Here we go again. Every ten years or so the Evangelical Christian Establishment (I call them the ECE because having an acronym for it makes it real) reboots the Christ franchise and comes out with some new version of the gospel that is supposed to be free of those stodgy suffocating embellishments foisted on it by previous generations making it newly relevant to the young folk out there who are unchurched. This Jesus is realistic. He is vibrant. He is young. Maybe someday, he’ll actually look Jewish.
Remember “Blue Like Jazz”? Yeah, fooled me too. Donald Miller with his allegedly enlightened intellectually credible version of the gospel. It turned out to be orthodoxy 2.0. Nothing that Billy Graham would not have happily endorsed in 1965. Remember “The Late Great Planet Earth”? “Jesus Freaks”?
Everything just comes and goes.
Remember “Jesus of Nazareth”? Back in 1977, it was considered a daring, unusually authentic version of the gospel. Starring Anne Bancroft and Ernest Borgnine, among others. Yes, with an all-star cast. I don’t think you need to say any more than that to know where it went.
And so we now have “The Chosen”. And once again, the hype tells us that this one will be different. This one is special. This one speaks to the younger generation. All bad signs.
The most important fact about “The Chosen” is this: the claims of giving you a more authentic depiction of Jesus in his time and culture is utter hogwash. It is clear from the very beginning that “The Chosen” is carefully calibrated to slavishly present what American evangelical Christians think Jesus and his culture sounded and looked like according to their literalistic perception as shaped by English language Bibles (reflecting the bias of various historical church establishments) and their own church culture of Americanized banality. Thus, if the NIV (New International Version) of the bible says that Jesus fed 5,000 people from one basket of fish and bread, then that is damn well what happened and will be depicted as such. We’ll even have the crowd shout, “Jesus of Nazareth has done a miracle!” to make sure they get it. And, of course, reflecting what passes for theology in the modern church, when a leper appears, the disciples act exactly like a ten-year-old white boy from Tennessee would imagine from the story he heard in Sunday school. “Horrors! A leper! Run!” The leper himself acts like the ten-year-old boy, giggling embarrassingly for Jesus. Does Jenkins even know that this is embarrassing or why?
The most damning indication of this flaw in “The Chosen” is so obvious and so fatal that I can hardly believe the decision to do it: the actors speak in English with vaguely middle eastern accents.
Are you kidding me?
Well, wait a minute. It may not actually be the most damning indication. Take a look at Jesus (Jonathan Roumie). Roumie is allegedly half Egyptian, but he is clearly more than half Irish. Half Egyptian, I guess, is as far as Jenkins is willing to go knowing that American audiences don’t want a Jesus that looks too Jewish.
Look at those faces. Come on now– it could be the starting line-up from a football team from Missouri. Oh, wait. Maybe from Utah.
Is it necessary to explain why this is stupid? Firstly, I accept that having the characters talk to each other in Galilean Aramaic with English subtitles– while the best solution– is not on the table for Jenkins. Assuming he is sincere– and I never assume that about anyone who belongs to any American religion that claims to be modelled on Christ but overwhelmingly supports Donald Trump for president– Jenkins will undoubtedly judge the success of “The Chosen” not based on awards or money but on how many people he can claim to have brought to Christ.
Okay, yes, I am cynical about American evangelical Christians, but you can’t get much more cynical than to vote for Donald Trump.
Dallas Jenkins, the driving force (IMDB calls him– ha ha– the “creator” of “The Chosen”) doesn’t see a problem. I see a problem. Even if you accept the convention that the bible is “infallible” in some way, a qualification foisted upon it by later generations of church leaders, the bible is still language, words that were written down decades or even centuries after Christ lived, translated, transposed, and yes, even edited, before we in the 21st century received them. They don’t contain, for the most part, the actual dialog or images or smells or tone of the actual events. This is a problem for every rendering of the Christ story because the story is so well-known and revered by so many people that it is very, very hard to free yourself of the contamination of stereo-types and conventions.
The problem is that the people of Israel in 30 A.D. did not live in a script as a reflection of some quaint idea of what Americans think first century Jews were like. We know something about people and society and groups and we know, for instance, that an army of 70,000 individuals can’t move to a new location overnight, appear on the top of a hill, and completely surprise another army. It’s absurd. Simply feeding the army, supplying it with water, taking care of the horses, finding roads and paths, scouting for obstacles, scouting for enemies, scouting for enemy scouts, and so on, will ensure that the army of 70,000 will be noticed long before they appear in formation for battle.
In the same way, if 5,000 people are fed from one basket of fish and loaves, there will be some people who don’t believe what they see, and some who will believe anything they are told, and some who will not gaze with reverence upon the magician who performed this trick. And they are not likely to run around holding intact fish and waving them in the air the way they do in “The Chosen”. I didn’t see any person in the scene biting into it or cleaning and gutting it or anything you might expect someone who is actually going to eat the fish might do.
Jenkins tastefully declines to use the magic of CGI to dramatize the cure of a leper. Instead, we see the blotches, the wounds, and then we see the same patch of skin without the wound. The puzzle for some of us is this: did this and other miracles really happen? Do we believe Jesus the prophet but not Jesus the miracle worker? Do we believe both or neither?
I personally suspect that most of the miracles were actually ambiguous events that were massaged into the more dramatic stories by years of retelling which necessarily incorporate elements of exaggeration and enhancement. Apologists consistently argue that the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world is proof that incredibly dramatic events occurred in Israel during Christ’s ministry. But the faith did not actually begin to rapidly spread until later, through the devout efforts of the apostles, now evangelists, primarily Paul, who never even met Jesus.
If everyone saw correctly what the modern English bible tells us they saw, Jesus would never have been arrested and crucified. There clearly were people, including authorities, who did not believe that Jesus’ miracles were real or that they were evidence of divine power. Even the bible tells us that. So when Jenkins shows us an awestruck crowd he is showing us a fantasy in which all the participants behave exactly the way the fantasist wants them to behave, in a way that gratifies his infatuation with himself as a believer and supporter of pussy-grabbing porn-star payoff artist politicians or even worse, Mike Pence.
Ross Douthat defends an inerrant interpretation of the Gospels. He makes a reasonably good case for it, at least, if you already believe he’s right. He argues that the essential consistency of the gospel message is evidence that it is true. Then he also argues that the inconsistencies prove it is true: because the fact that inconsistencies were left in the gospels proves that no one edited them later to iron out the inconsistencies, thereby corrupting the accounts.
Well, that’s good. It’s inerrant because it’s errant. It’s errant because it’s inerrant.