, Shane Willard’s mentor, sees himself as directly taught by God, including on academic matters. Towards the end of his formal education, Taylor had a charismatic experience of baptism in the Spirit, felt he had been healed from a severe and extended illness, and resigned from Methodist ministry. (Whether he finished his studies is not clear but I think he didn’t.)

And so Clark began to hear directly from God, at the “school of the Spirit.”

Again and again in the book Clark Taylor reports words he received directly from God and that this became the source of his teaching. He does indicate in this one story that he’s very good at Hebrew, but this would have been years earlier and I don’t know how often he uses it now. Today he is part of the Australian Company of Seers.

So between these things: that Shane Willard speaks pretty regularly at charismatic churches, that his most public-facing mentor believes he receives information directly from God including academic information, that Shane Willard calls Jesus his rabbi, and that Shane Willard has at least three completely sui generis rabbinic traditions to his name⁶ — I did have to ask:

Is the rabbi who is giving Shane this information Jesus of Nazareth? Through a charismatic mentor?

Because that actually would make sense with the circles Shane Willard operates in, who teaches him, the way he talks about and thinks about Jesus, and above all, the fact that he is the earliest source for some purported rabbinic traditions.

Two days ago, I was ready to put all the chips on this theory and publish it, arguing that the “charismatic teacher theory” makes the best sense of the data. But then I got an email from someone who admires Shane Willard a great deal and said he knew exactly who his mentor was.

Suspect Four: Hebrew Roots mentor.

Because Shane Willard Ministries would not give me a name or a source for this Passover lamb thing, I am not able to independently verify that the name a reader gave me as the possible rabbinics mentor for Shane Willard is, in fact, the source for these claims. What I was able to do was look at the putative Hebrew Roots mentor’s old website, and see that there are some plausible links between this website’s articles and Shane Willard.

You might notice I am not using the possible Hebrew Roots mentor’s name in the body of this article. That’s 1) out of deference to the kindness of the man who gave me this name in the first place 2) because I can’t independently verify his identity and 3) because, for some reason I don’t know, Shane Willard Ministries does not want this information to be public. There could be personal reasons here that I don’t want to put my nose into. I don’t want to hurt anyone, so in the body of this article itself, I’m going to use the name “David King” when I would otherwise write the name of the mentor himself. This way, it won’t show up on google hits for David King’s real name. However, if you look at the links, you will see the actual name.

So what’s the Hebrew Roots movement? The Hebrew Roots movement is a non-denominational Christian movement that seeks to live more like Jesus by seeking to live more like Jews. It also draws heavily from the Gospel of Matthew, which insists on the importance of Torah for all followers of Jesus, whereas Paul insists that at least gentiles are not beholden to it.⁷ It tends to be characterized by emphasizing the Sabbath and Jewish festivals, and by using the Mishnah and Talmud as sources to understand the Gospels while insisting that these texts are not canon for Christians.

I would characterize David King’s writings, insofar as I was able to access them, as lying somewhere at the intersection of “an actual seminary degree,” “ambitious amateur interest,” and “fringe scholarship.” As always, things could have changed since. To give King credit, he knows a lot of terms and concepts that are usually unattested in Hebrew Roots pop history (after my tour of pop history, I’m impressed when anyone knows what a Targum is). A reader sent me a file of King’s correspondence with parishioners, and King does a consistently good job shooting down myths about the New Testament in these letters and appealing to first century sources for first century history — like Josephus. In this sermon he usually makes it clear when he’s talking about a hypothesis or theory rather than academic consensus — something that his neighbors in the popular history sphere rarely do. He keeps the focus in the field of what can be known and not excessively speculating. He also regularly distinguishes between Jewish practices that are characteristic of the centuries covered in the Bible and those that come later — again, another thing that pop historians repeatedly struggle to do. Do I agree with most of what he wrote? No. But he’s not a fool or a crank, and in a world where a lot of Assemblies of God ministers eschew seminary altogether, you can hear that King put some work in. (That said, there is a lot of over-mystifying Hebrew here and assigning significance to masculine and feminine endings in Hebrew).

But, a lot of this material is dated or speculative — for instance, David King falls into the same Safrai pit that Vander Laan, Tverberg, Bell, and The Chosen fell into by arguing for generalized male literacy in Palestine in the early first century. That’s not his fault, and he’s not the first person to fall into it. There’s also the problematic idea David King espouses that our New Testaments are erroneously translated from the Greek rather than paying attention to the Hebrew behind them. Depending on how literally he means this, this is either a dated speculative field of scholarship (i.e., back-translating the words of Jesus in the New Testament into Aramaic) or nonsense that depends on unsupported fringe claims about what the New Testament is. David King does claim that Revelation was originally written in Hebrew, so there is a lot of fringe scholarship happening here.

There’s also some material that has an appropriative edge to his — i.e., evaluating the Torah as good but the the Oral Torah as bad. Similarly, King suggests that Jesus and his followers denounced the practice of putting a hedge around Torah, which the non-Jesus-affiliated rabbis insisted on doing. However, the lines between “Jesus” and “rigorous Oral Torah” might not be as clear as King thinks they are. The Matthean Antitheses are extremely recognizable as exactly this kind of practice. In other words, this material is probably still not reflective of someone who is an actual expert in rabbinic literature, and most rabbis will probably still disagree with this work.

So, if David King is in fact the mentor, we still have some problems. The first is that evidence that rabbinic history deeply informs Shane Willard’s work is still absent. It doesn’t seem to be coming from King himself. From what I see on David King’s website, King favors the Old Testament as an intertext for the New Testament far more than he prefers “rabbinic traditions,” and King’s correspondence with his parishioners is pretty conservative and sticks to the texts of the Bible itself. Shane Willard seems to tilt the other way. So, it’s not even clear to me how many of these rabbi stories are actually coming from David King, based on the information I have access to.

Secondly, even if David King is the source for these traditions, we are still stuck with the fact that that not a lot of genuine information about rabbis is getting into Shane Willard’s teaching. The rabbis I have talked to, and shown Shane Willard’s work to, have no idea what Shane Willard is talking about.

The third problem is the biggest: we still don’t have a source for the claim that anointing the Passover Lamb’s feet is a thing people used to do before Passover. David King’s website that archives his material is not complete on the Wayback Machine, and this reference cannot be found in his teaching. Shane Willard is still the earliest source for this that we can find. This means that none of the above hypotheses — that this material is coming from pastors goosing up things they’ve heard on NOOMA, or from charismatic experiences, and so on — really can be ruled out at this stage. The trail is still cold. We still just have this rogue rabbinic tradition that we can trace to Shane Willard and no further.

And yet, it made it all the way to The Chosen. All the way from this one person, through pop history after pop history source, into a TV show that broadcast this story and taught it as fact to millions of people. And it still doesn’t go back further than Shane Willard.

So let’s return to The Chosen.

What Does All This Have to Do with The Chosen?

One way or another, the claim that the feet and head of the Passover lamb were anointed before the sacrifice made it into The Chosen. The earliest source for this claim is not a rabbi. It’s not a historical text. It’s a guy from South Carolina, 15 years ago. Or more accurately, it’s the guy that guy says he heard it from, who may be a second guy from South Carolina.

So, all in, here is the best case, 100-percent fact based version of the story:

Shane Willard has an anonymous second-hand source for a rabbi who has a claim about Jesus’s last week before Passover that no other rabbi knows. Shane Willard is the earliest discernible source for latter claims, and for one reason or another we are not allowed to know who first made some of these claims. This made it into a number of sermons and popular sources until it finally reached the Bible Reference webpage. From there or from other channels it made it into The Chosen and was broadcast to a massive audience and explained as a well-known historical truism. 

There are more speculative possibilities, but let’s leave it at that.

Jalein Abania should not be dragged too cruelly for (I suspect) trusting a webpage called “Bible Reference.” What she shouldn’t have been able to do is make historical claims that were put in a TV show that frequently touts its commitment to using the best of academic scholarship to do their work. Someone should have stopped this. Jalein Abania was not ready for that, and she shouldn’t have been put in that position.

The crew of The Chosen, though, I think deserve a little dragging. I really enjoy The Chosen, and I’m not shy about it, but this was a real mistake. They have access to all the Bible scholarship they want, and should not have made the same mistake she did. (That said, Jalein Abania may want to hold off on teaching the history of the Bible for a hot minute until she learns her way around the literature a little better.) To take a claim made by your team’s social media influencer about rabbinic history and not check it with your stable of scholars is ridiculous. To take a claim about what she said about the text of the Bible itself, which you could easily check on your own cell phone, is psychotic. Jalein Abania’s “Bible Tea” should have been checked against at least Exodus and also an academic source before it made it into the show. The team of The Chosen can’t beg out here that they don’t have access to a JSTOR account. They have academic advisors.

This is all assuming that this does not have some other source I don’t know about, but at this point, I don’t see what that source possibly could be. I am positively dying to watch The Chosen Season 4 roundtables on this because I can’t wait to see what they say about it.

Does This Matter?

So, I have a feeling what some of you might be thinking right now: does it matter? Why is Laura Robinson so obsessed with figuring out how this claim made it into The Chosen?

Is this the biggest deal in the world? No. In the end it doesn’t matter that much if Jews anointed their lambs’ feet before Passover. The sun will keep coming up, and cows will keep giving milk, and democracy will keep fading, whether The Chosen was historically accurate about this claim or not.

But — it also does matter. Because these ideas – that Jesus was perfectly fulfilling even minute and obvious forms of prophecy in a way that only the stupid and evil could ignore – actually informs a lot of how how we think about non-Christians, particularly at the time that Jesus was alive.

It actually does matter that Paul, and others like him, had to creatively reconsider their religious traditions after their experiences of Jesus, rather than getting pointed directly to him by a barrage of obvious material.

And it actually does matter how we represent our neighbors’ historical traditions – not as dim shadows of our own superior ones but as traditions and practices in their own right.

I talked about Bible Reference being the superspreader event for this myth but, in reality, the new superspreader is The Chosen. This myth has now been taught has fact to a massive new audience, who will repeat it to people, and will continue to spread this. The Chosen clearly thinks of itself as a kind of ministry — that’s how the crew talks about it. Is spreading easily debunkable historical misinformation part of its calling?

And the truth matters. Let me quote from a Messianic columnist whose patience for these urban legends has also run out:

Balderdash teachers rely on the vastness of Jewish literature and their students’ unfamiliarity with Jewish sources and tradition. Their fabrications are passed from person to person like urban legends, often growing in the retelling by gullible listeners, just because the stories often sound so fascinating.

This is a quote from Daniel Thomas Lancaster, who notes that the field of “rabbinic origins of the Bible” is ripe for falsehoods because they prey on our desire for knowledge and the admitted inaccessibility and difficulty of the texts they claim to come from. I understand that people want to learn more about the history of the time of Jesus, because it gives us a kind of access to him. But we shouldn’t just say things. We shouldn’t just repeat what we’ve heard. We owe it to our neighbors, our students, and ourselves to actually investigate the truth before we repeat it.

Because if we don’t have truth about the gospels, it raises the uncomfortable question of whether we have the gospel at all. If the best supports and illuminations we can present about the life of Jesus are not true, then what are we communicating to people when we tell them the gospel at all?

I’d say: not much. 

And we should take that seriously.

Also, a final note to Shane Willard: I appreciate that you want to protect your mentor’s privacy, but you can’t have it both ways. It can’t both be true that your mentor must remain anonymous but also your mentor is the reason why people should buy your material. I don’t know if David King (as I named him above) is actually your source. But if you want to protect his privacy, don’t use the concept of David King as a reason why you’re trustworthy. In fact, very few historians appeal to their teachers for reasons why their teaching is credible.⁸ They appeal to sources! Just put a works cited on the information page for all your projects. Or make a point of indicating what text you’re thinking of when you name some rabbinic tradition.

I got so stumped trying to find your rabbinic sources that I started to think you were getting them directly from Jesus. I still think that might be it. That’s not really a place someone should find themselves while listening to your history courses. You, personally, remain the oldest discernible source for some of your claims about this supposed rabbinic practice. If you can’t provide an older source that shows that you’re not making it up, reconsider whether you should be making the claim at all.

And while we’re at it: Dallas Jenkins, you can’t have it both ways either. I know, and don’t complain, that large portions of The Chosen are invented for the purpose of making good television, and I know that you appeal to this fact when people (usually unreasonably) criticize you for making something up. I think some of these inventive character elements are the best stuff on the show. It’s fun and interesting and keeps us hooked. I genuinely love it.

But I don’t feel the same way about inventing historical claims. Once you have switched to the aftershow format, and you’re explaining the history behind the show, you can’t use that explanation anymore. That part has to be historically sourced, and it’s hard to tell if you guys tried to verify it in this case. Based on how receptive Bible Reference was to me writing in and asking for clarification, I think that Jenkins and anyone else who tried to chase down the origins of this story would have had a similarly receptive audience.

If one of the reasons why people should watch the show is that it’s at once creative and adventurous with the stories of the disciples, but still very faithful to the text and academically checked and sourced, exactly how is material like this getting into the show? Are you actually investigating things carefully (you sounded pretty confident that child sacrifice happened at the Paneas! Why?!) and giving your academic advisors veto power over claims you want to make? Or do you count on them to go along with what your team wants to show?

Because if the team behind this show is going to claim to take the history seriously, this should be obvious in the text of the show itself. And in this situation, I did something you all should have done before you made historical claims on TV - I figured out out where the claim came from. And I don’t work for your show. You guys should do the same.

1. As always, I could have missed something, but at some point it seems like the reason you’re not finding evidence for something is that it doesn’t exist.

Every rabbi I consulted (which included Conservative, Orthodox, Reformed, and Messianic rabbis, three in personal correspondence and others through available sources) denied this is a tradition. Some even denied you could put oil on it while it was cooking.

2. We can establish a literary link between Shane Willard and Rob Bell in this Q and A in which Shane Willard mentions an evangelist filling a San Jose stadium with Oprah in 2014. This is plausibly Rob Bell on the “Life You’ve Always Wanted” tour.

3. However, Willard adds the somewhat novel element that only the best of the best rabbis had authority. I spoke with Ephraim Stone who clarified that actually, all rabbis are understood to have authority (smicha), because they receive it from another rabbi with smicha. If a rabbi’s rulings are in doubt they may be challenged and judged by a beit din but this is not common.

4. From Ephraim Stone: rabbis generally understand prophecy to have ceased, so this is generally academic. Malachi was, in most rabbinic understanding, the last prophet, so a rabbi and a prophet have never actually met. (Ephraim says the possible except is interactions between Dolly Parton and a rabbi).

He also told me that such a small court would not be appropriate for something as high-stakes as determining the validity of prophecy, if such a thing were to occur. He said that if rabbis were to actually consider that someone might be a prophet, a much larger court would be appropriate. This would also intersect with the issue of court sizes for capital crimes, since false prophecy would be a capital crime in the Torah.

Meir Simchah Panzer told me the thirteen attributes of God are a general guide to formation for rabbis, but are not specifically used as a checklist for judgment.

Look at me giving you the names of everyone I learned this from!

5. This relationship is called an “affair” in extent sources (particularly ch 8 from Just a Bloke from the Bush, Clark Taylor’s only authorized biography) but since this woman apparently worked for the ministry, many people today in the United States would call this relationship “adult clergy sexual abuse.”

6. The three being 1) the “disposition of messiah/beit din” 2) the practice of anointing the passover lamb six and two days before the feast and 3) “turn your head, to face the one, who can bear the burden.”

7. This is what I think they say. I can post a later blog about this showing why.

8. I admit my doctoral advisors are hidden in this article as a fun Easter egg, but as readers will note, “I heard this from X” is not a normal thing for me. Historical claims should have historical sources.