The season's last two episodes, currently in theatres, revisit some old themes and confront some logistical challenges (how to be heard in a crowd? how to multiply the loaves and fish? etc.).
1. I wonder if the revelation about Gaius is meant to indicate a merger of the story of Matthew 8/Luke 7 with the story of John 4. More liberal critics have often considered these potentially variants on the same story, but now that the idea has been placed in my head, it does seem (no libel meant toward an anonymous man of 2000 years ago) all too possible that they could be the same story and yet both be literally true, the boy both a servant and a son.
2. At first I thought it was powerful that the walking on the water was connected to a particular crisis of faith for Simon (almost wrote Peter, but that name has yet to be used), and overall I still did, but I disliked that Jesus and Simon talked directly about Eden during the scene. I think I would have been more powerful to stick closely to the Biblical dialogue with the family crisis as subtext instead of text.
3. Overall I find the show to be more successful in giving depth to the Biblical characters than in creating entirely new plots. I did not find the idea that Andrew and Philip had plunged a large-ish region into crisis by a brief visit to be very plausible. The scene in which three or four ethnic groups appeared one by one to voice their grievances was for me uncomfortably evocative of the fight scene in Anchorman! But the smaller miracle scenes built into this framework (and obviously the big miracle at the end) were very well-done.
The sick person being both a servant and a son certainly seems possible, but there are other differences between the two stories that don't quite gel, e.g. the person requesting the miracle is a royal official (and thus presumably Jewish and/or Herodian) in John's gospel and a Roman centurion in the other two gospels, and while the official/centurion comes from Capernaum in both stories, Jesus is actually in Cana when he performs the miracle in John's gospel. Also, the royal official asks Jesus to come to his house, while the centurion specifically tells Jesus *not* to come to his house and asks him to perform the miracle from a distance.
It's certainly possible that The Chosen might gloss over all those differences, though, the same way it had John calling Jesus "the Lamb of God" in Galilee rather than Judea, etc. Also, the show doesn't really seem to make any significant distinction between the Roman power structures and the secular Jewish/Herodian power structures.
Yeah, I mean, the centurion does live in Capernaum... but then again, is it a given that he was a *Roman* centurion? Maybe the Herodian armies had centurions too? Or maybe the centurion was a Roman who had been assigned to help the Herods etc.?
By the way, I revisited Episode 7 during the livestream tonight, and I think I might not be able to watch it again without your "Anchorman" comment coming to mind. It actually hadn't registered with me, in the theatre, how many different ethnic groups there were in that scene; I was still thinking in binary Jewish-Gentile terms.
Not really possible to do this without spoilers -
1. I wonder if the revelation about Gaius is meant to indicate a merger of the story of Matthew 8/Luke 7 with the story of John 4. More liberal critics have often considered these potentially variants on the same story, but now that the idea has been placed in my head, it does seem (no libel meant toward an anonymous man of 2000 years ago) all too possible that they could be the same story and yet both be literally true, the boy both a servant and a son.
2. At first I thought it was powerful that the walking on the water was connected to a particular crisis of faith for Simon (almost wrote Peter, but that name has yet to be used), and overall I still did, but I disliked that Jesus and Simon talked directly about Eden during the scene. I think I would have been more powerful to stick closely to the Biblical dialogue with the family crisis as subtext instead of text.
3. Overall I find the show to be more successful in giving depth to the Biblical characters than in creating entirely new plots. I did not find the idea that Andrew and Philip had plunged a large-ish region into crisis by a brief visit to be very plausible. The scene in which three or four ethnic groups appeared one by one to voice their grievances was for me uncomfortably evocative of the fight scene in Anchorman! But the smaller miracle scenes built into this framework (and obviously the big miracle at the end) were very well-done.
Subtext instead of text -- yes, exactly.
The sick person being both a servant and a son certainly seems possible, but there are other differences between the two stories that don't quite gel, e.g. the person requesting the miracle is a royal official (and thus presumably Jewish and/or Herodian) in John's gospel and a Roman centurion in the other two gospels, and while the official/centurion comes from Capernaum in both stories, Jesus is actually in Cana when he performs the miracle in John's gospel. Also, the royal official asks Jesus to come to his house, while the centurion specifically tells Jesus *not* to come to his house and asks him to perform the miracle from a distance.
It's certainly possible that The Chosen might gloss over all those differences, though, the same way it had John calling Jesus "the Lamb of God" in Galilee rather than Judea, etc. Also, the show doesn't really seem to make any significant distinction between the Roman power structures and the secular Jewish/Herodian power structures.
Yes, I wonder to what degree there even would have been a Roman military presence in Galilee at this time.
Yeah, I mean, the centurion does live in Capernaum... but then again, is it a given that he was a *Roman* centurion? Maybe the Herodian armies had centurions too? Or maybe the centurion was a Roman who had been assigned to help the Herods etc.?
By the way, I revisited Episode 7 during the livestream tonight, and I think I might not be able to watch it again without your "Anchorman" comment coming to mind. It actually hadn't registered with me, in the theatre, how many different ethnic groups there were in that scene; I was still thinking in binary Jewish-Gentile terms.