Image: Maddison Colvin, Composite Christ (2022)

Image composited of stills from depictions of Christ in film and television: The Chosen (2017-present), Mary Magdalene (2019), Last Days in the Desert (2015), Son of God (2014), The Gospel of John (2014), The Passion of the Christ (2004), Mary Mother of Jesus (1999), Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Jesus (1979), Jesus of Nazareth (1977), and King of Kings (1961).

By Glen Nelson

At the end of Season Two of The Chosen, the juggernaut, multi-season series that retells the story of Jesus using a visual palette of antiquity and the lingo of the 21st century, the characters of Matthew and Jesus have finished workshopping what will become the Sermon on the Mount, the individual beatitudes tailored to reflect the foibles of the inner circle of followers, and a group of thousands is gathering on a hill in Northern Israel to listen. A new follower, Judas, has just arrived on the scene, his name held back ominously for effect. Presumably, the new season will pick up at that point. Will the disciples have enough food for this huge crowd? Well, yes and no. 

The Chosen made national news during its first season, not for its contemporary treatment of scripture or artistry, but for its inspired financing model and its ambition. The pilot was released on Christmas Eve, 2017, and the eight episodes of Season One appeared April 21, 2019. In the beginning of that year, The Hollywood Reporter noted that using a legal provision that offered equity to investors through crowdfunding, the series had raised nearly $9 million (eventually, the amount became $11.1  million). Its goal was to issue 13.9 million shares. It was not the first to use crowdfunding for film and TV production, but it is the most successful, so far. The TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000 raised $5.8 million on Kickstarter, and the film Veronica Mars raised $5.7 million. At the end of some episodes of The Chosen, Dallas Jenkins, who created the series and writes and directs each episode, makes an onscreen appeal that viewers contribute to the show, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, has no ties to any Hollywood studio, network, or streaming service. Their names—there are a lot of them—appear in the scrolling credits that complete each episode. Jenkins, who is an evangelical Christian, has lofty and zealous dreams for total viewership to be global and reach one billion people. 

Years ago, Jenkins created a 19-minute film shown on Christmas Eve at the Illinois megachurch which he attends, Harvest Bible Chapel, titled The Shepherd. Producer brothers Neal Harmon and Jeffrey Harmon in Utah saw the video and suggested to Jenkins that it might build audience interest if posted online for free. 15 million views later, the first multi-season video series on the life of Jesus began to be realized with the Harmons’ VidAngel, now Angel Video, acting as distributor. In its credits, the show is listed as “An Angel Original.” It is filmed in Texas and on the biblical backlot of Goshen, Utah, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and employed for their own scriptural filmmaking. Before The Chosen, Jenkins made a series of short films for his church that included the casting of Jonathan Roumie as the lead character. In those shorts is found the genesis of Jenkin’s Jesus. The first seasons are distributed on The Chosen app, the Trinity Broadcast Network, BYUtv, Peacock, Apple TV, Prime Video, and elsewhere. 

Looking Back

For at least the last 80 years, commercial entertainment adaptations of the New Testament have provided a revealing mirror to the social trends of the day, including the divisions between us. The radio series by Henry Denker, The Greatest Story Ever Told—it aired from 1947 to 1956 and was made into a best-selling book by Fulton Oursler in 1949 and a luxuriously stiff film in 1965, all with the same title—relied on the Bible text for the character of Jesus’ dialogue. But by the 60s, the times, they were a-changing. Young audiences craved someone divine who looked like them, even in their fringed suede, denim, long hair, tie-dye, ponchos, headbands, beads, and peasant blouses, and more, who talked like them. Hollywood’s biblical epics and their draped robes of pageantry and archaic speech had come to feel remote. As young American students distanced themselves from the pews of mainstream Christianity they intoned nevertheless the Christian vocabulary of peace and love like a group-think, feel-good mantra. The barrier was not the message but the manner of its delivery.

From that cultural pool, the surprisingly groovy parables of St. Matthew emerged as a staged musical by John-Michael Tebelak, titled Godspell, at Carnegie Mellon University in 1970. By the time it arrived Off-Broadway (May 17, 1971) re-scored by Stephen Schwarz and with a hippie-Jesus leading a small cast of actors and audiences through an earnestly straightforward, hummable telling of the scriptures, Godspell had attracted little controversy and a following well beyond hippie culture. It was a magnet for talent, too. Imagine being in the theater for the Toronto production in 1972 and seeing this young cast perform “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” and “Day by Day”: Victor Garber, Gilda Radner, Martin Short, Paul Shaffer, and Eugene Levy. 

Godspell is now a staple of community theater, church basement fundraisers, and regional productions with shoe-string budgets. The show remains very popular for performers far too young to know of its original stage production, audio recording, or film: during the 2020-21 academic school year, Godspell was the sixth most-produced musical in U.S. high schools, trailing the Addams Family and Charlie Brown. 

Its darker twin, Jesus Christ Superstar, took a different path. When Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice shopped around their rock opera version of the Passion, which places much of the drama on the shoulders of the character of Judas, commercial stage producers would have none of it. Undeterred, the songwriters issued it as a concept album in 1970. The BBC banned it, at least briefly, and labeled it sacrilege; however, the boxed set double album became such a monumental hit in the United States, that multiple, unauthorized staged productions sprang up based on the sung-through work’s recording alone. Broadway beckoned. Lloyd Webber and Rice’s show had its Broadway premiere on October 12, 1971. New York theatergoers must have felt like they were witnessing an invasion of stage Jesuses as Godspell and Superstar played simultaneously, downtown and uptown. 

In the Broadway production, Judas was played by Black actors Ben Vereen and Carl Anderson, which became significant to the adverse reaction of the show by some religious groups. The show was designed to provoke. Bans, condemnations, and protests followed quickly. A film of Superstar appeared in 1973, directed by Norman Jewison, whose Fiddler on the Roof (1971) convinced Universal Studios to proceed with his adaptation. Anderson reprised his stage performance as Judas. That casting was galling to the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B’rith which was joined by the American Jewish Committee in condemning the film. Their concerns had one valid point (mournfully, with ongoing resonance) as the director of the League, Benjamin R. Epstein, wrote, “…the movie’s sharp and vivid emphasis on a Jewish mob’s demand to kill Jesus can feed into the kind of disparagement of Jews and Judaism which has always nurtured anti-Jewish prejudices and bigotry.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued this policy statement in September 1971: “Leaders in the Church should not authorize or permit the use of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar in any Church-sponsored meetings. We regard it as being incompatible with the spirit and doctrine of the Church concerning the divinity of the Savior.” 

You will not be seeing a production of Superstar today in an LDS cultural hall, either—Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, maybe—but other denominations have softened toward the fifty-year old show. The Vatican officially endorsed Superstar in 1999, and three years afterward, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said it was “a sincere effort to tell the story of Jesus in contemporary musical and ethical terms.” 

Troubles

How should the character of Jesus be depicted on the page, on stage, and on screen? Even for a writer coming to a project from a position of belief, many questions arise. Is it acceptable to write dialogue for the character to speak outside of direct biblical quotation? Should scriptural figures be fictionalized and given backstories and plot lines of their own? What can be invented? There are questions for audiences, too. If someone disagrees with an artist’s creative choices in those matters, what is that person to do about it?

Issues of taking sacred texts and interpreting them for contemporary audiences became a battlefield, and increasingly, the rhetoric grew hotter. “This is Hollywood’s worst hour,” wrote an indignant Jerry Falwell about the film adaptation of The Last Temptation of Christ, in 1988. “Neither the label 'fiction' nor the First Amendment gives Universal [Studios] the right to libel, slander and ridicule the most central figure in world history.” He called for a boycott, not only of the film, but any and all business interests from the film’s parent company, the media conglomerate MCA. 

Speaking for the LDS Church in his role as managing director of the public communications department, Richard Lindsay let it rip: “In our view this film trivializes the message and mission of Jesus Christ. We abhor the unconscionable portrayal of Jesus Christ in intimate sexual scenes and as a voyeur. Men and women are left poorer by exposure to the stereotypes the movie portrays.” 

In case a primer is needed, in the 1955 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis and the 1988 film adaptation directed by Martin Scorsese, the character of Satan conjures a final vision to tempt Jesus down from the cross: that the Son of God will live like his peers do, passionately fall in love, have children with his wife, and disavow his messianic calling. It’s devilishly subversive and radically ordinary. In the novel and the film, Jesus rejects this vision and fulfills his mission from God into martyrdom. 

After the novel appeared, some members of the Greek Orthodox clergy called for the author’s excommunication. Kazantzakis was no hack. The author of Zorba the Greek and numerous other volumes and translations of classical literature was a revered artist in Greece and internationally. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature nine times, and in the year of his death, 1957, he fell one vote shy with the Nobel Prize committee, losing to Albert Camus. Maybe acclaim is beside the point, though. Many people in the 80s and 90s hungered for arts-related fights, and religious-themed projects were easy targets. 

Last Temptation added fuel to the fire of righteous indignation in a society that was becoming increasingly eager to engage in the public assignation of right and wrong. Vilification became something of a spectator sport. Artworks became litmus tests because reactions to them were taken to reveal the audience member’s values—a weaponized word of the era—and a way to place people into defined categories with rigid parameters. It was politically advantageous to label people as good/bad, friend/foe. Artists were guilty of such manipulative impulses, as well. Still, for every cynical artist who used religion to shock, for example, there were operatives maneuvering to leverage the ensuing controversies for their own purposes. For viewers of artworks who called such judgments into being, opinions regarding them became identity markers, and all of it was becoming calcified in direct, public view. The term “culture war” began in the 1920s to reflect the divide between American urban and rural peoples, but the responses to these late-century entertainments in the news targeted culture itself, and the term’s revival in the 1990s began to feel ever more war-like. 

Today’s social media trolling, name-calling, and cancel culture have nothing on the bitterness and dangers of that period. Violence and death threats against artists were common. They extended outside of Christianity. Salman Rushdie lived in hiding, under police protection, for approximately ten years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his execution for writing the novel The Satanic Verses, and an attempt on his life took place in public as recently as August 12, 2022 in Upstate New York, in which the novelist lost an eye, the use of one hand, and suffered more than a dozen wounds in his neck, chest, and torso. He will live, but many artists’ careers in the era before the new century were made and lost, not on the quality of their work but on their positioning to the political reactions to their works. There was not a lot of public turning of the other cheek. 

Still, scriptural source material presented such tantalizing possibilities to artists that it proved irresistible. Many, many adaptations of the Bible story found in the Gospels appeared on screen and on stage then and since, often with the participation of the greatest writers, directors, musicians, and actors of the day. Some of these films lean toward piety: King of Kings (1961), Jesus of Nazareth (1977), The Visual Bible: Matthew (1993), The Miracle Maker (2000), The Passion of the Christ (2004), Mary Magdalene (2018), Messiah (2020), while others employ irreverence, humor, reimagined archetypes, and the self-reflective possibilities of the Bible as dramatic literature: La Voice Lactée/The Milky Way (1969), The Passover Plot (1976), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), The Jesus Film (1979), Jesus—The Film (1986), The Gospel of Us (2012). Of course, any given person might see piety or irreverence in their neighbor’s opposite reactions. 

Image: Mykal Urbina (2022) Onset filming The Chosen, Season 3.

Corpus Christi

One more example is worth retelling before turning back with hopeful anticipation to The Chosen, Season Three. In 1998, Roman Catholic rights groups leaked a new play that was set to be produced at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York by one of its favorite playwrights, Terrance McNally. He was on a hot streak. He had penned an extraordinary string of hit, award-winning plays over the previous decade, nearly one each season and most of them for MTC. This forthcoming play was called Corpus Christi, and its conceit is that in an updated structure of a Medieval Passion Play, Jesus and the apostles are gay. 

The city, its churches, theatergoers, and press erupted. There were anonymous threats of bombings and other extreme violence. MTC used the threats as an excuse to cancel the production altogether, a shock given their prized relationship with the author. An open letter from esteemed playwrights in defense of McNally—and their accusations of moral cowardice, censorship, as well as threats of their own aimed at the theater company—caused MTC to rescind its cancellation and to mount the play, after all. It opened on September 22, 1998, and audience members passed through newly-installed metal detectors to get to their seats. 

As for the play itself, it is in many ways a simple story of the main character, here named Joshua, as he is born in Corpus Christi (the Texas town where the playwright graduated from high school), grows up, is surrounded by friends, travels, and loves. At the end of the play, Joshua returns home for a last supper with his friends, is betrayed, and is crucified for being gay. The death scene is brutal, and the stage directions in the script call for it to be almost unwatchably violent and disturbing. Aside from the play’s action, the language itself is unabashedly vulgar. F-bombs rain down on the page in torrents, for example. And yet, McNally’s compassionate tone for these characters, however arch and stereotyped, is representative of his plays with other gay figures in them, of which, there are many sterling examples. 

For some, attending the production came to be like participating in a political rally. The play ran for two months, a duration not atypical for non-profit, subscription companies in New York. It might have passed by entirely with little lasting notice. It wasn’t especially praised. Ben Brantley, The New York Times’ theater critic, who is openly gay, wrote of the play as unconvincing and undeveloped. Comparing it to other works that draw from the Gospels, he wrote, “Yet as a piece of writing, ‘Corpus Christi’ feels lazy. It rides piggyback on the mighty resonances guaranteed by the story that inspired it, and rarely reaches beyond the easy novelty of making its central character gay, with such attendant scenes as a wedding of two men.”

However, something of national impact happened during the run of Corpus Christi. Two weeks after opening night, on the evening of October 6, nearly 2,000 miles away from the theaters of City Center, two men abducted a gay student of the University of Wyoming in Laramie, lured him into their truck, took him to a remote field, taunted him, robbed, beat, and tortured him so mercilessly that doctors later deemed the victim’s injuries too severe to attempt to remedy. The men, who are now serving life sentences in prison for murder, bound the dying freshman to a barbed-wire fence and left him. The police found Matthew Shepard 18 hours later, covered in blood except where his tears had washed trails down his cheeks, still alive. He never regained consciousness, and he died in an intensive care unit after six days. In response, hate crime legislation was enacted over the next decade, including the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. 

One struggles to imagine Shepard’s pain and terror, made even more harrowing by his memory of being raped repeatedly and beaten on a trip with high school friends to Morocco three years earlier. His suffering in Laramie is almost too painful for us to consider. Back to the McNally play, though, if an audience member looked disdainfully on its final scene’s violence as offensive, gratuitous, manipulative, or simply in bad taste when the play first opened, after Shepard’s murder in Wyoming, the reactions of viewers and those who had followed the controversies of Corpus Christi in the papers shifted. It became real, suddenly prescient. The play was the same, but the world had changed.

Think of McNally, too, going through the darkness of having such a personal play appear in the storm of public controversy, danger, and betrayal, only to observe it as prophetic weeks later. One month after the opening, he wrote about the experience in his preface for the published edition of the play, “…[Matthew Shepard was] beaten senseless and tied to a split-rail fence in near-zero weather, arms akimbo in a grotesque crucifixion, he died as agonizing a death as another young man who had been tortured and nailed to a wooden cross at a desolate spot outside Jerusalem known as Golgotha some 1,998 years earlier. They died, as they lived, as brothers.”  Writing about his goals for the play, he added, “At the same time it asked you to look at what they did to Joshua [Jesus], it asks that we look at what they did one cold October night to a young man in Wyoming as well. Jesus Christ died again when Matthew Shepard did.”

The Artist and the Audience

What is lost frequently in discussions of artworks that are challenging or works by artists “not like us”—whatever that means—is the fact that real people create these things and real people experience them. It raises again the ageless questions, What is art for and what can it do? Art changes us. In the theater, this is a communal experience. The push/pull of critical and social posturing sometimes forgets those things. What’s more, as we change, these artworks blur and morph and reappear in ever-shifting ways. Although your response might be the opposite of the person next to you, art continues to alter us in our spinning world because it keeps playing in memory, like a repertory theater of the mind. 

There is no one right way in art, and that is its own burden and virtue. Aside from the variety of responses in any given audience, each of us holds a range of reactions in ourselves. Duality is a component of our age, even if social politics paints it otherwise. We ask ourselves to keep many artistic points of view and their subtle colorings resident at the same time.

Future thinkers armed with perspective might look back on our day as a time when our unending consumption of digital content became a gateway to embrace discordance as essential to our omnivorousness—not by aspiration to claim all knowledge as our providence but by entitled assumption and technological reality—that we held all art in our palm at once.

Is The Chosen good or bad art? Are the people who watch it or don’t watch it good or bad? Neither art nor ourselves is static. That is one reason why the labels that attempt, however slyly, to calibrate moral goodness in art simply don’t work. A pronouncement—whether it is praise or condemnation—of a faith-derived artwork as uplifting, sacrilegious, devout, or blasphemous is only as permanent as we are, which is to say, not very fixed at all. We are each in flux.

Is The Chosen Good?

On paper, The Chosen shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be effective. The bizarre gap between characters in costumes and on sets that aspire to historicity who then speak so colloquially is, like, totally jarring. Typically, that kind of anachronism kills the viewer’s ability to be fully immersed in a dramatic work. It pulls the viewer in and out of the action by disrupting its consistency. It violates the rules of its own universe. It is like listening to two languages at once. 

Here, Jenkins’ choices do not seem to be artifice nor caprice but simply the way he envisions the characters and the story as meaningful to and a mirror of contemporary life. It is the gateway he believes to be the most direct route for viewers to understand his point of view and interpret the source material. To be sure, it takes some time to become accustomed to this approach, to relax and just roll with it. At the end of one emotional scene in the first season of the show, Jesus heals the leper, gives him a new tunic, and says, admiringly, “Green is definitely your color. Not too shabby.” You won’t find that verse in the Gospels. Many of the characters sound like that, jumping in and out of contemporary cadences from what is otherwise intended to approximate period speech.

In another scene, this one from Season Two, a former highway thief offers an extended, remorseful confession that he has attacked and robbed a Jewish traveler in the dark and left him beaten and naked, to die on a roadside. Jesus forgives him, and assures him omnisciently that in fact his victim did not die. Then realizing that he and his posse should be on their way because it is getting dark, Jesus deadpans, “You never know what sort of men will lay in wait along the side of the road.” There is an awkward pause, then Jesus says with a smile, “Too soon?” 

These are scripts that embrace the vernacular nearly at every opportunity. The language and references of The Chosen are so contemporary that if Jesus were to begin a scene by saying, “Two Pharisees walk into a bar…”, not one viewer of the series—none of the millions of them—would even bat an eye. 

At a base level, even for purists, it is forgivable because it is enjoyable. The recent Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, can be boiled down to an irresistible, two-word pitch: baby Yoda; The Chosen finds distinction in a similarly concise description: Jesus is funny. The conceptual embrace of humor began to evolve in the early short films that Jenkins made for his church. In a 2015 short, Jesus (with Roumie already cast in the lead role) watches the disciples arm wrestle. Thaddeus surprises the group and bests Andrew, to which Jesus says, “Even I didn’t see that coming.” 

In terms of character and setting, the series straddles the societies of the imagined Bible and Anywhere, U.S.A. The male and female disciples joke and tease and play and bully and fret. They are given tics, disorders, and troubling histories. The actors, aside from their unplaceable, foreign accents that occasionally come and go without warning, are very much represented visually on screen by the creative modes of restless camera work and other present-day filmmaking techniques. This should add up to be a disruptive, unending whipsaw for the viewer, particularly those who come to the show expecting a Bible-bound experience; they are, after all, its core audience. Consider the hubris, then, involved in writing and filming such contemporary plot and dialogue representing hallowed figures of the Bible, including One in whose name people around the world pray every day, and conjuring backstories and personalities foreign to or merely hinted at in the canon of Christian scripture. It is quite audacious. It shouldn’t work.

And yet. The viewer finds the unique spirit of the series in the intangibles that transcend its cleverness, especially in the surprising insights that strike when least expected. (It might be a fascinating social experiment to take this concept one step further: to film the exact same script with the same performers in modern dress on the streets of New York or Las Vegas or even Tel Aviv. How far would the audience allow itself to be pushed with updated versions of scriptural art? Would faithful series viewers swoon after such an approach or hunt for torches and pitchforks?) There is a method to the series’ approach. It is not a biblical bait and switch. The humor makes the miracles feel more unexpected. The music is effective and, particularly when miracles occur in the plot, tingle-inducing. The contemporary language helps a viewer to imagine walking alongside the historical Jesus, Himself. Dramatically speaking, these are no small achievements. As is, The Chosen is so winningly human, so insightful and engaging, it almost persuades anyone to be a Christian. 

Jenkins has a plan, and by making the characters feel like your next door neighbors—granted, a funnier version of them and more physically attractive—they feel real in a way that no Hollywood biblical epic has matched. These disciples are messy and messed up, meaning, they are like we are. What disbelief is Jenkins asking us to suspend in this approach to storytelling? Perhaps our shared reverence for sacred texts has been a barrier to understanding these men and women all along and putting ourselves in their sandals.

Clearly, a top priority of the show is relatability. In LDS culture, children sing a line from a song by Janice Kapp Perry, “I’m trying to be like Jesus….” As people watch the movies, TV series, and stage productions cited here, including The Chosen, what kind of Jesus do they want to be like? As Max von Sydow, Victor Garber, Ted Neeley, Jeff Fenholt, Willem Dafoe, Corey Behnke—to give some examples from the films and plays noted above? What are the traits in these performances that draw us (or fail to draw us) to Jesus?

Right now, millions of people likely want to be like Jonathan Roumie, the Jesus of The Chosen, and they might not be able to articulate exactly why. Certainly, he projects an appealingly original, wise, funny, playful, teasing, handsome, restrained, good, persecuted, loving, loyal, intense, knowing, honorable, strong, miraculous, and calmly divine being—in many respects, a being you did not imagine existed. You might think this appeal radiates innately from the actor himself, but Roumie’s previous performances on American network television do not have that same, charmed effect. This role has clearly tapped into something meaningful for him. It does not detract anything from this warm and winning actor to suggest that this unexpected emotional connection between character and audience is principally Jenkins’ doing as his writer and director. It is still early in the story and early in the series, but as a creative duo, they’re onto something. 

In a discussion of all of these dramatic projects, Christian believers can be forgiven for jumping to judgment. It is surely a protective impulse for Christians to want to safeguard this revered text. It is called the Holy Bible, after all. Who should have the job to make art from it? What should be its interpretive barrier of entry? We wonder and worry at the possibilities of the new: a 70’s hippie singing with a guitar? A rock opera portrayal? Monty Python’s perverse universe? Mel Gibson’s repulsive violence? A vision of Jesus making love? Gay apostles? Jesus cracking jokes? Any of us is justified to think as we want about any and all of the above projects, especially after having learned enough to construct an informed opinion. However, viewers might surprise themselves by wading through them and finding new ways to enlarge their faith and to see things from others’ view as they explore. What would Jesus do?: the perpetual guiding question of contemporary ethical choice making. Here’s a follow up: What would Jesus view?

Dallas Jenkins envisions seven seasons of The Chosen. We are beginning Season Three with Jesus’ first, large-scaled public sermon, a Woodstock of blessedness. The series is a chronological survey of the life of Jesus with an occasional, looping backstory. Readers of the Bible know what’s coming over the next seasons. It will be fascinating to see how the viewing audience reacts over time. Will they be like the flash mobs of ancient Israel who were adoring fans of a celebritized Jesus, until they weren’t? Will audiences and financial backers of The Chosen mirror this fickleness or fealty as the series’ storyline grows darker and opportunities for its unique sense of humor evaporate? There may be a sorting of allegiances. Based on the work so far, however, over two seasons and counting, Jenkins is telling us to have faith.