The Murder in The Chosen Doesn’t Work

But not for the reasons I’ve heard

Photo by Anastasija Puskas on Unsplash

This is part of a series on The Chosen. I promise this blog is not usually “all The Chosen, all the time.” I just realized I had a lot I wanted to say about it.

This piece is about theme, narrative, and theology. For a fact check of The Chosen and the Temple of Pan, see this.

For the accuracy of the tradition of anointing a Passover lamb’s feet six days before Passover, see here. For a more thorough explanation into the origins of this relatively recent myth, see here.

---

This post contains spoilers for Episode 4.3, “Moon to Blood,” of The Chosen. If you care about spoilers, please skip this one.

---

Season 4, episode 3 of The Chosen contains a sequence that is, at least in the networks I run in, fairly controversial (and by networks, I mean “me and my mom and two of my closest friends,” I don’t think the rest of you are as obsessed with Jesus and film as I am). This is a sequence in which Thomas’s fiancee Ramah (who is a fictional addition to the show) is stabbed to death by senior centurion Quintus in a mob. The mob was caused by Jesus’s preaching, which Jesus gave with the direct purpose of stirring up the crowds. Though Jesus is not there at the moment Ramah is stabbed, he comes back quickly to see her dying. Though Thomas begs for Ramah to be healed and insists that Jesus can fix it, Jesus says that “it is not her time,” and affirms his love for Thomas. Ramah dies in the square, with Mary Magdalene holding her hand.

Part of why I think this struck a nerve with people is that one of the (frankly, many) things to enjoy about The Chosen was its insistently positive portrayal of women. Though women are among the followers of Jesus in all the Gospels, it’s actually fairly rare to see them in film. The Chosen, though, takes the anonymous women around Jesus and gives them names and backstories – Ramah the winemaker, and Tamara the Cushite. The show also portrays women who are mentioned in the Gospels but rarely make it to the screen – Joanna the wife of Chuza, the mother of John and James, and the wife and mother-in-law of Peter. So in light of this, a scene in which a woman (and arguably something of a fan favorite character) is senselessly killed in front of Jesus during a disturbance he created, in which Jesus does nothing either natural or supernatural to help – felt like a change in tone.

I get the impression from content that surrounds The Chosen that Dallas Jenkins thinks the reasons why people don’t like Ramah’s murder are twofold: one, because it’s upsetting, and two, because it’s not in the Bible. I don’t identify with either of those sentiments. Ramah’s murder is upsetting, but speaking as a woman who’s eaten more than one bowl of cereal in front of The Exorcist, that’s hardly a reason to dislike it as a narrative choice. When it comes to cinema, my appetites are known to be savage, and while the landscape has changed in cinema dramatically in the last twenty years, the Christian filmgoing public may have more gorehounds in the stands than you might expect. It takes more than a sword through the gut to get us to blink. So no, I wasn’t excessively upset or disgusted by the violence. That wasn’t the problem. 

Second, the fact that it’s not in the Bible. This is probably the most common bad-faith criticism Dallas Jenkins et. al. get about The Chosen. On this front, I simply don’t care. In fact, I think it’s great. The Chosen is an adaptation of the Gospels, and adaptations are just that – adaptations. By necessity, material is altered as it changes genres. In this case, the Gospels go from four written texts to one multiseason television show, and to make the Gospels into a new genre you have to change them. A multiseason television show, ideally, has a lot of well-developed characters – which the Gospels don’t have. In the same way you couldn’t make Breaking Bad without Walter White, Jesse Pinkman, and Gus Fring, you can’t make The Chosen without the show’s version of Mary Magdalene, Peter, and Thomas – which wouldn’t happen if you stuck to the details about them that are given in the Gospels. There is a lot of original material in The Chosen, because without it you wouldn’t have a show. You’d have something closer to a verse by verse film adaptation of an individual Gospel, and these movies are the filmgoing equivalent of scrambled egg whites, hold the salt. They’re absolute slogs to get through. No one wants to watch that.

The fact that Ramah is a character in The Chosen is only objectionable if you believe that the concept of making a film adaptation of the Gospels is inherently problematic. I don’t agree. There is nothing wrong with making a film adaptation of a Bible story and making the necessary changes to the story to translate it into a new genre. 

But the changes that are made when adapting a text have to work in the world of the adapted text itself. An adaptation must stand on its own and be internally coherent, and it needs to also be narratively and thematically satisfying. 

In light of this, I think there are three big reasons why the murder of Ramah – which was apparently planned from the beginning of the show – was a misstep. It’s not because it was sad, and it’s not because it’s not in the Bible. It’s because the murder of Ramah 1) does not fit with the in-text explanation of what the Gospels are, 2) because there is no satisfying in-universe explanation for why Jesus allowed it to happen and 3) because it doesn’t explain the role of Thomas in the Gospel of John, which (according to Dallas Jenkins) it was intended to do.

1. The Chosen has a Perspective on What the Gospels Are, and It Doesn’t Fit with Ramah’s Murder Being Omitted

The Chosen insists again and again that the roots of two canonical Gospels, Matthew and John, are the writings of the words and deeds of Jesus that Matthew and John kept on the road. In Season 1 Matthew leaves the tax booth with his writing pad, and Jesus proposes he’ll have a new use for it. This pad becomes the first draft of Matthew’s Gospel, and we often see Matthew writing in it throughout the series as he records Jesus’s words and deeds.

John, later, also gets out a notebook and starts writing, and Matthew buys him parchment and pens as a thoughtful present in Season 4. In the premier of Season 2, we also see John conducting interviews with the disciples when they gather to bury James. 

So the show has a very clear perspective on what the Gospels are – they are texts the disciples produced on the ground with Jesus, and from the living memory of eyewitnesses. We also see that throughout the show Matthew is unusually kindly towards the women, letting them stay in his house. In Season 4, a much older Mary Magdalene calls Matthew “her oldest friend” and Matthew seems to have a crush on her in Season 2. 

So in light of this, it seems beyond belief that someone as tender-hearted as Matthew, whose gospel contains a sustained discussion of persecution and violence on the mission field in Matthew 10 and further references to persecution in Matthew 23, would not record the murder of a member of the community. It is especially unlikely given his closeness to Mary, who (except for Thomas) was closest to Ramah. 

If we allow (as scholars usually do) that the Gospels are later products of memory, it becomes more plausible that a woman Jesus knew well who died a sudden and violent death on the road with him wouldn’t make it into the Gospels. But that is not what The Chosen says the Gospels are. Instead they are direct reports of what Matthew and John saw, and the living memories of individuals only a few decades after these events passed. If this is what the Gospels are, it strains credulity that the murder of a disciple’s fiancee on the road with Jesus would get no historical mention at all.

2. The Show Cannot Answer the Thoroughly Unnecessary Theological Question “Why Didn’t Jesus Heal Ramah?”

Of course, in general Christian experience people struggle with the question “Why doesn’t God heal me?” or “Why did God let this happen?” These are difficult theological questions where satisfying answers are often difficult to come by, if they exist at all. Because of this, it is perhaps not particularly surprising that The Chosen’s forays into theodicy often fall flat – the textual explanations are rarely as meaningful as simple shots of Jesus hugging a disciple, or disciples hugging each other.

When the show attempts a textual explanation, these tend to center around three characters: 1) Little James, who walks with a limp and a walking aid, 2) Eden, the wife of Peter, who has a traumatic miscarriage while he’s on the road and 3) Ramah, who is stabbed to death when a Roman soldier suffering something of a mental breakdown either recklessly or accidentally plunges his sword through her back during urban unrest Jesus caused.

Of the three, Little James is the major outlier. First, the character of Little James has a chronic condition that makes him physically slower and visibly limited — he walks with a cane, and limps. But at least in the way it’s introduced, it serves as a moment to challenge some ableist ideas. Jesus denies that James walking slower is a problem that needs to be solved. He doesn’t mind walking slower, he thinks the way James looks with a cane is fine, and he likes James the way he is. This is actually a good model of inclusion and invites a different way of thinking about disability — James’s body is good, and it’s not James’s job to walk as though he’s not disabled for the ease of everyone else. It’s the rest of the crew’s job to accommodate him. (Admittedly, this image gets more complicated in Season 4 when we see James also has bouts of acute pain and we see this really is a problem for James himself, not just people around him). Second, James has some agency in this. He discusses his disability with Jesus and accepts that he is called to be the “disabled disciple,” and show strength and courage through his disability. He discusses it frankly and at length with Jesus, and seems to feel uplifted and encouraged by Jesus’s response. Third, and most importantly, James’s disability in the show is a narrative device to explain the fact that the actor who plays Little James, Jordan Walker Ross, does have severe scoliosis and cerebral palsy. The fact that Ross plays a major character in a show where supernatural healing is a motif calls out for in-text explanation, and the coward’s way out would have been to simply cast an able-bodied actor. It’s commendable that The Chosen doesn’t do that, and takes a just hand in the casting process in a world where able-bodied men are framed as an on-screen default.

But these explanations don’t fit well with Eden’s miscarriage or Ramah’s stab wound. Eden’s suffering is never assigned the same weight that Jesus assigns James’s. She never discusses the miscarriage with Jesus, and in fact the religious figure who primarily comforts her is Yussif the Pharisee (probably Joseph of Arimathea). There’s also no important challenge to our thinking that the text works out – the goodness of James’s body is affirmed, while Eden’s (perhaps infertile, as Peter tells us later) body is not. She is ritually washed and baptized in a scene that mirrors her husband’s plunge into the sea, but in the sequence it is Peter who is given an explanation for the trauma, not Eden. In the mikvah, Eden prays for Peter, but on the water Peter prays for himself. Jesus apparently answers both prayers, which center Peter, not Eden. All this is triply true of Ramah, who of course never discusses her injury with Jesus and whose body is simply destroyed. James is given a chance to envision himself as demonstrating strength by living as a disabled man, but Ramah can’t do that as a woman with a fatal abdominal injury. 

In fact, the only person who can learn and grow from Ramah’s trauma is Thomas, just as the only person who receives a lesson from Jesus after Edens’s miscarriage is Peter. But this is just a classic example of the trope of “women in refrigerators,” or “fridging,” that’s faced criticism among feminist readers of genre literature. This refers to when violence or tragedy occurs to a female character in order to develop a male character around her. The trauma that the woman goes through isn’t really about her, it’s about him. Ramah’s murder matters because of how Thomas feels about it. This darkly mirrors the extent to which Peter’s growth and change in seasons 3 and 4 is in response to Eden’s suffering, even though Eden is kept at a distance from Jesus. In a show where the purpose of “trials” is defined as a chance to show the genuineness of one’s faith (more on this in a bit), it’s almost text in the show that the reason why Ramah died was for Thomas to learn something. This is pretty unsatisfying theology.

It’s even less satisfying in light of the fact that The Chosen has an unusual narrative constraint on it that most shows don’t have. That’s the presence of a major character in the narrative who has supernatural healing powers and an ability to raise the dead. And because of this, the question “Why doesn’t God heal me?,” generally expressed by the suffering throughout history, is a meaningfully different question than, “Why did the historical Jesus, incarnate before his resurrection, choose not to heal someone?”

The show doesn’t have a good answer on this front not just because of the difficulties of theodicy, but specifically because the question, “why didn’t Jesus heal this person” isn’t really a question the Gospels engage at all. There’s only two times in the Gospels Jesus doesn’t heal someone, and they’re both in Nazareth. Mark says Jesus couldn’t do many miracles in Nazareth because of a lack of belief, and Matthew says he didn’t do many miracles because of lack of belief. But on the whole, people who approach Jesus for healing are healed in the Gospels.

Given that the show also adds in extracanonical healings, like the man who became lame after stealing a horse and turned out to be a bandit in the Good Samaritan parable and Shula the blind woman, it becomes even more difficult to explain why Jesus doesn’t heal these particular women. You can say “it wasn’t God’s will” until you’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t make the answer satisfying from the perspective of a viewer. If you create a narrative where you invent characters that exist in a world where a major character has healing powers, you have to explain why it’s not God’s will to heal these women who seem like a major outlier in the narrative. An outlier that you introduced.

But by introducing extracanonical miracles (the Samaritan bandit, Shula the blind woman) and adding extra-canonical sufferings, the show’s rules for who is healed and who isn’t become increasingly unclear. It can’t be that Jesus only heals people who he healed in the Gospels – Jesus heals at least two characters who don’t exist in any Gospel text. It can’t be that Jesus doesn’t heal people who have the faith to withstand living with illness – “living with illness” is the one thing Ramah absolutely can’t do.

By making such selections, the show actually introduces a bizarre narrative theme that this is the rule of who Jesus heals: Jesus doesn’t heal characters played by disabled people, or women with acute injuries. It’s noticeable that there are only two “trigger warnings” in the title cards of the main series so far, and both of them involve women and medical emergencies. Jesus doesn’t heal Eden’s traumatic miscarriage (even though, in another unforced error, the show has already revealed through the Samaritan bandit that Jesus can and does heal at a distance), and Jesus doesn’t heal Ramah’s impalement. 

Incorporating a disabled actor into your cast and dealing with the implications of the casting choice is not at all the same thing as inventing a female character and intending to have her die horribly, or introducing reproductive trauma into your source material. It is certainly not the same thing as making either of those choices for the purpose of developing male characters around those women – which both of those incidents are narratively for. And because of this tendency to use women’s suffering to develop male characters, it becomes even more noticeable that James is given far more in-text support from Jesus than either woman receives.

3. The Murder Doesn’t Explain the Two Thomas Scenes in The Gospel of John 

Dallas Jenkins’s explanation for the murder of Ramah is that he had envisioned it as a way to explain why Thomas is so fatalistic and dour in the Gospel of John. The source of Thomas’s apparent fatalism is John 11:16, when the disciples are weighing the fact that Jesus wishes to go to Judea even though he was recently nearly stoned there (11:8). Jesus is determined to go because he wishes to go raise Lazarus from the dead. In response to Jesus’s determination, Thomas says, “Let us go with him, that we may die with him.”

Is this fatalistic? I don’t think so. I actually think that Ben Linus from Lost got it right. Thomas is best known for his doubt, but he had a remarkable heroic moment when Lazarus died, when he decided to go die with Jesus. The voice of Thomas in John 11 is of a sold-out, completely committed disciple who was ready to go die with Jesus. He fled with the rest, and later needs evidence more than anyone that Jesus is in fact alive. It’s not enough for him to hear about Jesus, he wants to touch him.

It’s remarkable that in John 20, Jesus doesn’t even seem to be particularly upset that Thomas was slow to believe the testimony of others. Thomas got burned bad. He was ready to die with Jesus. He didn’t, and now he’s wounded, and confused, and grieving, and doesn’t know who to trust. Jesus gives a blessing to those who will believe without seeing (as those who believed after Thomas will have to content themselves), but Thomas is not cursed. Jesus invites Thomas to touch his wounds, and meets his hesitancy to believe with evidence for his apostle. 

So is Thomas fatalistic? Or is he committed? I actually think it’s easier to make sense of Thomas as a zealous figure than as a suicidal one. In The Chosen after Ramah dies, Thomas openly expresses a desire to die, but in the Gospel of John that’s not who he is – with the rest of the disciples, he flees when Jesus was arrested, and in the Gospel of Matthew the only disciple who commits suicide is Judas. Thomas does not seem particularly eager to die. It rather seems that he had a moment of hyper-commitment to Jesus, which led to his staggering disappointment when Jesus died before him. 

So, I think the better way to stage this would have been that Thomas is, when Lazarus dies, more committed than the other disciples. The easiest way to do this would be to have his fictional in-universe fiancee Ramah leave him. The in-text justification would be Jesus’s approval of anyone who leaves his wife for the sake of Jesus. Thomas, in the show, had an opportunity to literally do this – his intended’s father does not approve of the match. The response to this could have easily been that Ramah decides to return home and follow her father, and Thomas is given a choice to follow her and keep on in the wine business or follow Jesus. Then, as much as it breaks his heart, he chooses Jesus. This would give him a plausible motivation to express more commitment than the other disciples – “let’s go die, I’ve already given up so much” – and a justifiable chip on his shoulder later when Jesus disappoints him by dying. Without introducing the other theological problems we’ve discussed.

In fact, the theological payoff would be dramatically improved. Jesus’s explanation for failing to intervene in Thomas’s heartbreak would be much more understandable — Ramah is a human with a will, and Jesus can’t make Ramah love him. This fits with the larger theme of following or rejecting Jesus, which actually is a major theme in the Gospels. “Why don’t some people follow Jesus?” is a question the Gospels regularly engage. “Why doesn’t Jesus heal people?” just isn’t. Furthermore, not mentioning Thomas’s fiancee who left him would make much more sense about the disciples who are apparently recording and providing interviews for the Gospels. Not mentioning Ramah would be as normal as not mentioning anyone’s ex-girlfriend in front of them — it’s kind, not heartless. But failing to mention Thomas’s murdered soon-to-be-wife, whom Thomas would presumably love in some way for the rest of his life, would be cold.

Conclusion 

The murder of Ramah, thematically, theologically, and narratively, doesn’t do the work that Dallas Jenkins wants it to do. The far superior choice would be to have Ramah leave the community, and for Thomas to choose Jesus over her. This would avoid the “fridging” problem we discussed (violence done to women to develop male characters), as well as the theodicy problem, and also the historical problem the show creates in their portrayal of the way the Gospels were written. 

The problem is not that the death is sad or violent, it’s that it doesn’t work in the text of the story.