I'm glad you mentioned the emphasis on "individual faith in Christ" and "spiritual liberation from sin" over any sense of physical liberation or salvation in the show. Obviously I've enjoyed the way it has depicted the very real bafflement of the disciples between their expectation of a victorious military leader and the reality of his humble and otherworldly kingdom. But it did get under my skin a little during the Luke 4:16 sequence, when Jesus read from Isaiah about the "year of the lord's favor" in Nazareth and immediately took all the language about captives/poor/destitute and made it pretty much completely about spirituality poverty. Another thing I'd really love to see you look into here is how exactly church tradition is playing into the "flash-forward" sequences we've seen in the show. In season 4, we've got Mary living in a cave and the mention that Little James was impaled with a spear near lower Egypt. I don't mind that kind of stuff being imagined from scratch, but it's definitely not in scripture—and I tried to find some evidence of historical tradition mentioning this manner/place of death for James The Lesser, but came up short. So I've wondered what exactly is going on there. It feels like the kind of thing most viewers will watch and go, "huh, well, there must be some historical basis for this speculation" and I can't tell if there is.
Thank you for speaking up about this. My other big concern is that for how deeply Jewish the show is, they're still sticking to one Messianic Jewish rabbi as a consultant, who is ultimately still pretty Protestant. I get why they made the choice, but let's not pretend this is sufficient. This could be many Christians' first deeper encounter with Jewish traditions, and I worry about more things that sneak under the radar, like the anointing of the lamb's feet, without proper scholarship or expertise.
Yeah, and that's why I talked about his background. He definitely catches things Jenkins doesn't catch but someone like Laura Lieber or Mark Brettler would just be a lot more cautious about some of the sourcing.
I am shocked to learn that this show only has three consultants, but the fact that they are sometimes commonly ignored and that a lot of the theology of the show comes from Jenkins isn't surprising.
The historical side of Jewish practices doesn't work upon further inspection. Jesus doesn't even enter a synagogue until episodes 1 and 6 of season 2; the Scriptures say He did this from the beginning! This follows a trend where the Pharisees and Sadducees parallel the ecclesiastical authorities of pre-Reformation Europe. Much of the prayers and blessings are from developments in Rabbinic Judaism.
The Roman side is even worse. For one thing, Galilee would've been under Antipas, so Quintus, Gaius, and the soldiers of Capernaum would be Antipas's officers, not Pilate's. And any man serving in the Roman army would be a pagan Levantine, not a Roman citizen, which gives another layer to the good Samaritan story.
Well done, Laura, as usual, and thank you for writing. I'm definitely a fan of The Chosen, but have many similar concerns, especially around some of the events of Season 4.
I do keep in mind that Dallas Jenkins is the son of Jerry B. Jenkins, author of the "Left Behind" series, so that automatically makes me take his work with a grain of salt... 🙂
I think the problem you run into with doing a show like this is that the people involved feel like there is so much at stake. Dallas isn't doing this show because the Jesus story is a good story, he's doing it because he believes Jesus is real and that everyone needs to come to him or they'll be destined for hell. It isn't just a show to him, nor can it be. It's a ministry effort disguised as a show. He's answering the great call in the NT from Jesus. To evangelicals, scholarship is a threat to getting people to Jesus. It's fascinating to listen to the history told by Pete Enns on this. The only reason the roundtable exists is because it mostly gives Dallas validation. Unfortunately for them, I think we live in a world now where authenticity/transparency, as values (and I'm not even sure those are the right words), has become much more important to everyone. And when people are led to believe one thing very strongly and then come to find out things are different later, it creates a lot of trauma. My tradition (LDS) is seeing a huge backlash as all the primary and secondary sources are being made publicly available and searchable. The church just can't control the narrative anymore and it turns out they haven't been honestly representing it. But, this is not unique to the LDS church. I'm seeing so many former evangelical scholars (and other influencers) speaking up about the narratives they grew up with and their problems. But, even more so, I see the pain in their expression, their anger, disappointment--all the things. They feel like they've been lied to and deceived. And then they turn that anger towards almost, but not quite, tearing the thing down that they now feel is a danger to the world. In that light, I hope The Chosen can relieve itself of arbitrating or dictating theology and just stick to telling a good story that helps people be better towards themselves and others. Then it doesn't matter if they got things wrong, because that is not what the show is about in the first place.
One thing that really stood out to me in the roundtables is that the majority of the run time is spent on pastoral advice/life application. I think it's there because the show makes high stakes claims that have to appeal to the high expectations of the audience ("this show is extremely historically accurate," because the idea of historical accuracy is very important in evangelical spaces) but it doesn't really do that much to deepen the history. There's whole historical questions that the roundtables just never address at all (I wanted them to talk about how they think Joanna is, the idea of being Herod's steward, etc) and they didn't really get there at all. But the reality is that a show that really did insist on historicity would be really frustrating, or at least a discussion of it would be --"this might be what this was like, we don't know, the earliest record of this is late," etc.
Good job/valid criticisms. I remember when I first heard about swaddling the lambs in the last few years and was immediately skeptical. Those type of animals need to stand and walk right after birth, and as you aunt said, nurse. As a veteran home-birth mom, I know how critical some of these things can be, but I mean have they never watched a nature show? I also know and advocate for the more likely Nativity scenario, ala Bailey.
They need a real Jewish rabbi or scholar, and a real Eastern Orthodox scholar, neither of which they can probably get, nor would Jenkins listen to them because he obviously is stuck in his evangelical bubble, and their input would likely sound bizarre and "heretical" to him. Realistically, he COULD probably get an evangelical who converted to Orthodoxy or trained in it who could push back in evangelical lingo, like Mako Nagasawa, who would also emphasize restorative justice and bring some reality to all the language in scripture about rescuing the poor, marginalized, and oppressed (which I first learned from Bema). And they could get a more academic Messianic rabbi, or someone like Mark Kinzer or Amy Jill Levine. The truth is probably that Jenkins knew Sobel, or knew of him.
Even though I've been studying for 45 years and been through most denominations, they've mostly been inside the American evangelical bubble, mentally if nothing else; many of them fairly anti-education and scholarship, and it's only in the last 4 years after I began a deep dive into theology and scholarship (as an amateur) that I have left the fundagelical mental bubble myself and branched out. That should give me plenty of compassion on Jenkins-like people, but currently it just makes me crazy, and the most charitable things I can do are a whole lot of eye rolling. It's different when I have to deal with a run-of-the mill fundagelical on the ground (who I view as a victim of the evangelical industrial complex), vs ones who claim to be leaders, are supposedly at least a little educated, and should know better. I view them more as perpetrators of this kind of nonsense.
I'm sure Jenkins' heart is mostly in the right place, and I like the show, but I heartily dread all the upcoming likely spew of penal-substitionary atonement as well, and we won't probably get even a nod toward healthier, more historical and scriptural views. 🙄🙄😒 History won't be kind to the theological undertones or American mega-church vibes of the show, although it's depiction of Jesus's compassion and humanity are good.
Concerning: "there’s no reason to think Jesus is ever portrayed in the Gospels as sometimes healing someone and someone deciding not to". I give you: John 5.
From v.2: "Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there ..."
I concede, I very much doubt this is what Jenkins was thinking of, but there it is: a lot of people lying around and Jesus picks one of them.
I enjoyed reading the blog posts. I have not seen the show!
Yeah, I can get to a "by implication" reading of that passage but I don't think it's where the emphasis of that passage lands - that Jesus declines to heal most of those people. I also think it's a poor analogue for the murder/refusing to heal in the show (which I know you haven't seen! That's just the scenario we're trying to account for) where someone asks for healing and Jesus says no. But I think what you're pointing to is the only time where we do have Jesus "on stage" with unhealed sick people and doesn't heal them. The closest I could think of where there is some kind of explicit yes/no process for healing is Luke 4.
One small quibble is that I think in the later seasons economic themes are becoming more prominent. The olive oil subplot, Judas and his obsession with funding, some mentions of Lazarus's will, the high cost of the oil bought by Mary.
I'm glad you mentioned the emphasis on "individual faith in Christ" and "spiritual liberation from sin" over any sense of physical liberation or salvation in the show. Obviously I've enjoyed the way it has depicted the very real bafflement of the disciples between their expectation of a victorious military leader and the reality of his humble and otherworldly kingdom. But it did get under my skin a little during the Luke 4:16 sequence, when Jesus read from Isaiah about the "year of the lord's favor" in Nazareth and immediately took all the language about captives/poor/destitute and made it pretty much completely about spirituality poverty. Another thing I'd really love to see you look into here is how exactly church tradition is playing into the "flash-forward" sequences we've seen in the show. In season 4, we've got Mary living in a cave and the mention that Little James was impaled with a spear near lower Egypt. I don't mind that kind of stuff being imagined from scratch, but it's definitely not in scripture—and I tried to find some evidence of historical tradition mentioning this manner/place of death for James The Lesser, but came up short. So I've wondered what exactly is going on there. It feels like the kind of thing most viewers will watch and go, "huh, well, there must be some historical basis for this speculation" and I can't tell if there is.
That was where I noticed it the most - the Luke 4 scene. Also the absence of economic themes from John the Baptist's lines.
Thank you for speaking up about this. My other big concern is that for how deeply Jewish the show is, they're still sticking to one Messianic Jewish rabbi as a consultant, who is ultimately still pretty Protestant. I get why they made the choice, but let's not pretend this is sufficient. This could be many Christians' first deeper encounter with Jewish traditions, and I worry about more things that sneak under the radar, like the anointing of the lamb's feet, without proper scholarship or expertise.
Yeah, and that's why I talked about his background. He definitely catches things Jenkins doesn't catch but someone like Laura Lieber or Mark Brettler would just be a lot more cautious about some of the sourcing.
I am shocked to learn that this show only has three consultants, but the fact that they are sometimes commonly ignored and that a lot of the theology of the show comes from Jenkins isn't surprising.
The historical side of Jewish practices doesn't work upon further inspection. Jesus doesn't even enter a synagogue until episodes 1 and 6 of season 2; the Scriptures say He did this from the beginning! This follows a trend where the Pharisees and Sadducees parallel the ecclesiastical authorities of pre-Reformation Europe. Much of the prayers and blessings are from developments in Rabbinic Judaism.
The Roman side is even worse. For one thing, Galilee would've been under Antipas, so Quintus, Gaius, and the soldiers of Capernaum would be Antipas's officers, not Pilate's. And any man serving in the Roman army would be a pagan Levantine, not a Roman citizen, which gives another layer to the good Samaritan story.
Well done, Laura, as usual, and thank you for writing. I'm definitely a fan of The Chosen, but have many similar concerns, especially around some of the events of Season 4.
I do keep in mind that Dallas Jenkins is the son of Jerry B. Jenkins, author of the "Left Behind" series, so that automatically makes me take his work with a grain of salt... 🙂
I think the problem you run into with doing a show like this is that the people involved feel like there is so much at stake. Dallas isn't doing this show because the Jesus story is a good story, he's doing it because he believes Jesus is real and that everyone needs to come to him or they'll be destined for hell. It isn't just a show to him, nor can it be. It's a ministry effort disguised as a show. He's answering the great call in the NT from Jesus. To evangelicals, scholarship is a threat to getting people to Jesus. It's fascinating to listen to the history told by Pete Enns on this. The only reason the roundtable exists is because it mostly gives Dallas validation. Unfortunately for them, I think we live in a world now where authenticity/transparency, as values (and I'm not even sure those are the right words), has become much more important to everyone. And when people are led to believe one thing very strongly and then come to find out things are different later, it creates a lot of trauma. My tradition (LDS) is seeing a huge backlash as all the primary and secondary sources are being made publicly available and searchable. The church just can't control the narrative anymore and it turns out they haven't been honestly representing it. But, this is not unique to the LDS church. I'm seeing so many former evangelical scholars (and other influencers) speaking up about the narratives they grew up with and their problems. But, even more so, I see the pain in their expression, their anger, disappointment--all the things. They feel like they've been lied to and deceived. And then they turn that anger towards almost, but not quite, tearing the thing down that they now feel is a danger to the world. In that light, I hope The Chosen can relieve itself of arbitrating or dictating theology and just stick to telling a good story that helps people be better towards themselves and others. Then it doesn't matter if they got things wrong, because that is not what the show is about in the first place.
One thing that really stood out to me in the roundtables is that the majority of the run time is spent on pastoral advice/life application. I think it's there because the show makes high stakes claims that have to appeal to the high expectations of the audience ("this show is extremely historically accurate," because the idea of historical accuracy is very important in evangelical spaces) but it doesn't really do that much to deepen the history. There's whole historical questions that the roundtables just never address at all (I wanted them to talk about how they think Joanna is, the idea of being Herod's steward, etc) and they didn't really get there at all. But the reality is that a show that really did insist on historicity would be really frustrating, or at least a discussion of it would be --"this might be what this was like, we don't know, the earliest record of this is late," etc.
Good job/valid criticisms. I remember when I first heard about swaddling the lambs in the last few years and was immediately skeptical. Those type of animals need to stand and walk right after birth, and as you aunt said, nurse. As a veteran home-birth mom, I know how critical some of these things can be, but I mean have they never watched a nature show? I also know and advocate for the more likely Nativity scenario, ala Bailey.
They need a real Jewish rabbi or scholar, and a real Eastern Orthodox scholar, neither of which they can probably get, nor would Jenkins listen to them because he obviously is stuck in his evangelical bubble, and their input would likely sound bizarre and "heretical" to him. Realistically, he COULD probably get an evangelical who converted to Orthodoxy or trained in it who could push back in evangelical lingo, like Mako Nagasawa, who would also emphasize restorative justice and bring some reality to all the language in scripture about rescuing the poor, marginalized, and oppressed (which I first learned from Bema). And they could get a more academic Messianic rabbi, or someone like Mark Kinzer or Amy Jill Levine. The truth is probably that Jenkins knew Sobel, or knew of him.
Even though I've been studying for 45 years and been through most denominations, they've mostly been inside the American evangelical bubble, mentally if nothing else; many of them fairly anti-education and scholarship, and it's only in the last 4 years after I began a deep dive into theology and scholarship (as an amateur) that I have left the fundagelical mental bubble myself and branched out. That should give me plenty of compassion on Jenkins-like people, but currently it just makes me crazy, and the most charitable things I can do are a whole lot of eye rolling. It's different when I have to deal with a run-of-the mill fundagelical on the ground (who I view as a victim of the evangelical industrial complex), vs ones who claim to be leaders, are supposedly at least a little educated, and should know better. I view them more as perpetrators of this kind of nonsense.
I'm sure Jenkins' heart is mostly in the right place, and I like the show, but I heartily dread all the upcoming likely spew of penal-substitionary atonement as well, and we won't probably get even a nod toward healthier, more historical and scriptural views. 🙄🙄😒 History won't be kind to the theological undertones or American mega-church vibes of the show, although it's depiction of Jesus's compassion and humanity are good.
Concerning: "there’s no reason to think Jesus is ever portrayed in the Gospels as sometimes healing someone and someone deciding not to". I give you: John 5.
From v.2: "Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many ill, blind, lame, and paralyzed people. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there ..."
I concede, I very much doubt this is what Jenkins was thinking of, but there it is: a lot of people lying around and Jesus picks one of them.
I enjoyed reading the blog posts. I have not seen the show!
Yeah, I can get to a "by implication" reading of that passage but I don't think it's where the emphasis of that passage lands - that Jesus declines to heal most of those people. I also think it's a poor analogue for the murder/refusing to heal in the show (which I know you haven't seen! That's just the scenario we're trying to account for) where someone asks for healing and Jesus says no. But I think what you're pointing to is the only time where we do have Jesus "on stage" with unhealed sick people and doesn't heal them. The closest I could think of where there is some kind of explicit yes/no process for healing is Luke 4.
Please keep your series going! I so enjoy reading your articulations of why there are so many moments in this show that make me go 🤔.
Also, why not at least Tim Mackey?
One small quibble is that I think in the later seasons economic themes are becoming more prominent. The olive oil subplot, Judas and his obsession with funding, some mentions of Lazarus's will, the high cost of the oil bought by Mary.
Yeah, I think that's true. I was just noticing that it didn't seem to be attached to John the Baptist or the Luke 4 scene at all.