Introduction
Historical fiction thrives in the silences of history. It begins with fragments—archaeological evidence, half-remembered traditions, terse documents—and expands them into lived worlds that feel inhabited and real. Biblical stories, perhaps more than any others, invite this treatment. The gospels themselves are fragmentary, offering episodes without inner detail, events without explanation, characters who appear and disappear in a single verse. From the earliest evangelists to modern novelists and filmmakers, storytellers have sought to give shape to these silences, filling them with plausible motives, emotions, andThe Chosen belongs squarely within this tradition. It is not scripture but a retelling, one that expands the sparse record into textured drama. What distinguishes it is its method: serialized storytelling, told primarily through the lives of disciples who must choose whether or not to follow. In doing so, the series reflects not only the diversity of gospel tradition but also the long cultural history of reimagining Jesus—from apocryphal gospels to literary retellings to biblical epics on screen. For me, its power does not rest in theological accuracy but in narrative craft. As an atheist and cultural Christian, I find in The Chosen not a revelation of faith but a continuation of story—a modern gospel of the moment, painted on the blank canvas of Jesus.
Historical Fiction as a Genre
Historical fiction occupies a space between record and imagination. It begins with what is known—dates, figures, fragments—and builds upon that foundation with story. Its goal is not deception but illumination: to reveal truths that the historical record, with its silences and gaps, cannot fully capture. Jerome de Groot (2010) observes that historical fiction “exists to dramatize the silences of history.” Where historians must confine themselves to archival evidence, novelists, filmmakers, and showrunners are free to invent dialogue, inner thoughts, and emotional arcs. This freedom allows the past to become emotionally intelligible for readers and viewers.
The genre thrives in literature. Tolstoy’s War and Peace reimagines Napoleon’s invasion of Russia by embedding fictional aristocratic families into real historical events. We never meet the Rostovs or the Bolkonskys in archives, but through them we feel the trauma and resilience of the Russian people. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall does something similar for the English Reformation, transforming the enigmatic figure of Thomas Cromwell into a psychologically complex protagonist. These novels do not fabricate history wholesale; they create plausible inner worlds that allow us to imagine how individuals may have lived through upheaval.
Film and television adapt the same practice. Gladiator (2000) introduces the fictional Maximus Decimus Meridius, a Roman general who never existed, but whose story dramatizes themes of loyalty, corruption, and revenge against the backdrop of Commodus’ reign. Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012) portrays the president’s final months with historical accuracy in broad strokes, but the private conversations—Lincoln speaking with his family or weighing compromises with his cabinet—are speculative. They are no less powerful for being invented; in fact, they give texture to a figure often flattened by myth.
Audiences intuitively understand this contract. We do not read Wolf Hall expecting court transcripts, nor do we watch The Crown believing that Queen Elizabeth’s private dialogue has been preserved verbatim. Instead, we enter into a suspension of disbelief, allowing invention to serve as a bridge to plausibility. Through fictional detail, the past becomes not only comprehensible but relatable.
When this genre turns to sacred history, the stakes grow higher. Biblical stories, preserved in terse and fragmentary texts, invite expansion. They cry out for embellishment precisely because they are so sparse. What did Matthew feel when Jesus called him? What was Mary Magdalene’s life like before her healing? What did Nicodemus wrestle with after his nighttime conversation? The gospels do not say. But the silences invite imagination, and imagination has always rushed to fill them—through novels, films, plays, and now, streaming television.
This is the space in which The Chosen resides. It is not a documentary of first-century Galilee. It is a work of historical fiction: grounded in scripture but embellished with story, building bridges between ancient texts and modern viewers. Like Tolstoy with Napoleon or Mantel with Cromwell, The Chosen offers not history but a dramatized past—plausible, emotional, and resonant. It is part of a long lineage of storytelling that makes absence speak, transforming fragments into flesh.
The Gospels as Oral Tradition and Re-imagination
The gospels are not diaries or stenographic reports. They are literary compositions built on decades of oral tradition. The earliest followers of Jesus remembered his sayings, retold his deeds, and preached his parables in house churches and synagogues long before they were written down. Memory is never static; it shifts, reshapes, and reframes with each retelling. By the time the authors composed their gospels, they were already presenting portraits of Jesus shaped by theology, community need, and imagination.
Each gospel reflects a particular vision of Jesus, and each was crafted in response to a concrete historical moment.
The Gospel of Mark, generally regarded as the earliest, gives us an urgent and enigmatic figure. He commands secrecy after miracles, prays in anguish in Gethsemane, and dies with a cry of abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, NIV). This Jesus is mysterious, a suffering prophet whose true identity is grasped only in fragments. Mark’s perspective is shaped by crisis. Written around the time of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 70 CE, the gospel reflects the disorientation of a community facing profound loss. The Temple, long the center of Jewish worship, lay in ruins; Rome’s power seemed unshakable. In this context, Mark’s emphasis on suffering, endurance, and ambiguous hope resonates as a theology of survival. His Jesus does not promise triumphalism but models faith amid catastrophe.
Matthew reframes this figure as the new Moses, a lawgiver and authoritative teacher. His Sermon on the Mount echoes Sinai, offering not only miraculous deeds but moral instruction: “You have heard that it was said… but I tell you” (Matt. 5:21–22). Matthew’s gospel, written a decade or two after Mark, reflects a Jewish-Christian community wrestling with its identity after the fall of the Temple and amid growing separation between synagogue and church. For such a community, Jesus is portrayed as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, the one who embodies continuity with Israel’s story even as he inaugurates something new.
Luke, meanwhile, emphasizes compassion. His Jesus proclaims good news to the poor, centers women and outsiders, and tells parables of mercy such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Luke’s gospel, often associated with a Gentile audience in the wider Greco-Roman world, reflects the concerns of a community seeking legitimacy within empire. His Jesus is not merely a Jewish reformer but a universal savior, one whose message extends beyond Israel to embrace Samaritans, Gentiles, and the marginalized.
By contrast, John presents a theological drama. His Jesus is luminous and fully divine, declaring “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12) and praying not in despair but in triumph (John 17). John’s gospel, likely written near the end of the first century, comes from a community defining itself in tension with surrounding Judaism, particularly in the wake of synagogue expulsions of Jesus-followers. For such a context, Jesus is presented not ambiguously but majestically: the eternal Word made flesh, the revealer of divine truth, the source of eternal life. Where Mark leaves mystery, John insists on majesty.
The differences among the gospels are not contradictions but interpretive variations—evidence that early Christians remembered Jesus in diverse ways. This diversity reflects the nature of oral tradition itself. Stories are not preserved like fossils; they live like rivers, shifting course with each telling. The Jesus who healed in Galilee was remembered differently in Rome, Antioch, or Ephesus. By the time the stories were written, they already bore the marks of decades of interpretive memory, colored by the needs and experiences of the communities that cherished them.
In this sense, the evangelists were not historians in the modern sense but storytellers. They did not write to provide neutral biography; they wrote to produce conviction. Each gospel is both memory and re-imagination, a theological portrait that reveals as much about its community as about Jesus himself. John makes this explicit when he concludes: “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God” (John 20:31). His gospel is not historical reporting but devotional literature—an imaginative retelling designed to inspire belief.
Understanding this context reshapes how we see The Chosen. The series does not stand outside the gospel tradition; it participates in it. Just as John reimagined Jesus for his audience, so too does The Chosen. It takes fragments—Matthew called from his booth, Mary Magdalene delivered of demons, Nicodemus meeting by night—and expands them into full character arcs. It transforms skeletal narratives into emotionally textured stories, designed not only to recount but to inspire. If the gospels themselves are works of interpretive imagination, then The Chosen is not an aberration but a continuation. It is, in its own way, a modern gospel: not a new scripture, but a new retelling, shaped for the audiences and media of the twenty-first century.
Beyond the Canon: Many Jesuses
The diversity of gospel portraits did not end with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In the early centuries of Christianity, a wide range of communities preserved and circulated alternative visions of Jesus. These writings, often labeled “apocryphal” or “non-canonical,” reveal just how contested and varied early Christian memory truly was. They demonstrate that there was never a single, uncontested picture of Jesus but rather a chorus of interpretations, each shaped by theology, geography, and cultural need.
The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Thomas presents perhaps the starkest contrast with the canonical gospels. Rather than offering a narrative of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, it collects sayings attributed to him, many of them enigmatic and mystical. The opening line sets the tone: “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death” (Thomas 1). Here Jesus is less a suffering prophet or divine redeemer than a wisdom teacher whose words conceal hidden knowledge. Many scholars connect Thomas to communities in Syria or Egypt, where ascetic and mystical practices flourished. For such groups, salvation was not found in the cross or resurrection but in grasping the secret meaning of Jesus’ sayings.
The Gospel of Mary
The Gospel of Mary offers yet another vision. In this account, Mary Magdalene emerges as a visionary leader who recounts teachings she has received directly from the risen Christ. When she shares her vision, Peter challenges her authority, asking how Jesus could have revealed such things to a woman. Mary responds with calm conviction, defending her experience. This gospel reflects a community wrestling with questions of leadership and gender, affirming the spiritual authority of women in the face of patriarchal resistance. In such a setting, Jesus becomes the one who empowers Mary with insight greater than that of his male counterparts.
The Gospel of Judas
Even more startling is the Gospel of Judas. Far from condemning Judas as the archetypal betrayer, this text portrays him as the only disciple who truly understood Jesus’ mission. By handing Jesus over, Judas fulfills a divine plan rather than thwarts it. Here, Jesus is not a victim of treachery but a cosmic figure orchestrating events beyond the comprehension of others. Written in the mid-second century, likely in a Gnostic milieu, this gospel reflects a community that saw salvation not in martyrdom or orthodox belief but in hidden wisdom revealed to the few.
Infancy Gospels
Still other traditions reimagined Jesus in his childhood. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for example, depicts him as a precocious, sometimes mischievous wonder-worker. In one story, the boy Jesus fashions birds from clay and brings them to life; in another, he strikes down a child who offends him. These accounts, though startling to modern readers, reflect the human desire to fill the gaps of Jesus’ “hidden years.” Communities who cherished these stories were less concerned with theological precision than with imaginative completeness—they wanted to know what Jesus was like as a child, and they were willing to supply the details.
From Diversity to Creed
Taken together, these writings reveal the sheer breadth of ways in which Jesus was remembered. He could be sage, revealer of secret wisdom, advocate for women, cosmic orchestrator, or divine child. For some communities, his suffering and death were central; for others, they were irrelevant. The canonical gospels are the accounts that survived into orthodoxy, but they did not erase the existence of these alternatives.
Over time, the church sought to bring unity to its diversity. Councils such as Nicaea (325 CE) and Chalcedon (451 CE) did not create Christianity so much as filter it. They focused the memory of Jesus into creeds that could hold the center together. The Nicene Creed’s declaration of Christ as “true God from true God” narrowed the range of acceptable Christologies, while Chalcedon’s formula of “one person in two natures” stabilized debates over Jesus’ humanity and divinity. These decisions did not eliminate difference—Christians continued to argue, divide, and emphasize distinctives—but they transformed those differences into questions of taste and emphasis rather than of fundamental identity. The creeds became boundaries: within them, there was room for diversity; outside them, one risked exclusion. Later divisions—the Reformation, denominational splits, theological schools—were real, but for the most part, the creeds held the center.
The Chosen in Light of the Filter
This historical trajectory sheds light on The Chosen. The series does not explore the full spectrum of early Christian diversity—the Jesus of Thomas, Mary, or Judas. Instead, it presents the filtered Jesus, the one who has passed through centuries of theological refinement and harmonization. He is compassionate, authoritative, divine yet human, approachable yet majestic—the Jesus of the Nicene and Chalcedonian tradition.
Equally significant is the series’ decision to tell the story not only through Jesus but through those who followed him. Much of the drama centers on the disciples—men and women called to leave tax booths, homes, and livelihoods to follow. By showing their hesitations, failures, and moments of courage, the series creates an interpretive mirror for its audience. We are drawn into their responses and asked, implicitly, how we might respond in turn. In this way, The Chosen functions like the canonical gospels themselves, which often place readers in the role of deciding whether to follow. Just as Mark climaxes with the centurion’s confession, “Surely this man was the Son of God” (Mark 15:39), the series continually presents moments where the viewer is invited to confess, to hesitate, or to walk away.
Jesus as a Blank Canvas
Part of the enduring allure of Jesus lies in this dynamic. The historical Jesus remains elusive, a mystery glimpsed in fragments but never fully captured. That very elusiveness makes him a blank canvas upon which generations have painted. The canonical gospels, the apocryphal writings, the creeds, the novels, and now The Chosen—all are attempts to render him visible, to shape him into the figure their communities need. This adaptability is not a weakness but a strength. It has allowed Christianity to endure by continually presenting a Jesus who can be encountered afresh, one who is always familiar yet never exhausted.
Interlude
Taken together, the first three sections reveal a pattern. Historical fiction, whether in novels or films, always begins with fragments and fills the silences with story. The gospels did the same, shaping oral traditions into portraits of Jesus that were already interpretive, theological, and imaginative. Beyond the canon, communities continued to reimagine Jesus in wildly different ways—sage of hidden wisdom, advocate for women, cosmic orchestrator, or precocious child.
But the church, seeking unity, eventually filtered this plurality through the creeds. Nicaea and Chalcedon did not erase the diversity of memory, but they focused it, establishing a Christ who was both human and divine, both teacher and savior, both compassionate and majestic. Within these boundaries, Christians could still disagree, but the center held.
The Chosen stands in this lineage. Like a novel or film, it embellishes fragments with emotional detail. Like the canonical gospels, it presents a portrait designed to inspire belief. And like the creeds, it resolves diversity into a harmonized Jesus recognizable across denominations. What makes the series distinctive is its narrative strategy: we encounter Jesus primarily through the disciples who follow him, which draws us into their decisions. In their hesitation and courage, we are invited to see ourselves.
The historical Jesus remains a mystery, a blank canvas. But this very elusiveness has always been the source of his power. Each generation has painted him anew, and The Chosen is simply the latest brushstroke—one that belongs not in history books but in the tradition of storytelling that has always surrounded him.
Literary Retellings of Jesus and the Bible
The impulse to expand and reimagine biblical stories has long animated literature. Like the evangelists, novelists work with fragments, silences, and gaps, transforming them into narratives that resonate with new audiences. These works are not written to replace scripture but to animate it, to provide voices, motives, and emotions that the biblical record leaves unsaid. The Chosen belongs to this lineage, standing alongside a wide range of literary retellings that approach sacred history with both reverence and invention.
One of the most influential examples is Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis (1896), which dramatizes the clash between imperial Rome and the fledgling Christian community under Nero. Its fictional protagonist, Marcus Vinicius, falls in love with the Christian woman Lygia, a relationship that personalizes the broader conflict between pagan and Christian worlds. “He felt that she belonged to another order of things, to another sphere, to another world, that between him and her there was not only a gulf of feeling, but a gulf which no bridge could span” (Sienkiewicz, 1896/2009, p. 97). The love story embodies the gulf between Rome and Christianity, much as The Chosen embodies the tensions of faith by personalizing them in the struggles of its disciples.
Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe (1942) provides another striking example. Expanding on a brief gospel note that soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ clothing (Matt. 27:35), Douglas imagines Marcellus, the Roman tribune who wins the robe, and follows his journey of conscience. The robe becomes a burden: “It was not heavy, but it oppressed him; it was not cold, but it chilled him; it was not warm, but it burned him. It seemed to hold the weight of an invisible grief” (Douglas, 1942, p. 136). Douglas transforms a passing reference into a meditation on guilt and redemption. The Chosen employs a similar strategy, turning minor biblical moments into fully fleshed-out arcs, from Matthew’s decision at the tax booth to Nicodemus’s anguished refusal to follow.
In Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997), the silences belong not to Jesus but to Dinah, a minor figure in Genesis. “We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men” (Diamant, 1997, p. 1). Diamant restores dignity to a biblical woman whose story had been silenced, much as The Chosen elevates Mary Magdalene, giving her trauma and healing a central place in the narrative. Both works insist that neglected figures deserve voice, agency, and interior life.
Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord novels (Out of Egypt, 2005; The Road to Cana, 2008) reimagine the “hidden years” of Jesus’ life. In Out of Egypt, the child Jesus struggles with dawning awareness of his identity: “I was seven years old. What do I know of miracles? What do I know of who I am?” (Rice, 2005). Rice fills in the silence between infancy and ministry with episodes of family, longing, and divine mystery. Her Jesus is human, full of questions, even as he carries the weight of divinity. Like The Chosen, her work seeks to bridge the distance between scripture and lived experience, presenting a Jesus whose humanity makes his divinity more compelling.
Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (2012) takes a more subversive path. Told in Mary’s own voice, it portrays her as skeptical of her son’s mission and traumatized by his death. “Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones” (Tóibín, 2012, p. 3). Here, Mary is not the serene icon of devotion but a bereaved mother grappling with grief and doubt. Where The Chosen harmonizes the gospels into a creedal portrait, Tóibín unsettles tradition, showing that fiction can both illuminate and destabilize sacred memory.
Taken together, these works demonstrate the human impulse to reimagine sacred stories. Some, like Douglas and Rice, aim for devotion; others, like Diamant and Tóibín, challenge or revise tradition. All, however, reveal the same dynamic: the gaps and silences of scripture invite storytelling. The Chosen stands firmly within this tradition. Its goal is closer to Douglas and Rice than to Tóibín—it seeks to deepen devotion rather than to provoke doubt. Yet its method is the same: to take fragments, fill them with imagination, and render ancient faith accessible in narrative form.
Biblical Epics and Cinema
If novels have long reimagined biblical stories, cinema and television have amplified this impulse on a grander scale. The visual medium does more than describe; it immerses audiences in ancient settings, giving faces, voices, and emotions to figures who had previously lived only in text. Each generation has produced its own cinematic Jesus or Moses, each shaped by the theological, cultural, and artistic sensibilities of its time. The Chosen is the latest in this tradition, but far from the first.
Devotional Epics
Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977) remains one of the most beloved portrayals of Christ on screen. Combining elements from all four gospels, it presents a harmonized narrative with reverence and grandeur. Robert Powell’s performance, with its iconic solemnity, embodied the devotional Christ familiar to Catholic and Protestant audiences alike. Zeffirelli’s goal was not historical reconstruction but recognition—his Jesus was instantly legible as the Christ of tradition. In this sense, Zeffirelli paved the way for The Chosen, which similarly blends gospel sources into a creedal harmony.
Hollywood’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) sought to provide a definitive life of Christ for the silver screen. Its sweeping cinematography and star-studded cast reflected the ambition of mid-century biblical epics. Yet its most memorable moment is perhaps its most awkward: John Wayne as the Roman centurion declaring, “Surely this man was the Son of God.” However stilted, the line captured the film’s intent: to move beyond ambiguity into confession. Like The Chosen, the film sought not to question who Jesus was but to affirm him as Lord.
Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) narrowed the lens to focus intensely on the final hours of Jesus’ life. Graphic, unrelenting, and theological in its violence, the film sought to immerse viewers in the magnitude of suffering. Its embellishments came not in backstory but in visual excess—every lash, wound, and nail rendered with harrowing detail. Where The Chosen expands the gospels with psychological depth and narrative backstory, Gibson filled their silences with visceral intensity. Both methods aim to deepen devotion by making suffering and redemption palpable.
DreamWorks’ animated The Prince of Egypt (1998), while centered on Moses, belongs to the same tradition of sacred re-imagination. Its soaring songs and striking animation dramatized the Exodus in ways both faithful and inventive. By portraying Moses and Rameses as brothers whose relationship collapses under divine demand, the film personalized a cosmic conflict. Like The Chosen, it demonstrates how even animation can bridge the distance between ancient scripture and modern audiences.
Countercultural Re-imaginings
Not all cinematic retellings aim for creedal harmony. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar (1970; filmed in 1973) reframed Jesus through the lens of counterculture, with rock opera rhythms and political undertones. Its Jesus is human and enigmatic, often overshadowed by Judas, who questions motives and outcomes. Here the emphasis is not on divinity but on ambiguity, presenting a Christ who can be doubted as much as worshipped.
Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, provoked controversy by imagining Jesus’ inner struggles with desire and doubt. Its most infamous sequence presents a vision of Jesus marrying and raising a family, before accepting his mission anew. The point was not blasphemy but psychological realism: a Christ fully human, torn by temptation. Where The Chosen portrays a serene and confident Jesus, Scorsese’s film presents one still in process, uncertain of his identity until the end.
The Chosen in Context
Placed alongside these predecessors, The Chosen becomes easier to define. Like Zeffirelli and Gibson, it aims for devotion, presenting a Christ consistent with Christian creeds. Like The Prince of Egypt, it uses narrative embellishment to personalize sacred history. Unlike Jesus Christ Superstar or The Last Temptation of Christ, it avoids ambiguity, offering instead a harmonized Christ recognizable across Christian traditions. Its Jesus is approachable but never uncertain, humorous but never destabilized, human but always divine—the Jesus of consensus.
Cinema and television have always reimagined sacred stories, reflecting their times. The solemn grandeur of the 1960s, the devotional intensity of the early 2000s, the countercultural experimentation of the 1970s—all found expression in moving images. The Chosen is the twenty-first century’s contribution: serialized, crowdfunded, and distributed via streaming, designed for a global audience. It is not the first visual gospel, but it is the latest brushstroke in a long artistic tradition.
The Chosen as Historical Fiction
What distinguishes The Chosen from earlier biblical films is not only its medium—serialized streaming television—but also its method. Rather than condensing the life of Jesus into a single sweeping epic, it lingers on details, backstories, and relationships. Its approach is precisely that of historical fiction: to take skeletal records and flesh them out with plausible narrative, to transform fragments into full lives.
Matthew the Note-Taker
In the Gospel of Matthew, the evangelist tells his own calling in a single verse: “As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me,’ he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him” (Matt. 9:9, NIV). That is all. No description of his motives, no record of his inner conflict, no detail beyond his occupation.
The Chosen expands this into a rich character arc. Matthew is portrayed as meticulous, socially alienated, and perhaps neurodivergent—obsessive in his record-keeping and awkward in his interactions. His decision to follow Jesus is thus not a sudden leap but a profound rupture from a carefully ordered but lonely life. The image of Matthew constantly writing serves both as characterization and as narrative bridge. It suggests, anachronistically but powerfully, that such note-taking could have become the Gospel of Matthew. Historically, this is improbable; most scholars believe the gospel was composed in Greek decades later by a trained scribe. Yet as fiction, the embellishment works. It offers modern viewers a tangible way to imagine authorship, linking disciple and text through an emotionally resonant device.
Mary Magdalene’s Trauma and Redemption
Mary Magdalene is another figure largely silent in the gospels. Luke 8:2 tells us that “seven demons had come out” of her, and all four gospels note her presence at the crucifixion and resurrection. Beyond this, the details of her life remain unspoken.
The Chosen fills this silence with a harrowing backstory. Mary, first identified as Lilith, suffers from trauma, possession, and social rejection. She drowns her pain in alcohol and despair until Jesus restores her with a word of compassion. From that moment, she becomes one of the emotional anchors of the series. This embellishment is not in scripture, but it makes visible what “seven demons” might have meant in lived experience. It dramatizes the cost of healing and the depth of redemption, allowing viewers to feel what the gospel only asserts.
Thomas the Skeptical Caterer
In John’s gospel, Thomas is remembered for doubting the resurrection until he sees Jesus for himself (John 20:24–29). Beyond that, he is nearly invisible.
The Chosen reimagines him as a cautious caterer, someone whose livelihood depends on careful planning and minimizing risk. His skepticism thus emerges not as a single moment of weakness but as a consistent character trait: cautious, calculating, pragmatic. By giving him this backstory, the show prepares the ground for his later doubt, making it feel less like an isolated incident and more like the natural outgrowth of his personality. This is historical fiction at work—providing coherence across fragments, shaping a character who feels whole.
Nicodemus the Torn Pharisee
The Gospel of John mentions Nicodemus three times: visiting Jesus at night (John 3), speaking hesitantly in his defense (John 7), and assisting in his burial (John 19). That is the entirety of his presence.
The Chosen transforms him into one of its most complex characters. He is depicted as a respected Pharisee, intellectually curious yet bound by duty. His nighttime meeting with Jesus becomes a turning point of anguish. He longs to follow but cannot sever his ties to power and position. In one of the show’s most moving scenes, Nicodemus weeps as he watches the disciples leave without him, hidden in the shadows of his own hesitation. This expansion turns a passing biblical figure into a tragic archetype—the almost-disciple who knew but could not act.
Narrative Bridges and Their Purpose
Each of these expansions functions as a narrative bridge between sparse gospel text and modern imagination. Matthew’s note-taking bridges the gap between authorship and text. Mary Magdalene’s trauma bridges the gap between “seven demons” and lived suffering. Thomas’s cautiousness bridges the gap between doubt and personality. Nicodemus’s tears bridge the gap between three brief mentions and a fully human struggle.
The purpose of these bridges is not to deceive but to invite empathy. Viewers can recognize themselves in Matthew’s alienation, Mary’s brokenness, Thomas’s caution, and Nicodemus’s hesitation. They are fictional details, but they make possible a deeper emotional and spiritual engagement with the story.
The Risk and the Reward
Of course, there is risk in this approach. Some viewers may mistake embellishment for history, assuming that Matthew’s notebooks or Mary’s backstory are drawn directly from scripture. Historical fiction always risks blurring the line between invention and record.
Yet the reward is profound. By fleshing out characters, The Chosen makes the gospel world feel inhabited and alive. Its embellishments allow viewers not only to know what happened but to imagine how it might have felt. That is the hallmark of historical fiction, and it is why the series resonates so strongly.
The Chosen as a Gospel of the Moment
The four canonical gospels each arose in a particular time and place, shaped by the needs of their communities. Mark, written around 70 CE in the shadow of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, speaks to a traumatized audience by portraying Jesus as a suffering prophet whose endurance offers hope in catastrophe. Matthew, likely composed in Antioch, reflects a Jewish-Christian community wrestling with identity after separation from the synagogue, presenting Jesus as the new Moses who fulfills Israel’s story. Luke, writing for a cosmopolitan audience within the Roman Empire, emphasizes Jesus as a universal savior whose compassion extends beyond Israel to women, Gentiles, and the poor. John, produced near the end of the first century, offers a theological drama for a community in conflict with synagogue authorities, portraying Jesus as the eternal Word made flesh. Each gospel is not biography in the modern sense but a portrait crafted to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of its moment.
In the same way, The Chosen functions as a gospel for our cultural moment. It is not scripture, but like scripture, it takes fragments of memory and tradition and reshapes them into a narrative designed to move its audience. Where the evangelists wrote for house churches and fledgling Christian communities, The Chosen is crafted for streaming audiences saturated with serialized storytelling. Its multi-season structure mirrors modern television dramas, allowing viewers to invest in characters and relationships over time. In this sense, it is a gospel retold in the idiom of streaming culture: not scrolls or codices, but episodes and seasons.
What makes The Chosen distinctive is its attempt to present a universally Christian Jesus. The canonical gospels reflect diversity: Mark’s anguished prophet, Matthew’s authoritative teacher, Luke’s compassionate healer, John’s divine Word. The apocryphal traditions reveal even greater plurality: Jesus as wisdom sage in Thomas, as revealer of secret knowledge in Judas, as visionary teacher who empowers Mary. The Chosen, however, does not dwell in plurality. Instead, it harmonizes. Its Jesus teaches like Matthew, heals like Luke, bears mystery like Mark, and speaks devotionally like John—yet all are blended into a single, creedal Christ.
This harmonization is intentional. By weaving together the canonical gospels and avoiding radical alternatives, the series creates a Jesus recognizable across Christian traditions. Evangelical Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox alike can find in him the Christ of the creeds: compassionate, approachable, humorous, and human, but also divine, authoritative, and serene. He is not the Jesus of contested memory or theological experimentation, but the Jesus of consensus—the Christ filtered through Nicaea and Chalcedon, reaffirmed through centuries of liturgy and hymn.
To call The Chosen a “gospel of the moment” is not to elevate it to scripture but to recognize its continuity with the long history of gospel-making. Just as the evangelists reimagined Jesus for their audiences, so too does this series. It is not a documentary of Galilee but a devotional drama for the twenty-first century. It harmonizes voices into a single figure, reflecting less the diversity of early Christianity and more the stability of the creedal center.
In this sense, The Chosen functions as a kind of “fifth gospel”: not canonical, but cultural; not written in parchment, but in pixels; not proclaimed in marketplaces, but streamed across devices. Like the gospels of old, it is designed to inspire recognition and response. It asks viewers not only to observe but to decide, inviting them into the same drama of following that the disciples faced.
Why I Love It
My admiration for The Chosen is not rooted in faith. I do not watch it as a believer seeking confirmation of doctrine. I am an atheist, and yet I am also a cultural Christian, formed by deep roots in a tradition I no longer hold. What draws me to the series is not theology but storytelling—its ability to take fragments of history and transform them into characters I recognize, emotions I share, and dilemmas I understand.
Part of what I love is simply the craft of historical fiction. I have long been drawn to novels, films, and dramas that embellish the past, whether Tolstoy expanding Napoleon’s invasion, Mantel reimagining Cromwell, or Diamant giving voice to Dinah. The Chosen does for Galilee what these works do for their settings: it makes the past inhabited, textured, and emotionally intelligible. I delight in watching Matthew’s awkward brilliance, Nicodemus’s anguish, or Mary Magdalene’s redemption, not because I believe them historically accurate, but because they are narratively compelling.
I also love how the series acknowledges the role of discipleship. By focusing so much of its story on the men and women who chose to follow, the show places me in their position. Their hesitations and decisions become a mirror for my own reflection. I am not asked to confess faith, but I am invited to empathize with the moment of decision, to recognize the courage and cost of following. This is a profoundly human drama, one that transcends creed.
On a deeper level, I am drawn to The Chosen because it embodies the adaptability of Jesus himself. The historical Jesus is a mystery, a blank canvas. Each generation has painted him according to its needs—prophet, sage, redeemer, revolutionary. I do not need him to be divine in order to value the stories told about him. For me, Jesus is part of my cultural inheritance: a figure whose memory shaped art, literature, morality, and even the rhythms of the calendar. Watching The Chosen allows me to reconnect with that inheritance, not as faith but as culture, not as dogma but as narrative.
This is why I can love the series without believing in its theology. I love it as I love The Prince of Egypt for its artistry, or Jesus of Nazareth for its solemn beauty, or Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord novels for their imaginative daring. I love it because it makes silence speak, because it paints the blank canvas anew, because it participates in the ancient human task of telling stories that matter.
In Closing
The enduring mystery of Jesus lies in his elusiveness. The historical figure remains just out of reach, glimpsed only in fragments of memory and filtered through generations of interpretation. That very incompleteness has allowed him to be continually reimagined—as prophet, redeemer, sage, visionary, or revolutionary—each portrait shaped by the needs of its community. The canonical gospels, the apocryphal writings, the creeds, the novels, the films, and now The Chosen all testify to this adaptability.
What The Chosen offers is not history, but participation in this long process. It harmonizes tradition into a universally recognizable Jesus, while drawing us into the drama of discipleship, inviting us to see ourselves in the moment of decision. For me, its value lies in that invitation. Not as confession, but as story; not as doctrine, but as cultural inheritance. In the end, The Chosen is another brushstroke on the canvas of Jesus, a gospel of the twenty-first century—not canonical, but cultural, not definitive, but deeply human.
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