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Most Christian-faith-based media is overly saccharine or unrealistic. The Chosen is one of the few pieces of Christian media I’ve not just watched, but thorough

Most Christian-faith-based media is overly saccharine or unrealistic. The Chosen is one of the few pieces of Christian media I’ve not just watched, but thoroughly enjoyed. It focuses on characters rife with their own set of personal issues who are changed by their encounters with Jesus. It portrays a realistic world full of problems we can all relate to. Ironically, it is a breath of fresh air precisely because it has a bit more grit.

SavantIdiot 5y ago
The Last Temptation of Christ was brilliant in this regard. Jesus of Nazareth as a person that didn't really want to be the Christ.
- phd514 5y ago
  There's a huge difference between The Chosen and LToC -- while both may present a "gritty" and imaginative narrative including fictionalized accounts that are not canon, The Chosen does it in a way that does not contradict anything canonical while LToC depicts a sinfully lustful Christ who abdicates his role as savior by stepping down from the cross. As such, it should come as no surprise that The Chosen is popular and well-received among believers and LToC was widely criticized.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Depends whose canon you're talking about because there is no canonical canon. Kazantzakis was very influenced by Gnosticism which set him at odds with the Orthodox and Catholic versions. Personally I found the story to be the most accessible and human version of the story.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Where does the LToC contradict the gospels? They aren't a comprehensive diary of his every thought. You can't say Jesus didn't fantasize about a life with Mary, because that's proving a negative. It's just a proposed fiction to imagine Jesus in a more human way than the vagaries of the canonical gospels. I can see how that would upset some people, but I'd be interested to know where the contradictions exist. It made me really consider the gravity of being the son of god in a way that the gospels simply aren't equipped to deliver.
    - ekianjo 5y ago
      books 2000 years ago were not written to talk about feelings. this is rather recent in litterature circa 16th or 17th century onward
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      The Last Temptation shows Jesus’ deity as imperceptive and impotent, contradicting his nature: not a sin so much as a denial of Jesus’ nature. The imperfect human desires before and during the vision also carry on well past harmless observation and affect the man in a way that would have concerned the one who figuratively(?) advised to pluck out an eye rather than be burdened by sin caused by it. The temptations are incongruent with the refutation of temptation and self-knowledge displayed in the wilderness. That said! I agree the film is a marvelous examination of human weakness and faith in this life.
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    > LToC depicts a sinfully lustful Christ who abdicates his role as savior by stepping down from the cross It depicted a man tempted to.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
I'll admit to being biased against the show from the start, but your description of it sounds like Jesus is just a constant deus ex machina. Is there more to it than "Jesus shows up and everything's cool now?"
- colordrops 5y ago
  Considering its meaning, is your use of the term "Deus ex machina" (god out of the machine) intentionally ironic?
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    It's just the term for a seemingly unsolvable situation suddenly being solved by an unexpected occurrence.
- jollybean 5y ago
  "but your description of it sounds like Jesus is just a constant deus ex machina." - there is no reasonable way to infer this from the given comment. Thee 'bias' may be a bit stronger than imagined.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Not particularly. Their description was that everybody has real problems that are changed by coming in contact with Jesus. Real problems, solved by a solution suddenly showing up in the third act. A deus ex machina.
- eitland 5y ago
  Haven't seen the Chosen yet but the stories as written are quite a bit more nuanced.
scop 5y ago
I concur. As a believing Christian, if somebody comes along and says “hey do you want to watch this Jesus show/movie?” my honest answer is…not really! I went into the Chosen expecting it to be awful and have been very impressed by the story telling and production quality . You pinpoint part of the problem: in an attempt to be reverent, shows or movies will make it all so pious as to remove anything earthly or real about it. And, surprise surprise, that’s dreadfully boring. Or if there is some grit/problem, there’s a “once saved always saved” bent to it where the problem is fixed and then the movie ends…as of life isn’t full of hardships after baptism/whatever! I think the second problem for Jesus films is due to the nature of the gospels themselves: outside of the Passion narratives, they are strung together stories with little narrative connection. (I know, I know, it’s more nuanced than that…but the point being that a film director just can’t make a film about the gospels without making it seem like a random string of events with largely different people/places). It is this problem that the Chosen so masterfully addresses: make the focus on the characters in the story, not Jesus, and thereby give a narrative form to what are otherwise brief, well-known stories. The healing at the well, whose brother is made to be a militant apostle, is a great example. There have also been some flourishes in the show that have indicated some real artistic meditation/thought by the writers, for example when Jesus and John discuss the Torah and John is given the first insights into his eventual theology.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  > ... outside of the Passion narratives, they are strung together stories with little narrative connection... It may seem this way given the style of books we're accustomed to reading in the 21st century, but there are clear narratives to each Gospel, and the events are amazingly well arranged. You might enjoy a book like Reading the Gospels Wisely. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801039371 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801039371
  - scop 5y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve read NT Wright and Bauckham and others on this topic, but I haven’t heard of Pennington. Will check it out! Wright in particular has really helped me to see each gospel in its own narrative form. I agree that the gospels do have narrative structure when considered as products of the first century. Perhaps the closest to a “modern” narrative would be John’s gospel, but even that is very difficult to tackle given the heavy theology interwoven throughout. In fact, it was seeing scenes from John’s gospel in The Chosen that really alerted me to the talent of the filmmakers. Seeing them pull of John 3 in a meaningful and natural way was phenomenal, as they avoided the potential for dry/impersonal theology by wrapping it in the deeply personal experience of Nichodemus.
maroonblazer 5y ago
I was raised Catholic, am now an atheist, but I'd watch this too. I also highly recommend "Jesus of Nazareth". It's a more traditional telling of the New Testament but the cast and performances are truly outstanding. https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Nazareth-Robert-Powell/dp/B075B2G56S https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Nazareth-Robert-Powell/dp/B075B...
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  There's also The Gospel According to St. Matthew, by Pasolini. It's currently in my to-watch list, but many people claimed it's a step above Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth
sircastor 5y ago
It’s a challenging tightrope to walk: You either have to take a lot of creative liberties about Jesus (for lack of explicit background) or you limit your content to just the source material, and end up with a very limited depiction. Everyone (or at least every Christian) has their own version of Jesus in their head and when media is produced about him, they correlate that version with their own.
- jollybean 5y ago
  This is such a good point. 'The Passion of Christ' is a great example of something that can be truly emotive for some, but not for others. I found it barely interesting and frankly not sure how much it has to do with Christianity, or rather in a pedantic way. It was nice production design, neat to see 'what it would have looked like' and I'm actually sympathetic to why 'it's good in a way' ... but to me it's all kinds of besides the point. Populism is perhaps more real in Faith than it is in politics, there are various lowest common denominators that can appeal to broad audiences and suck a lot of wind out of the situation.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    It was interesting to me as someone who's been adjacent to, and by necessity somewhat versed in Christianity, for 20 years, but the need to make the audience sit through all 40 lashes, that felt very hardcore "if the Mass isn't in Latin, it doesn't count" Catholic to me. I was mainly there for the Aramaic.
    - jollybean 5y ago
      As a Protestant, none of it made any sense to me at all on the level of Religion or Faith. It seemed like one of those big budget 'History Channel' re-enactments of an important moment, with a big focus on the violence, for what I can gather are reasons of ratings, and that's it. Without offending anyone who liked it, it seemed to almost offensive to me.
      - EdwardDiego 5y ago
phonebanshee 5y ago
I kind of had to laugh about this. The vast majority of European written media over, say, the last two thousand years, is Christian faith based.
- QuarterReptile 5y ago
  I think it would accurately be described as Christian derived (being Western) but, given the exponential growth of published writing over time, I doubt the majority of written media is Christian based. Just my hunch..
jollybean 5y ago
The best 'faith based' stuff focuses on the content or experience, not Disneyfied characterization of the Bible. U2 is a Christian band, they make Gospel music. They just stopped saying that back in the 1970's but if you look at their lyrics it becomes immediately obvious. In fact, blatant. Literally their hit song "He Works in Mysterious Ways". They don't even hide it, yet, nobody is really aware. That to me is mind-blowing: how something can be so obvious, right in front of our eyes, not even denied ... and we don't see it. Mr. Rogers Neighbourhood is 100% Ministering without apparent Ministering. 'Children of Men' is possibly my favourite film, it's literally a Nativity Story. ... but the last thing on the planet I would ever want to listen to is a 'Christian Band' that calls themselves a 'Christian Band'.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  The U2 lyric is “she moves in mysterious ways”. Just a little different.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    Oh that's right it's funny how your memory adapts to what you want it to be. But it's just the same with them anyhow. U2-charist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2charist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2charist
Causality1 5y ago
Does the grit extend to Jesus himself? That is to say, do we get the Zen monk-style Jesus from modern Western media or do we get the anger-issues Jesus from the Bible?
- WoodenChair 5y ago
  > That is to say, do we get the Zen monk-style Jesus from modern Western media or do we get the anger-issues Jesus from the Bible? Both of those are your interpretation of others' interpretations, and I question whether either of those is a widely held view. Personally, I don't see the media as depicting him as zen-like and I definitely don't read him as having anger-issues in the Bible.
  - Causality1 5y ago
    Give it another read. He gets pissed off all the time and for the most bizarre reasons, like the time some people he was teaching don't understand his parable and he's asked why he teaches in parables if people have trouble understanding them and he throws a shit-fit.
    - xedrac 5y ago
      I understand how someone could come to this conclusion, especially if you read the Old Testament and believe that Jesus and Jehovah are the same being. But I do think The Chosen has successfully captured the essence of the Gospels and made them much more relatable.
  - EdwardDiego 5y ago
    That time he cursed the fig tree, was used to great humour by a web comic. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/biblical-literalism https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/biblical-literalism
    - secondcoming 5y ago
      That's quite funny but I assume the fig tree was a metaphor
RickJWagner 5y ago
My family started watching 'The Chosen' a while ago, we're hooked. As a programmer, I identify most closely with the Mathew character.
- finder83 5y ago
  Agreed! Matthew is such a great character. I relate a lot with him too. I get the same feeling watching the character as I do reading the book of Matthew, which makes me appreciate the gospel even more.
- matthops 5y ago
  The studio behind The Chosen is hiring engineers. Remote friendly. :) www.angel.com/apply

SavantIdiot 5y ago

The Last Temptation of Christ was brilliant in this regard. Jesus of Nazareth as a person that didn't really want to be the Christ.

phd514 5y ago
There's a huge difference between The Chosen and LToC -- while both may present a "gritty" and imaginative narrative including fictionalized accounts that are not canon, The Chosen does it in a way that does not contradict anything canonical while LToC depicts a sinfully lustful Christ who abdicates his role as savior by stepping down from the cross. As such, it should come as no surprise that The Chosen is popular and well-received among believers and LToC was widely criticized.
- tootie 5y ago
  Depends whose canon you're talking about because there is no canonical canon. Kazantzakis was very influenced by Gnosticism which set him at odds with the Orthodox and Catholic versions. Personally I found the story to be the most accessible and human version of the story.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Where does the LToC contradict the gospels? They aren't a comprehensive diary of his every thought. You can't say Jesus didn't fantasize about a life with Mary, because that's proving a negative. It's just a proposed fiction to imagine Jesus in a more human way than the vagaries of the canonical gospels. I can see how that would upset some people, but I'd be interested to know where the contradictions exist. It made me really consider the gravity of being the son of god in a way that the gospels simply aren't equipped to deliver.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    books 2000 years ago were not written to talk about feelings. this is rather recent in litterature circa 16th or 17th century onward
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    The Last Temptation shows Jesus’ deity as imperceptive and impotent, contradicting his nature: not a sin so much as a denial of Jesus’ nature. The imperfect human desires before and during the vision also carry on well past harmless observation and affect the man in a way that would have concerned the one who figuratively(?) advised to pluck out an eye rather than be burdened by sin caused by it. The temptations are incongruent with the refutation of temptation and self-knowledge displayed in the wilderness. That said! I agree the film is a marvelous examination of human weakness and faith in this life.
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  > LToC depicts a sinfully lustful Christ who abdicates his role as savior by stepping down from the cross It depicted a man tempted to.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

I'll admit to being biased against the show from the start, but your description of it sounds like Jesus is just a constant deus ex machina. Is there more to it than "Jesus shows up and everything's cool now?"

colordrops 5y ago
Considering its meaning, is your use of the term "Deus ex machina" (god out of the machine) intentionally ironic?
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  It's just the term for a seemingly unsolvable situation suddenly being solved by an unexpected occurrence.
jollybean 5y ago
"but your description of it sounds like Jesus is just a constant deus ex machina." - there is no reasonable way to infer this from the given comment. Thee 'bias' may be a bit stronger than imagined.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Not particularly. Their description was that everybody has real problems that are changed by coming in contact with Jesus. Real problems, solved by a solution suddenly showing up in the third act. A deus ex machina.
eitland 5y ago
Haven't seen the Chosen yet but the stories as written are quite a bit more nuanced.

scop 5y ago

I concur. As a believing Christian, if somebody comes along and says “hey do you want to watch this Jesus show/movie?” my honest answer is…not really! I went into the Chosen expecting it to be awful and have been very impressed by the story telling and production quality . You pinpoint part of the problem: in an attempt to be reverent, shows or movies will make it all so pious as to remove anything earthly or real about it. And, surprise surprise, that’s dreadfully boring. Or if there is some grit/problem, there’s a “once saved always saved” bent to it where the problem is fixed and then the movie ends…as of life isn’t full of hardships after baptism/whatever! I think the second problem for Jesus films is due to the nature of the gospels themselves: outside of the Passion narratives, they are strung together stories with little narrative connection. (I know, I know, it’s more nuanced than that…but the point being that a film director just can’t make a film about the gospels without making it seem like a random string of events with largely different people/places). It is this problem that the Chosen so masterfully addresses: make the focus on the characters in the story, not Jesus, and thereby give a narrative form to what are otherwise brief, well-known stories. The healing at the well, whose brother is made to be a militant apostle, is a great example. There have also been some flourishes in the show that have indicated some real artistic meditation/thought by the writers, for example when Jesus and John discuss the Torah and John is given the first insights into his eventual theology.

ARandomerDude 5y ago
> ... outside of the Passion narratives, they are strung together stories with little narrative connection... It may seem this way given the style of books we're accustomed to reading in the 21st century, but there are clear narratives to each Gospel, and the events are amazingly well arranged. You might enjoy a book like Reading the Gospels Wisely. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801039371 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801039371
- scop 5y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation! I’ve read NT Wright and Bauckham and others on this topic, but I haven’t heard of Pennington. Will check it out! Wright in particular has really helped me to see each gospel in its own narrative form. I agree that the gospels do have narrative structure when considered as products of the first century. Perhaps the closest to a “modern” narrative would be John’s gospel, but even that is very difficult to tackle given the heavy theology interwoven throughout. In fact, it was seeing scenes from John’s gospel in The Chosen that really alerted me to the talent of the filmmakers. Seeing them pull of John 3 in a meaningful and natural way was phenomenal, as they avoided the potential for dry/impersonal theology by wrapping it in the deeply personal experience of Nichodemus.

maroonblazer 5y ago

I was raised Catholic, am now an atheist, but I'd watch this too. I also highly recommend "Jesus of Nazareth". It's a more traditional telling of the New Testament but the cast and performances are truly outstanding. https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Nazareth-Robert-Powell/dp/B075B2G56S https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Nazareth-Robert-Powell/dp/B075B...

gattilorenz 5y ago
There's also The Gospel According to St. Matthew, by Pasolini. It's currently in my to-watch list, but many people claimed it's a step above Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth

sircastor 5y ago

It’s a challenging tightrope to walk: You either have to take a lot of creative liberties about Jesus (for lack of explicit background) or you limit your content to just the source material, and end up with a very limited depiction. Everyone (or at least every Christian) has their own version of Jesus in their head and when media is produced about him, they correlate that version with their own.

jollybean 5y ago
This is such a good point. 'The Passion of Christ' is a great example of something that can be truly emotive for some, but not for others. I found it barely interesting and frankly not sure how much it has to do with Christianity, or rather in a pedantic way. It was nice production design, neat to see 'what it would have looked like' and I'm actually sympathetic to why 'it's good in a way' ... but to me it's all kinds of besides the point. Populism is perhaps more real in Faith than it is in politics, there are various lowest common denominators that can appeal to broad audiences and suck a lot of wind out of the situation.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  It was interesting to me as someone who's been adjacent to, and by necessity somewhat versed in Christianity, for 20 years, but the need to make the audience sit through all 40 lashes, that felt very hardcore "if the Mass isn't in Latin, it doesn't count" Catholic to me. I was mainly there for the Aramaic.
  - jollybean 5y ago
    As a Protestant, none of it made any sense to me at all on the level of Religion or Faith. It seemed like one of those big budget 'History Channel' re-enactments of an important moment, with a big focus on the violence, for what I can gather are reasons of ratings, and that's it. Without offending anyone who liked it, it seemed to almost offensive to me.
    - EdwardDiego 5y ago

phonebanshee 5y ago

I kind of had to laugh about this. The vast majority of European written media over, say, the last two thousand years, is Christian faith based.

QuarterReptile 5y ago
I think it would accurately be described as Christian derived (being Western) but, given the exponential growth of published writing over time, I doubt the majority of written media is Christian based. Just my hunch..

jollybean 5y ago

The best 'faith based' stuff focuses on the content or experience, not Disneyfied characterization of the Bible. U2 is a Christian band, they make Gospel music. They just stopped saying that back in the 1970's but if you look at their lyrics it becomes immediately obvious. In fact, blatant. Literally their hit song "He Works in Mysterious Ways". They don't even hide it, yet, nobody is really aware. That to me is mind-blowing: how something can be so obvious, right in front of our eyes, not even denied ... and we don't see it. Mr. Rogers Neighbourhood is 100% Ministering without apparent Ministering. 'Children of Men' is possibly my favourite film, it's literally a Nativity Story. ... but the last thing on the planet I would ever want to listen to is a 'Christian Band' that calls themselves a 'Christian Band'.

onionisafruit 5y ago
The U2 lyric is “she moves in mysterious ways”. Just a little different.
- jollybean 5y ago
  Oh that's right it's funny how your memory adapts to what you want it to be. But it's just the same with them anyhow. U2-charist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2charist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U2charist

Causality1 5y ago

Does the grit extend to Jesus himself? That is to say, do we get the Zen monk-style Jesus from modern Western media or do we get the anger-issues Jesus from the Bible?

WoodenChair 5y ago
> That is to say, do we get the Zen monk-style Jesus from modern Western media or do we get the anger-issues Jesus from the Bible? Both of those are your interpretation of others' interpretations, and I question whether either of those is a widely held view. Personally, I don't see the media as depicting him as zen-like and I definitely don't read him as having anger-issues in the Bible.
- Causality1 5y ago
  Give it another read. He gets pissed off all the time and for the most bizarre reasons, like the time some people he was teaching don't understand his parable and he's asked why he teaches in parables if people have trouble understanding them and he throws a shit-fit.
  - xedrac 5y ago
    I understand how someone could come to this conclusion, especially if you read the Old Testament and believe that Jesus and Jehovah are the same being. But I do think The Chosen has successfully captured the essence of the Gospels and made them much more relatable.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  That time he cursed the fig tree, was used to great humour by a web comic. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/biblical-literalism https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/biblical-literalism
  - secondcoming 5y ago
    That's quite funny but I assume the fig tree was a metaphor

RickJWagner 5y ago

My family started watching 'The Chosen' a while ago, we're hooked. As a programmer, I identify most closely with the Mathew character.

finder83 5y ago
Agreed! Matthew is such a great character. I relate a lot with him too. I get the same feeling watching the character as I do reading the book of Matthew, which makes me appreciate the gospel even more.
matthops 5y ago
The studio behind The Chosen is hiring engineers. Remote friendly. :) www.angel.com/apply