What no one tells you about 'The Chosen' — but every Christian should know

Not since “The Passion of the Christ” has a TV show or movie about the life of Jesus captivated audiences quite like “The Chosen.”

The show is available on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other streaming platforms, and over 200 million people have watched the crowdfunded historical drama that follows Jesus and his disciples around ancient Galilee and Judea.

That means the series, which premiered in 2017 and is now in its fifth season, is possibly the most successful Christian TV show of all time, and it is almost certainly the most successful crowdfunded media production in history.

What sets “The Chosen” apart is the show’s creativity and its commitment to visually and viscerally transporting viewers back to the first century. The tension of the time in which Jesus lived — at the intersection of the Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds — is palpable through the screen.

Captivating storylines and the show’s overall high production value also keep viewers glued to their screens.

Not only is “The Chosen” fun to watch, but creator Dallas Jenkins is honest about what he wants the show to accomplish. A Christian himself, Jenkins hopes the show motivates viewers to read the Bible for themselves.

"'The Chosen' is based on the true stories of the Gospels of Jesus Christ. Some locations and timelines have been combined or condensed. Backstories and some characters or dialogue have been added. However, all biblical and historical context and any artistic imagination are designed to support the truth and intention of the scriptures. Viewers are encouraged to read the Gospels," the series tells viewers in the first episode.

'They elicit a response from the viewer that corresponds to the response that the passages are trying to elicit from the reader.'

The show’s success indicates that Jenkins has probably accomplished his goal of encouraging at least some people to read more of the Bible for themselves. But does the show “support the truth and intention” of the biblical authors?

Biblical scholars who spoke to Blaze News gave their perspective on the biblical accuracy of the wildly popular series.

Is ‘The Chosen’ biblically accurate?

One criticism of “The Chosen” is that the show’s world-building and backstory development deviate too much from the Bible.

One critic called “The Chosen” a “dangerous source of entertainment, which dramatically takes Jesus and his words out of context.” Another critic said the “space-filling scenes” or those interactions that are not in the Bible “are dangerous.”

To be sure, there are countless interactions and conversations in the show that likely did not happen — and they certainly don’t appear in any of the four Gospel accounts.

For example, the show gives extra-biblical background on Mary Magdalene and includes a character for the wife of Peter the disciple. We know Peter was married because Jesus healed his mother-in-law, but the Gospel stories never introduce his wife. Most of the extra-biblical material, indeed, is related to the relationships among the characters and their dialogue.

But biblical scholars told Blaze News the creative liberties that “The Chosen” takes to produce a captivating story do not render the show biblically inaccurate.

In fact, New Testament scholar and professor at Gateway Seminary Dan Gurtner told Blaze News that he believes the show is “remarkably contextually accurate.”

“I like ‘The Chosen’ because I think they are faithful to what they're trying to do, and I think they elicit a response from the viewer that corresponds to the response that the passages are trying to elicit from the reader,” Gurtner said.

“They are faithful to the spirit of scripture. They take a lot of liberties, but they bring it back to the text,” he explained.

“All these backstories and all these intertwining things — which are completely made up, but they're in character with the people — they meet up with the biblical story,” he added. “I think that kind of creativity — it's fictitious, of course, and we get that — but they meet up with the biblical story. And whenever it meets up with the biblical story, it's right in step and completely in line with what the Bible actually says.”

New Testament scholar Paul Sloan, a biblical studies professor at Houston Christian University, told Blaze News that much of “The Chosen” is “accurate” and “well represented,” and “when it's altered, it's done so fairly and justly and in an entertaining way that I think is good to appreciate.”

Scholar Craig Keener, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, also praised the show for helping the audience relate with an accurate depiction of Jesus: a Jewish, Middle Eastern man.

“I think it nails Jesus' heart in the Gospels. I mean, in terms of blending all the Gospels together, I think it nails Jesus' heart,” Keener told Blaze News.

“I think it helps immerse us more in the Middle Eastern, early Jewish context of Jesus,” he added of the show. “Maybe not all the details are right, but it's way beyond what people are used to. And so it helps people identify more with the Jewishness of Jesus than church people may traditionally have done so. It's good cross-culturally helping us think that way.”

'The problem is when a film or a TV show comes off as if they are, and they don't realize all the ways in which they're being anachronistic or selective or creative.'

The scholars also emphasized that an important consideration when evaluating the accuracy of “The Chosen” is the fact that the biblical authors told history differently than we tell history today.

“The Gospels are historical, but they're not histories. They're ancient Greco-Roman biographies,” Gurtner said. “Any ancient author is not trying to write by the conventions of modern historiography.”

What that means, explained New Testament scholar and Bethel University professor John Dunne, is that the Gospels “aren't trying to provide a film recording, a video recording of what happened.” Rather, the Gospel stories “have theological interests,” he said, and “particular ways of storytelling” that are designed to communicate those theological interests and evoke a response from the audience.

Does the show’s accuracy even matter?

Multiple scholars who spoke to Blaze News said that “accuracy” is not the right metric by which to judge the show.

“It's the wrong metric because really what we're doing is we're comparing the film that we direct in our minds when we read the Gospels with an external film by another director who has imagined it differently,” explained Dunne.

The issue of accuracy and inaccuracy, on the other hand, is an important aspect when a show is not up front about the creative licenses its production takes, Dunne added.

“If a film is overtly saying, ‘We're not trying to be accurate, or we're not trying to X, Y, or Z,’ then I don't think it should be a metric,” he explained. “The problem is when a film or a TV show comes off as if they are, and they don't realize all the ways in which they're being anachronistic or selective or creative.”

But, as he noted, “The Chosen” does not commit that fault.

“It's only when people aren't aware of how they're taking liberties that I really want to push back,” Dunne said. “If they're very aware of all the liberties they're taking — and I think 'The Chosen' kind of revels in their own creativity — then the metric of accuracy doesn't come up for me.”

New Testament scholar Jason Staples, a professor at North Carolina State University, emphasized that biblical accuracy per se is not the mission of “The Chosen.”

“It's trying to be an entertaining adaptation for a modern audience of a lot of the things that are in the Gospels,” Staples said. “And as such, it has to make a lot of decisions for a combination of audience appeal and entertainment. And also there are a lot of places where the Gospels are sparse in terms of their details."

“So it just adds a lot of material to flesh things out that just aren't specified in the Gospels. And some of the things that it does are implausible, but perfectly within the bounds of a typical adaptation,” he explained. “So I think it's a pretty good and certainly entertaining adaptation of the material in the Gospels, but it is certainly very different from the Gospels in what it does.”

What about the inaccuracies?

While the show is a faithful adaptation of the Gospels, it is not without some historical inaccuracies.

For example, scholars who spoke to Blaze News noted historical inaccuracies related to building and city architecture, as well as the show’s inaccurate depiction of literacy levels in first-century Galilee.

'Jesus is not eradicating ritual purity. He is removing the source of impurity. He isn't getting rid of the system; he's getting rid of the impurity itself.'

They stressed, however, that those inaccuracies, which pertain to what biblical scholars call “background material,” don’t make a significant difference to the plot of the show or the depiction of Jesus’ ministry.

But one problem area most of the scholars identified is the show’s inaccurate depiction of Jesus’ interaction with ancient Judaism and the Jewish law.

“In terms of the purity regulations, there's just all sorts of mistakes about how people with skin diseases are handled in terms of what actually constitutes ritual impurity and what ritual impurity actually means,” Staples said. “There's this sort of conflation in ‘The Chosen’ about when someone is ritually impure that sort of in some way has something to say about their moral status, which in the Jewish Torah, the purity and impurity code is not a matter of morality.”

Staples, moreover, expressed concern that “The Chosen” suggests that Jesus “sort of opposes the ceremonial or ritual or purity regulations of the Torah in ways that the Jesus of the Gospels does not.”

Dunne shared a similar concern.

“Jesus is not eradicating ritual purity. He is removing the source of impurity. He isn't getting rid of the system; he's getting rid of the impurity itself,” he told Blaze News. “But when you see what ‘The Chosen’ does with it — oh my goodness! — they run in the opposite direction.”

The misrepresentations of ancient Judaism and Jesus’ relationship to the Jewish law is a fair critique, Sloan said, “because we're talking about real people, and obviously, Christians have a history of anti-Judaism.”

“So to the degree that some of their misrepresentations are actually perpetuating the tropes that contribute to that anti-Judaism, I think it's important to critique that,” he explained.

Does the show violate the second commandment?

Perhaps the most prominent critique of “The Chosen” is that it violates the second commandment, which prohibits idol worship — or, technically, making any image “in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”

One critic said “The Chosen” exemplifies a “clear violation of the 2nd Commandment” because the show “substitutes a created human in place of the uncreated Christ.” Popular pastor Voddie Baucham has also said he doesn’t watch “The Chosen” because he believes the show violates the second commandment.

'The joke is that if Jesus films violate the second commandment, then Jesus violated it first because he's the representation of God.'

But none of the scholars who spoke to Blaze News believe the show violates the second commandment by depicting Jesus on screen.

“It’s not portraying God the Father. Jesus actually became flesh,” Keener said.

Staples, on the other hand, pointed out that Christians generally interpret the second commandment to mean a prohibition against “making an image in order to bow down or in order to worship it, in order to treat it as though it were deity.” Because “The Chosen” was not made for worship, he doesn’t believe the show violates the second commandment.

Sloan offered Blaze News the same perspective.

“It’s not what [‘The Chosen’ is] there for. It's not an image that is being worshipped. It's not anything that is being treated as an idol,” he explained. “And if this is a transgression of image-making, then I would have to assume that every single artistic depiction of Jesus is also a violation of that.”

For critics who claim “The Chosen” transgresses the second commandment, Dunne said the logical end of that argument ends in a knot.

“The joke is that if Jesus films violate the second commandment, then Jesus violated it first because he's the representation of God, right?” he quipped.

Meanwhile, Jenkins has defended the show against the charge that it violates the second commandment.

“It’s not the portrayal or image itself that’s the issue. If it was, then as the verse says, 'anything' on earth or even water would be wrong to portray. It’s clearly the worship of it,” Jenkins said.

“But no one is worshipping the TV screen; we’re not claiming the show is the Bible or Jonathan [Roumie] is actually Jesus; and no one believes the portrayal is an object of worship or anything other than another way to illustrate and point people to truth,” he added. “On no conceivable level does 'The Chosen' compare to the gods and idols and images the Israelites were potentially worshipping to compete with God.”

Should you watch ‘The Chosen’?

If one of the central purposes of the show is to use beautiful filmmaking and storytelling to point the audience back to the Bible, then the biblical scholars who spoke to Blaze News would consider Jenkins’ mission a success.

Staples, for example, told Blaze News he believes the show gets the audience to think about issues connected to their faith while encouraging them to return to their Bibles.

'I watch what they presented, and it finds my affections drawn more to Christ and more attentive to the text.'

“And as a biblical scholar, things that get people to actually read the Bible are generally a plus for me,” he said.

Gurtner, meanwhile, praised “The Chosen” for doing to its audience what the Bible does to its readers: It confronts you with the person of Jesus — and forces you to respond.

“It does raise those questions of who do people say that Jesus is? That is the fundamental question,” he said. “And when you get to that question, it makes you deal with the, ‘So what?’ Once you realize who Jesus is, then what does that mean? What does that require of you?"

“Then all of a sudden, once you realize who Jesus is, all of a sudden you have to do something with what he claims,” Gurtner explained. “You can't just say, ‘OK, so Jesus is God. Now let me go about my life.’ All of a sudden, you have to take what he says. You can't just leave that on the floor.”

Keener agreed the show “challenges us to ask questions” and “invites us to think more deeply about the Gospels, not just to recite the stories, but to think about the details.”

Sloan even told Blaze News that he knows of people whose desire to read the Bible has been reinvigorated by “The Chosen.”

“I know people who have become more interested in the Gospels and reading the scriptures because of the show,” he said. “So I think that's a good testimony to the fact that these people are not just watching the show and then not reading their Bibles any more because of it. It's getting them interested.”

At one moment during his interview with Blaze News, Gurtner removed his scholarly lens and spoke about “The Chosen” from his Christian perspective.

What he said is perhaps the highest endorsement a scholar of his caliber — a bona fide expert on the synoptic Gospels — could offer “The Chosen.”

“This is not a scholarly perspective. This comes from the perspective of the Christian who wants to be faithful to Jesus, who knows the text and who desires to understand the text better and who is trying to understand what they're trying to present in ‘The Chosen.’ And that is, I watch what they presented, and it finds my affections drawn more to Christ and more attentive to the text,” Gurtner explained.

He went on, “I see this as a very well-produced, imperfect, but well-produced flashlight onto the word of God. And it's like putting a new light bulb in the light in my study when I open up my Bible. This is a really good new light bulb. I think I'm going to keep putting this light bulb into my light fixture in my study so that I'm going to really be able to see the word of God better. It doesn't replace the word of God. It helps me to see the word of God better. Why would I criticize the light bulb? It doesn't make sense to me.”

In that sense, Gurtner would argue that any Christian — and anyone curious about the person of Jesus — should watch “The Chosen” and wrestle with the questions it forces onto you.

“This isn't scholarship,” he said of the show. “This is media meant to edify.”