The Chosen Is Just Alright with Me

Binge watching Jesus after vertigo

So, I gave myself a day off to recover from a nasty bout of vertigo, an ailment that periodically afflicts me. About all I had energy for was to watch TV, and while browsing, I came across a show a devout Catholic friend of mine recently recommended.

“I’m not trying to convert you, Tommy,” he said. “but it’s a really good show and respectful of Judaism.”

The show is The Chosen, the first-ever full-fledged TV series based on the life of Jesus. It came out a couple of years ago and went pretty quickly from niche to Netflix. And I, who consider myself a connoisseur of pop culture Jesus depictions, decided to give it a go.

But, you may say, you’re a Jew, albeit a perplexed one, why watch a program about Jesus? To which I answer, I’m not a teenager, but I watched Riverdale.¹ Besides, as any longtime reader of this Substack knows, I was raised Christian and lived two-thirds of my life as Christian, and I’ve got nothing against Jesus. Truth be told, I kind of miss him sometimes. I think of him as an old friend about whom it’s sometimes pleasant to reminisce. ²

Nonetheless, I have to admit when I encounter a program like this today, as a Jew, my radar is up in ways it wasn’t when I was Christian, and I notice stuff I would not have in my previous life. I get now, for example, why, back in the day, some Jews objected to the depiction of the Pharisees in Jesus Christ Superstar.³ Making Caiphas and his crew the bad guys in the play makes Jews seem responsible for Jesus’s death and, theoretically, can encourage antisemitism among those too thick-headed to recognize that Jesus and everyone else in the play is Jewish and that his death, by Christian accounts, was a tragic necessity.⁴

So, my antennae were up, but I’m happy to report that my friend was right. The Chosen is a respectful depiction of Judaism and also a pretty watchable show.

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Now in its fourth season, The Chosen tells the story of Jesus from the start of his mission. The first season is kind of a “getting-the-band-together” story about how he gathers his disciples⁵ and reveals himself as the messiah. It’s full of back stories, some more plausible than others, of characters like Simon Peter, Matthew, and Mary Magdeline, not to mention the friendly Pharisee Nicodemus.

The show makes some interesting choices that reflect, I suppose, its consciousness of following in the wake of predecessors such as Jesus of Nazareth so that some key scenes one would expect to see occur off stage. We don’t, for example, see Jesus get baptized but are merely told through the disciple Andrew that “Creepy John”⁶ pointed him out and declared him the messiah. It puzzled me at first that the directors would leave out this important moment in the life of Jesus until I thought about the impossibility of them competing with Michale York and Robert Powell’s chemistry in J of N:

Zefirillelli’s scene derives its power not only from the intensity of John’s recognition of Jesus but also from his realization that his own mission is now over. “He must increase as I decrease,” says John, who knows perhaps that his own martyrdom is soon coming.

At other times, the show seems equally aware that its audience already knows the story pretty well. So sometimes, Jesus will tell a parable, but we’ll only get parts of it as the show follows other plot lines. The directors know they only need to start the parable, and the audience can finish it themselves.

The casting is multiethnic in ways that feel more like contemporary Israel than the fever visions of the tentifada types on American college campuses who imagine the country as “white.” And the acting and cinematography are, if not first-rate, pretty good, far better than the kind of Hallmark standards one would expect of a religious show.

I think the hardest thing for me to get used to was seeing Matthew, the tax collector, depicted as an effete beardless geek on the spectrum. I always pictured him as part of the rough trade that Jesus hung out with—tax collectors, publicans, and prostitutes—not as an awkward dandy stepping lightly through Jerusalem with a scented handkerchief pressed against his face.

And like many of the attempts to “make Jesus relevant”⁷ there are the occasional cringe-worthy verbal anachronisms—Simon saying, “I’ve got this” or “not too shabby.” But, overall, the filmmakers do a great job of achieving ancient-Israel verisimilitude, which, as I tell my students, means the story is not “realistic” but feels realistic. ⁸

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So what about the Jewish stuff? Is Judaism caricatured? Are the Jews the villain in this story? Does the show advance a replacement theology? No; not really; I don’t care.

First, observant Judaism is lovingly depicted in the show. Jewish characters, including Jesus, routinely make blessings on food and wine before they drink, and the act is always portrayed as a meaningful one. Here’s a scene of Jesus saying the hamapil, the Jewish bedtime prayer, before going to sleep (2:50 in the video, which I was unable to clip.)⁹

In scenes like this and others, we see Jewish rituals as a source of comfort and joy for practitioners. And, indeed, episode 2 of season one is devoted almost entirely to a realistic and approving celebration of Shabbat.

At the same time, it’s clear that this is a Christian show that sees the post-Jewish religion as more spiritual. The Pharisees, as in Jesus Christ Superstar, and as in, truth be told, the Gospels, are, if not the villains, the foil to Jesus’s message of unconditional love and the boundlessness of God’s power.

There are two main pharisaical characters, Nicodemus and Shmuel. The former is a sympathetic but limited rabbi, revered by his students and loved by his wife. Nicodemus perceives the beauty and importance of Jesus’s mission and teachings but is (tragically) unwilling to give up his old life for a new one. Shmuel is a constricted, law-worshipping cleric who sees the persecution of heresy as an opportunity for personal advancement.

Nicodemus is the “good pharisee” largely because he sees the flaws of his form of Judaism and wonders aloud things like, “What if many of the things we believe about how to behave and how to treat each other are wrong?” and who admits the Jewish traditions may sometimes misinterpret the Torah. He is also a wealthy cleric whose cloak, Creepy John says in one episode, could be sold for enough money to feed a village for a week. It is his attachment to material things, to his “good life,” as much as his traditionalism, that holds him back from fully embracing the messiah.

Shmuel is more of a full-on bad guy, the “conservative” who hates anything that challenges the status quo.

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Are these depictions antisemitic? I don’t think so. The fact is that from the Pharisaical point of view, Jesus was a heretic. It’s not so much that he was more flexible on halacha and Torah Law; in that sense, he may have been more modern Orthodox or “Haredi-lite” than heretic. But he claimed to be the messiah and beyond that, God, and there’s no getting around it—that would have been a big no-no.

But the depiction of the Pharisees feels kind of right to me in some respects. Or it might be better to say it feels familiar.

The same critiques leveled against the Pharisees by the show (and by Jesus, of course, IRL) are commonplace today against what we would call the Haredi or “ultra-orthodox” Jews: rigid literalness, intolerance, exclusivity, veniality, and, of course, the big one, hypocrisy. A day doesn’t go by in the Israeli press that you don’t find an article or column attacking the Haredi along these lines. As much as I defend them, I daresay they sometimes deserve it, as did, no doubt, their predecessors, the Pharisees.¹⁰ In truth, these critiques get attached to any clerical hierarchy once it’s achieved some measure of institutional power. So, I don’t take offense.

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And what about “replacement theology”—the idea that Christianity is not only the next best thing but actually renders Judaism obsolete?

Yes, I see it in the show. I see it in lines such as “[religion] won’t be all mountains and temples,” spoken by a character in the last episode of the first season who is looking forward to a faith that is less narrow, more inclusive, and more forgiving. I see it in Shmuel the Pharisee declaring, “The Law is God”—clearly an idea we are meant to reject. But I don’t see a ton of replacement theology in the first season, which, as I’ve said, depicts observant Judaism largely as a beautiful and meaningful faith. And to the extent it’s there, I don’t mind because, as I’ve said in my Substack on Aleinu, we all think our religion is “the right one.”

There’s an old joke, part of which takes place on an airplane, in which a woman objects to a man smoking a cigar, and he objects to her chattering monkey. “If you throw your monkey out of the window, I’ll throw my cigar out,” he says. In the joke, they both throw the offending object out of the window, but we all know that’s not how it works in real life.

All of our religions are offensive, on some level, to everyone else’s religion. So we just need to accept that sometimes I don’t like your monkey, and sometimes you don’t like my cigar, but we’re all stuck in the same vessel and need to make the best of it.

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Is The Chosen a cinematic masterpiece? A theological innovation? No, but it’s good Jesus TV, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for something to watch. If you’re a Jew and you really want to understand what the Christians are on about, this is not a bad place to start. It shows the attraction of Jesus and his message, which is chiefly about the forgiveness we all so desperately crave more than any rejection of Judaism.

As my friend said, I’m not trying to convert anyone. I just think it’s a pretty good show.

I’ll probably watch more seasons, even though I’m pretty sure I know what to expect in the grand finale.

1. Surprisingly entertaining until it did some major league jumping of the shark in Season 3.

2. Don’t worry, friends, this is not going to become a messianic Jew Substack.

3. Though, I still think the critique is wrong-headed.

4. Judas, whom some see as the hero of JC Superstar, says of his betrayal of Jesus, “I only did what you wanted me to.” He is rationalizing, but he’s also correct, which is the tragedy of Judas in the play.

5. There’s no Judas in the first season, and I’m interested to see if the show will follow in the line of Weber and Rice in depicting him as JC’s passionate but wrong-headed “right-hand man.”

6. The show has occasional flights of humor, even running gags, but nothing laugh-out-loud funny.

7. The worst offender I know, being the 1999 TV miniseries, Jesus.

8. As far as I can tell, Metatron, my go-to YouTube authority on historical accuracy in pop culture, has not commented on the show.

9. Interestingly, the “most played” portion of the video on YouTube

10. I give my Haredi friends the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, but even I sometimes lose my patience with their stringencies.