The Chosen – sweetly blows up fundamentalism (inerrancy of the Bible)

 There’s plenty that is irritating about ‘The Chosen’, the long TV series of the life of Jesus. (Watch it here - https://watch.angelstudios.com/thechosen)

 Peter is super irritating, he looks and talks like he should be doing a re-make of ‘Easy Rider’ or a Clint Eastwood Western; there are the bar scenes complete with the knowing all land-lord; and perhaps worst of all, there is the way direct quotes from the Bible will plonk down onto the stage like clunky robots so undermining the life and flow of what is a pretty good script.

 But there’s plenty to like. Proper money has been spent on the scenery, the actors and the costumes. There is nothing amateur here. There is depth to the characters -  even Peter – but especially Nicodemus, and Matthew, and Jesus. This is the first film about Jesus I have seen where he has his own character beyond what we read in the Gospels. And he is given some great lines, such as when Peter vociferously complains about Matthew joining them, arguing that ‘this is different’ To which Jesus replies, ‘Get used to different’.

 Another huge plus point is the careful background given to these familiar stories. There is a long build up to the miraculous catch of fish. Peter is in serious trouble, massively in debt to the tax office. He needs to money the fish will give. And this build up allows us to meet Matthew and get to know his loneliness and longing for more out of life so when Jesus does call him, there is more emotion than in the plainer account in the Gospels. Even more so for Nicodemus. He is almost the second star of the story line. Absolutely the religious teacher he is, but also open to God and so open to the possibility that John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth are his messengers.

 Perhaps one of the best things this TV series does is to sweetly blow up fundamentalism. By fundamentalism I mean a brittle like insistence that the Bible is inerrant. This pushes Christians down a claustrophobic cul de sac where they try and work out how many women visited the empty tomb on Easter Sunday, or how many angels were there, or whether Jesus dismissed the disciples after the feeding of the five thousand (the Synoptics) or they just left (John). The Bible does not claim to be inerrant. It claims to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and the church accepts that the Bible is authoritative in matters of faith and life-style. That is very different from trying to reconcile genealogies, and different numbers in David’s census to prove the Bible is without mistakes.

 ‘The Chosen’ blows fundamentalism up not just by adding vast swathes to the story, as with say Nicodemus failing to exorcise Mary Magdalene in the first episode, it also changes some of the details of the Gospel stories. So we have Jesus’ famous night time conversation with Nicodemus happening in Capernaum, not Jerusalem as in John 3. And instead of Jesus meeting the women of Samaria going north to Galilee, he is coming south from Galilee. Everyone who has read the Gospel of John will know the TV series is not accurate here, and this is the sweetness. It doesn’t make a jot of difference to the power of the story. There is such poignancy as Jesus starts to tell the women of Samaria about her husbands, such tenderness, that to start worrying about the detail that in the Gospels he is going north, not south, would be to strain out a gnat. Or – to stay with this particular story – to worry about which mountain we are supposed to worship God on. The answer is neither – we are to worship God from our heart.

 This does not mean ‘The Chosen’ is asking its viewers to wander down the rabbit holes of some liberal theology where miracles do not happen, Christ is not divine, and most of the Gospel accounts are said to be based on community myth making rather than eye witness accounts (for more on this see Richard Baukham’s ‘Jesus and the Eye Witnesses’) The boundaries in the film are orthodox. The miracles do happen, Christ is the Messiah, and the foundation to the series are the Gospel accounts. But within these boundaries the director and writer Dallas Jenkins has rolled out multiple red carpets to welcome in imaginative story telling that generally enriches the Gospel narratives.

 And in so doing Jenkins keeps Jesus of Nazareth centre stage, and escorts the unnecessary doctrine about Biblical inerrancy into the wings.