Almost any adaptation of Christian history will employ the theological perspective of the present day. Jonathan Roumie’s Jesus in The Chosen isn’t an attempt to adapt the Jesus of any one Gospel, nor the liturgical Christ of the first-century kerygma, nor the historical Jesus secular scholars quest for. He is the Jesus of 2017, an amalgamation of 2,000 years of cultural and hierological development. I’d even argue that, in many ways, he’s become our “Cultural Jesus,” a nice little embodiment of Jesus as colloquially understood. And lest you mistake this description for a critique, let me state at the outset that nothing is wrong with adaptation. Art and tradition are bound in symbiosis, tradition layering upon itself with art responding in a cyclical and ever-shifting balance. Tradition is, as David Bentley Hart eloquently puts it, “a living thing to be cultivated, not a dead artifact to be curated.”1
As such, I think The Chosen evokes undue criticism over some of its narrative choices.2 Sure, the series can be anachronistic at times and misses the mark on the occasional detail of history, but frankly, I don’t think any present-day Christian wants a hyper-accurate portrayal featuring a bunch of dusty fishermen wandering the Jewish hill country with no electric guitar music to accent their slo-mo walking montages.3 Any adaptation of the Jesus story, from Christ’s changing skin color in localized iconography to the interpretive narratives of the Gospels themselves, will inevitably infuse familiar tradition with contemporary folk understandings.
So when The Chosen invents a story we don’t find in the Bible, it’s not (as some pearl-clutchers whine) trying to countermand Revelation 22:18-19, nor is it trying to “improve” scripture. Sometimes, it’s just trying to develop its characters, but usually, it’s using the narrative to address present-day questions, as so much great art does.
I hope this introduction draws a clear distinction between critiquing the concept of extra-biblical stories interpolated into an adaptation of the Gospel narrative and specific examples of said interpolations. I will defend the former to the last, while I’m about to spend considerable time criticizing one of the latter.
Everything past the picture of Jesus hugging Peter is riddled with major spoilers for season 4 of The Chosen.
For those unfamiliar with the show and who don’t care about spoilers (final warning), The Chosen invents a fictional fiancé (“Ramah”) for the Apostle Thomas and then kills her off in Season 4. Her death is more than a bit melodramatic and ridiculous; a confrontation between Jesus and some Pharisees riles up a crowd, causing Galilee’s Praetor “Quintus,” who exists in a baseline state of comically angry, to become very, very comically angry. While escaping the fray, Thomas (weirdly) shoves past him, to which Quintus spins round and thrusts a sword in his general direction, stabbing Ramah in the back.
Cue slo-mo, cue dramatic music. Everyone is shocked, even Quintus, who stares at his bloodied sword like he’s surprised it stabbed someone. Ramah collapses. Mary Magdeline and Thomas rush to her side. James the Great (in the most compelling moment of the scene for me) pulls a knife from his belt and rushes Quintus, restrained by his brother John. Everyone else just kinda stands around and cries.
Ramah slowly dies in proper whispery, Hollywood fashion, passionately imploring Thomas to “Stay with him. It’s all I want.” Thomas, appropriately, begs her to hold on…and then sees his Rabbi. He cries out to Jesus, begging him to “fix this.”
“You don’t have to let this happen!”
And Jesus (in an uncharacteristically weak performance moment for Roumie) looks at him with sympathetic eyes and just kind of…shrugs. He tells him he is sorry and that he loves him, but the only words he offers in return for Thomas’ pleas are, “It is not her time.”
This whole sequence, execution aside for the moment,4 is a bold move on the part of the show’s creative team. Killing Ramah in this manner is not really an attempt to adapt the Gospel narrative, nor is it even primarily done to develop characters;5 this is, first and foremost, an attempted theodicy.
Fans and critics alike have written plenty about how out of nowhere this death felt and how bizarre a choice it was, but really, the logic is quite simple. Jesus is unambiguously God in the Chosen; Christ is with his disciples like God is with us right now, so placing an untimely death at the feet of Jonathan Roumie is just an adaptive way of asking the question, “Why does God let bad things happen to good people, right now?” The question is not principally one for the narrative's internal logic to answer; it’s a question for today, and asking it in the show's context is little different than placing one’s criticisms of the Red Scare in the mouths of 17th-century Puritans. Conceptually, it makes perfect sense.
But.
The problem is, in the wake of a significant and tragic loss, the vast majority of attempted answers to “why would Jesus let this happen” are infuriatingly platitudinous. “God has a plan” is little comfort to those in agony, and rightly so. It is not unreasonable for one to question a God whose “plan” involves a dispassionate indifference to the senseless suffering of the innocent. Bad answers to the problem of suffering drive people away from the faith as much, if not more, than the problem itself does.
So when you lay this challenge at the feet of our Cultural Jesus, you have to tread very, VERY carefully, and this I fear is where the writers of the Chosen fumbled the ball. I imagine that in the writer’s room, they saw two main paths available to them: have Jesus answer the “why” question or have Jesus stay mum and ask Thomas to trust him. Instead, they did…both.
An inadequate answer is worse than no answer. Within the question of suffering, one always finds a mystery. Even the most competent theodicies cannot answer much of the nebulous “why.”6 This returns, funnily enough, to some of the issues from my first reflection about the show trying to have it both ways. Is God sovereign and deterministic? Is everything that happens laid out sequentially in a master outline in the heavenly archives, programmed into existence before the foundations of the world? Did God plan for Quintus to kill Ramah to teach Thomas some lesson about…something?
Or does stuff just happen? Does God create us free and allow this world to suffer the consequences of our poor choices? Sure, in this scenario, God still presumably knows Ramah will be murdered, but as a consequence of fallen nature, not her intentionally chosen “destiny” from the outset. We have before us a classic and basic question of how God’s sovereignty functions in our world.
And The Chosen’s answer is…well, both. This is a tragedy. Jesus stands there forlorn and empathetic. But he also intentionally does not intervene. Her destiny is set. He wishes it didn’t have to be this way, but God has a plan. Except, Jesus is also God. I don’t just say that as a card-carrying trinitarian; I mean that is literally his function in the narrative here. In the show's storytelling structure, Jesus is both the one appealing to the mystery of “this happened for a reason, God has a plan” and simultaneously the one actively letting this happen, actively not intervening, actively standing there as the God not answering the pleading prayer of his disciple.
Again, I’ll reiterate that this is a bold choice. The writers easily could have let Jesus show up a few minutes later, with Ramah already dead, giving him some plausible deniability, but no, they choose to put it right in your face. God allows this kind of thing to happen every day. Let’s wrestle with that.
I appreciate that choice, I really do. But the show isn’t up to the task of providing a satisfactory answer for it. And I think that’s an unfortunate missed opportunity. The best, most honest philosophical and Christian approaches to this question, to my reading, are enough to provide hope, trust, and faith, but not exhaustive explanations.7 What the writers probably should have done (and in their defense, they tried to a little bit) was show Jesus suffering with his disciples through the loss without elucidation. The model of the God who goes to die, the King who makes himself a slave, the man who shows us what it is to be God by suffering, that is the more compelling emphasis. Furthermore, it preserves the essential ambiguities of tragedy. Anyone who has experienced profound grief can attest to the fact that those trying to provide words of comfort through certainty or “answers” find their platitudes falling on deaf ears. The proper response to tragedy is not to try and justify it (as God rightly condemns Job’s friends for attempting); the response is to sit in the grief with that person and do what Paul says Christians are called to do- weep with those who weep.8
Tackling this subject matter was a superbly brave choice by the Chosen’s creative team. Unfortunately, I fear almost everything about it, from the inadequate follow-up to the slightly ridiculous and soap-opera execution of the actual death,9 to the undermining of Thomas’ heroic willingness to follow Christ unto death in John 11 (now rendered as suicidal ideation), to juxtaposing the whole mess with Lazarus’ resurrection an episode or two later, which sure, puts the question right in your face again, but also makes that wonderful miracle now a reflection on the “why God saves some not others” question instead of letting that story function as the forerunner of victory it should be.
God doesn’t give us a “why.” We don’t have a definitive answer to the problem of suffering. Confronting us with that reality is fine, even (as I fear I’ve belabored) admirable. But in the Chosen’s portrayal, just as with the characterization of the disciples in my last post, meager compromises are offered in place of preserving ambiguity, and in these kinds of scenarios, ambiguity is indispensable.
I’d like to re-emphasize that this criticism is offered in a positive spirit. I really do commend The Chosen’s creative team for attempting this. Having watched interviews with series creator Dallas Jenkins addressing the controversy, it’s very clear that this choice was made with care, consideration, and in very good faith.
But the insufficient comforts of “this is all part of a plan” offered to a grieving family member are also made considerately and in good faith. Noble intentions can’t make up for a failure in execution, and when it comes to a challenge as profound as this one, the stakes are assiduously high. You’re speaking from the mouth of our Cultural Jesus, after all.
One of the most profound moments in all four Gospels is Christ weeping at Lazarus's tomb. It’s an absolute and uncompromising affirmation of human grief. Christ is fully aware of his divine ability to restore Lazarus to life and indeed, knows he is about to manifest that power. He even goes so far as to tell his disciples he’s glad Lazarus died so that they might see God’s work and believe.
And yet, even with all that knowledge, even with all that power, Christ demonstrates that even God is seized by grief. Hope, or in this case, even certainty is only a partial comfort to the despair death evokes within us. The profundity of this insight cannot be overstated: Christ takes on human suffering in body and in spirit. The story of Lazarus doesn’t merely demonstrate the awesome power of God, nor simply offer a glimpse of the hope to come; it’s a resonant affirmation of the wrongness of death and the truth of grief. Even the Truth himself, “greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved,” momentarily succumbs to it.
No matter how well-intentioned, anyone who tries to offer a pithy explanation for this esoteric mystery is bailing out the ocean with a thimble.
“Rather, the Christian should see two realities at once, one world (as it were) within another: one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply ‘nature’ but ‘creation;’ an endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once, to regard the world as a mirror of infinite beauty, but as glimpsed through the veil of death; it is to see creation in chains, but beautiful as in the beginning of days.”10
I was going to make a joke here about being uncertain how to properly cite a line from a comment section (where I originally saw the phrasing) but in my attempt to locate said comment I found a piece where Hart uses the same phrasing in the body of the work: [Leaves in the Wind].
And some very due criticism over others, as we’re about to see.
Well, ok I want that but The Chosen is obviously going for mass appeal here.
No pun intended.
Though it seems it may be a contrived attempt to add backstory to Thomas’ “doubting” status. He spends the rest of the season positively despondent. We’ll have to see how it plays into his disbelief post-resurrection in a few seasons, but I already don’t like how it colors his few other canonical moments (as I mention again later in this post, his “let’s go die with him” moment from John 11:16, which may strike the reader as a moment of bravery or loyalty in the text, is presented in the show as depressive. Thomas says, “Let us go die with him,” not out of devotion to his Rabbi but because he is so grief-stricken that he wants to die anyway).
I’ll invoke Hart again and strongly recommend his book "The Doors of the Sea." It’s less an outright theodicy in its own right, and more a meditation on the failures of average Christian theodicies and the harm such shallow banalities can do to the reputation of our faith (I realize that’s a pretty dour sales pitch, but honestly, I think an apophatic approach to the problem of suffering may be precisely the right outlook).
At least, not the ones that also display empathy. There are easy ways to logically dismiss the problem of suffering, but too often those involve rendering words like “love” or “good” so arbitrary as to be meaningless.
I’ll note here that this is not limited to grief but an inherent facet of the Christian experience. Weeping is a constant and recurring theme in monastic writings: Eastern Monks, Western Monks, the Desert Fathers and Mothers, anywhere you find those whose lives are dedicated to contemplative prayer and reflection, you will find them discussing how such experiences inevitably move them to tears. Aligning oneself with the God who is Love can’t help but result in a passionate empathy for the world (the tassels at the end of a komboskini are said to be there to wipe away the tears shed during prayer).
To say nothing of the bizarre portrayal of the Roman response. Quintus is subsequently shamed and demoted, wheres in real life, a Roman official killing a Jewish peasant would probably be met with little more than a shrug from the authorities.
Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Eerdmans, 2005.
Really glad to see you invoking Hart in this one (he might be one of my favorite authors!). Really good take. I couldn’t agree with you more.
And I should add, I particularly liked the end of this sentence: “It is not unreasonable for one to question a God whose ‘plan’ involves a dispassionate indifference to the senseless suffering of the innocent.” That’s some well-crafted prose!
I really like this, and perhaps ESPECIALLY the Hart quote at the end from Doors of the Sea. So many books, they say, so little time....you must be one very disciplined dude!