The Chosen – season three, episode one

The Jesus movement attracts new followers, and new sponsors, as the disciples return to Capernaum in 'Homecoming'.

Season 3, Episode 1 — ‘Homecoming’
Matthew 5-7; Luke 8

Synopsis. In A.D. 24, Matthew becomes his parents’ tax collector, and is immediately rejected by his father. Two years later, Matthew attends the Sermon on the Mount, and is moved by Jesus’ teachings about reconciliation. After the Sermon, Judas meets Jesus and joins the movement. A woman named Joanna, whose husband works in Herod’s court, comes with a financial offering for the ministry and a message from John the Baptist. Andrew goes back with Joanna to meet John in prison. Simon and Eden return to Capernaum, hoping for a little privacy, but are surprised to learn that Nathanael and Simon the Zealot will be staying with them. Thomas stays with Zebedee’s family. Ramah and Tamar stay with Mary Magdalene. Yussif learns that a new administrator named Jairus has been appointed to his synagogue. Judas says goodbye to his sister. Andrew apologizes to Mary Magdalene for the way he treated her after her relapse in Jericho. Matthew goes to his parents’ house to make his own apology, and is surprised when his father greets him warmly at the door.

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Gospels. This episode introduces two significant characters from the gospels—Joanna and Jairus—and it gives us more information about Judas Iscariot. It also features extended quotes from the Sermon on the Mount, and it shows people responding to the sermon and trying to fit the sermon’s teachings into their lives.

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Joanna is mentioned twice in Luke’s gospel:

• Luke 8:3 says she was one of the female patrons of the Jesus movement, and it says she was married to Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household.

• Luke 24:10 says she was one of the women who discovered the empty tomb.

We won’t be seeing the empty tomb for a while, of course, but the other facts about Joanna are amply reflected in this episode, as Joanna says her husband works for Herod, and she says she wants to support Jesus’ ministry financially.

Luke’s gospel seems to indicate that Joanna traveled with Jesus and his disciples, just like the other women, but the Joanna of this series has not done that yet.

Notably, Joanna does not speak with the Middle Eastern accent that is used by most or all of the Jewish characters on this show. Does that mean she is not Jewish? Or is it a sign of how Romanized the Herods and the people who work for them are?

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Jairus is identified in two gospels as a synagogue leader whose 12-year-old daughter was raised from the dead by Jesus (Mark 5:21-43, Luke 8:40-56; see also Matthew 9:18-26, which tells that story without giving us Jairus’s name or the age of his daughter).

Jairus, when introducing himself to Yussif, says his daughter is 12 years old. We will not meet the daughter herself until S3E4; the miracle will happen in S3E5.

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Judas Iscariot was introduced in S2E8, but his identity was not confirmed until the very end of that episode—so this episode gives us our first chance to get to know him as Judas.

Notably, this episode gives us two conflicting theories about Judas’s surname:

• Judas calls himself “Judas of Kerioth”, which is based on the theory that “Iscariot” was a toponymic by-name that indicated someone was from the town of Kerioth.

• Judas’s sister says the “line of Iscariot” will die with Judas if he does not have any sons of his own, which suggests “Iscariot” is a patrilineal family name that sons inherit from their fathers regardless of where they happen to be living.

There are two major problems with Judas’s sister’s claim:

First, if the name “Iscariot” means “of Kerioth”, then it applies to everyone from that town, and it’s in no danger of dying out—not as long as that town exists.

Second, Jews did not have permanent family surnames at this point in history, but were generally identified as the sons or daughters of their fathers (such as when Jesus called one of his disciples “Simon son of Jonah” in Matthew 16:17). Jews did not start using family surnames until the 10th century at the earliest, and in some countries not until much, much later, when local governments forced them to do so.

It is true that Judas Iscariot—who is known by that name in all four gospels—is also identified in John’s gospel as “the son of Simon Iscariot” (John 6:71; 13:2, 26), so to some modern readers it might sound like “Iscariot” was an inherited family name. But Simon and Judas were extremely common names back then—Jesus had two disciples named Simon, two disciples named Judas, and brothers named Simon and Judas as well, just to cite a few examples—so I assume both men were nicknamed directly after their hometown, to avoid confusion with other Simons and Judases.

As for the name “Judas”, Jesus says in this episode that it means “God be praised with your hands.” That sounds plausible enough. “Judas” is basically the Greek form of “Judah”, and the book of Genesis says the mother of the original Judah—the ancestor of the tribe that bore his name—gave him that name because she praised God for giving her children (Genesis 29:35). The Hebrew word for her praise is yāḏâ, and that word, in turn, seems to be related to yad, the Hebrew word for “hand”.

This episode reveals that Judas has made some bad business investments. In The Chosen Aftershow, the show’s co-writers say this aspect of the character is meant to show that Judas is an impulsive, shifty sort who tends to quit what he starts, which of course foreshadows his ultimate betrayal of Jesus.

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Joanna takes Andrew to visit John the Baptist in prison.

There is no biblical evidence that Andrew visited John in prison, but we do know that Andrew was John’s disciple before he was Jesus’ disciple (John 1:35-40), and we do know that John was visited in prison by some of his followers (Matthew 11:2-6, Luke 7:18-23), so it makes sense that Andrew might have been one of John’s visitors.

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Jesus spent much of S2E8 preparing for the Sermon on the Mount; now, in this episode, we see him actually preach it, and we see members of the audience quote it afterwards.

Only fragments of the sermon are depicted here, and they are edited together in a non-linear fashion: bits of the Lord’s Prayer, for example, are intercut with some of the other teachings from that sermon. But the sermon itself is clearly presented as a single event that happened at a particular time and place. So this episode’s depiction of the sermon falls somewhere between films that treat it as one long speech and films that render it as a montage of otherwise independent sayings.

We previously saw Jesus teach the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13; cf Luke 11:1-3) to children in S1E3 and to his disciples in S2E7, and in this episode we see the disciples mouth the words of the prayer as Jesus teaches it to the crowd at the sermon.

Aside from that prayer, most of the teachings in this episode are new to the series. Here is a quick rundown of the teachings that we hear in this episode (or at least those that aren’t buried in the sound mix):

These are the teachings Jesus says which are (mostly) new to the series:

• “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whomever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” (Matthew 5:21-24; notably, this episode leaves out the part from verse 22 where Jesus says that anyone who says “Raca” to his brother or sister will be answerable to the court, and anyone who says “You fool!” will be in danger of hellfire.)

• “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ ‘What shall we drink?’ Or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things, and your heavenly Father knows you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” (Matthew 6:25-27, 31-33; the first sentence was previously heard in S2E8; verses 28-30 are omitted from the dialogue here, but they were cited by Jesus in S1E6; cf Luke 12:22-31.)

• “Judge not that you be not judged, for with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged.” (Matthew 7:1-2; cf Luke 6:37)

• “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in Heaven.” (Matthew 5:43-45; the middle part was previously heard in S2E8; cf Luke 6:27-28, 35)

• “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3; cf Luke 6:41-42)

• “Your father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then, like this…” (Matthew 6:8)

• “And if anyone should force you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (Matthew 5:41)

• “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither rust nor moth destroys, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:19-21; cf Luke 12:33-34)

• “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand, and the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock, and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” (Matthew 7:24-27; but note, this episode reverses the two parts of this teaching, so that Jesus ends on a positive note rather than a negative note; cf Luke 6:47-49.)

These are the teachings that we have heard Jesus say before in this series:

• “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12; previously heard in S2E8; cf Luke 6:31)

• “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. And if anyone should slap you on your right cheek, turn and give him the other one also. And if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.” (Matthew 5:38-40; previously alluded to in S1E3; cf Luke 6:29)

These are the teachings that we only hear through other people after the sermon:

• Barnaby and Shula quote the saying that begins, “Consider the lilies” (Matthew 6:28-29; cf Luke 12:27-28), and they sound amazed—but this isn’t the first time they’ve heard that teaching. They were standing in the crowd outside Zebedee’s house when Jesus gave that teaching in S1E6.

• Joanna alludes to the first three Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-5; previously heard in S2E8; cf Luke 6:20-21) and the teaching about throwing pearls before pigs (Matthew 7:6) when she talks to John the Baptist.

• Andrew alludes to the teaching about salt (Matthew 5:13; previously heard in S2E5 and S2E8) when he talks to John the Baptist.

One member of the sermon’s audience marvels afterwards that Jesus “spoke with actual authority! His own!” This parallels how the biblical crowds who heard the sermon said Jesus had authority, unlike the teachers of the law (Matthew 7:29; cf Mark 1:22, Luke 4:32).

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This episode suggests that Jesus may have improvised part of the sermon, despite spending so much time fine-tuning it beforehand in S2E8. After Jesus finishes giving the sermon, Matthew—who helped Jesus plan the sermon in the first place—says he wrote down “many of the new things you said”.

Matthew also says he recognized some of the new things Jesus said from the teachings of Hillel, a rabbi who died in AD 10, or about 16 years before this episode is set. Matthew doesn’t say which teachings he is referring to, but he might be thinking of the Golden Rule, for starters. This is how Hillel phrased it:

That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; now go and learn. 

And this is how the biblical Jesus phrased it:

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12; cf Luke 6:31)

However, we already saw Jesus rehearse this teaching with Matthew in S2E8, so it shouldn’t be one of the teachings that is new to Matthew now.

Incidentally, note: Hillel’s version of the Golden Rule is negative, in the sense that it tells you what you should not do, whereas Jesus’ phrasing is positive, in the sense that it tells you what you should do.

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Two other points about this episode’s dramatic take on the sermon:

First, with regard to the teachings that Jesus did prepare before the sermon, Matthew marvels at the difference between seeing those words written down and hearing Jesus say them out loud—but Matthew already heard Jesus say those words while they were being written down. Maybe Jesus says them differently when he has a large audience.

And second, a lot of fuss was made in S2E8 about the staging of the sermon, complete with an actual platform designed by Nathanael and a curtain that Jesus could step through to begin his speech—but when we finally see Jesus deliver the sermon, he is standing far from the stage, in the middle of the crowd. So why did he need that stage in the first place?

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Simon says Andrew is staying in a “flat”, or apartment, in the east quarter of Capernaum.

We saw Simon and Andrew leave from different buildings when they left Capernaum with Jesus in S1E8. But the biblical Simon and Andrew seem to have shared a house. Mark’s gospel says Jesus and the sons of Zebedee went to “the home of Simon and Andrew” after one of their trips to the synagogue (Mark 1:29).

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New Testament. Judas and his sister talk about the fact that many people have claimed to be the Messiah, and they talk about the fact that the would-be Messiahs have usually been killed along with their followers. Gamaliel made a similar point when he talked about the Jewish rebels who came before Jesus: the leaders were all killed, and all of their followers were scattered (Acts 5:34-39).

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Old Testament. Several characters quote the Old Testament directly:

• Matthew’s mother says he should trust Adonai with all his heart and not lean on his own understanding (Proverbs 3:5).

• Jesus quotes the commandment against murder (Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 5:17).

• Jesus quotes the command that sets restitution at “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” (Exodus 21:23-25, Leviticus 24:17-22, Deuteronomy 19:21).

• Jesus prays the priestly blessing over his followers (Numbers 6:24-26); his mother Mary prayed this prayer over Mary Magdalene in ‘The Messengers’.

• John the Baptist says Jesus is fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy about proclaiming liberty to the captives (Isaiah 61:1-2; Jesus himself quoted this passage in S1E3).

Less directly, John calls Thomas “a stranger from a strange place”, which is similar to Moses’ description of himself when he lived with the Midianites (Exodus 2:22).

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Matthew asks his mother what God has done for the Jews in 500 years.

This echoes the title card in ‘The Shepherd’, which said the prophets have been “silent for 400 years”—i.e. since the traditional date of the last text in the Protestant Old Testament. However, as I said in my notes on that episode, many people would disagree with the idea that God and his prophets had been silent for so long.

For starters, many scriptures were written during this period, and a few of them are quoted in the New Testament or accepted in the longer Old Testaments that are still used by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Also, the Maccabean revolt succeeded in kicking the Greeks out of Judea about 165 years before this episode takes place, and the feast of Hanukkah—which Jesus himself observed in John 10:22-23—was created to commemorate the rededication of the Temple under the Maccabees.

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Themes. This episode emphasizes how Jesus’ sermon had specific effects on specific disciples. As Jesus preaches, the camera cuts away to individual disciples, who apparently needed to hear specific teachings. This serves two purposes:

First, it underscores the idea that preaching needs to be “personal”. In S2E7, Jesus and Philip talked about how the sermon needed to emulate the “personal” preaching style of John the Baptist, who “spoke directly to each person who was there.” The link to John comes full circle in this episode when Andrew visits John in prison, and John tells Andrew there must have been something “just for you” in the sermon.

Second, and for lack of a better way of putting it, it puts Jesus back in charge. When Jesus dictated the Beatitudes to Matthew in S2E8, it was strongly implied, through flashbacks, that Jesus was inspired to write the sermon—and the Beatitudes in particular—by the actions of his disciples. In contrast to that, the series now shows the disciples being convicted by Jesus’ words. The disciples had an effect on him; now he has an effect on them. If they once inspired him, he is now inspiring them.

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Reconciliation is a major theme in this episode.

The episode begins with a prologue in which Matthew is rejected by his father, and it ends with his father welcoming him home. In between, we also see Andrew apologize to Mary Magdalene for the way he spoke to her in earlier episodes.

It may bear mentioning that Matthew’s reconciliation is only partial at this point. We have yet to see how he might be fully reconciled to the fishermen he once taxed, and it’s worth noting that, so far, the only sign of financial restitution that we’ve seen on his part is that he gave his home to his parents (in S1E8; Matthew’s home will eventually become a base of operations for the Jesus movement in S3E2). Matthew has not yet done anything as extravagant as, say, what the tax collector Zacchaeus did, when he said he would give half of his possessions to the poor (Luke 19:1-10).

(Zacchaeus also said he would pay back anyone he had cheated four times what he owed them, but the Matthew of this series is such a stickler for numbers that I assume he did not personally cheat anyone; that is, I assume he only took from people what the Roman authorities required him to take from them.)

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Social status and political power continue to be very important to certain characters.

Yussif is upset that he is “so unimportant” that no one told him in advance that Jairus was being assigned to his synagogue.

And Joanna, to keep Andrew’s visit with John the Baptist a secret, flexes her power and threatens the family of one of the prison guards in Machaerus.

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John the Baptist says he trusts Jesus’ timing when it comes to things happening “soon”. Jesus previously teased Simon about the vagueness of the word “soon” in S2E2, and John the Baptist commented on how “strange” that word is in S2E4.

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Historical quibbles. This episode seems to be imposing modern business practices on first-century Palestine:

• Jairus says he put in a request for ink with the elders, as though there were some sort of office-supplies department he could turn to.

• Judas talks about how he “joined the mining company”. When he says he’s leaving, his business partner says, “I’ll sue you,” and Judas replies, “I renounce my shares!”

I already noted, in connection with the depiction of Judas and his business partner in S2E8, that this notion of businesses, companies, or corporations being entities unto themselves may be something of an anachronism.

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On a related note, Judas gives his sister the “deed” to his house.

Deeds, as such, came out of the medieval charter system, and it is not clear to me that an equivalent concept existed in first-century Palestine, or that private home ownership was something that a typical non-elite member of society would have enjoyed. The talk of “deeds” in this episode may be of a piece with the anachronistic use of the phrase “the middle class” in S2E8.

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The language of modern ministries also creeps into the dialogue.

Joanna and Judas’s business partner are both surprised that Jesus and his followers did not “take up a collection” during the sermon. Passing the collection plate around during a concert or public speaking event is standard practice in some modern churches, but I don’t know how common it would have been in ancient Palestine.

Jesus, meanwhile, tells his followers that “spreading the word” is “vital to our ministry”, which feels very much like the sort of language that one hears in modern religious promotional campaigns (including, it must be said, some of the promotional efforts that have accompanied this series).

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Jairus says he was assigned to the synagogue in Capernaum after the previous administrator was “transferred” somewhere else.

This would seem to imply that the synagogues of this period were all run from some sort of central office, but there is no evidence that they were controlled like that; indeed, there is no good evidence that they were even controlled by rabbis. The synagogues of this period appear to have been more like local community centres than places of worship, partly because they did not have the Torah Shrines that became central to Jewish services after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70.

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Simon says Andrew is staying in a “flat”, or apartment, in Capernaum.

It is not clear to me that apartment buildings would have existed in first-century Capernaum. For what it’s worth, the building we saw Andrew leave in S1E8, as he was getting ready to leave Capernaum with Jesus, looked like a regular house.

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Judas mentions that he attended beth midrash, a school for studying the Torah. See my notes on S2E3 for why that might be anachronistic, too.

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Geography. Joanna takes Andrew to see John the Baptist in Machaerus.

The gospels don’t say where John was imprisoned, but the Jewish historian Josephus—who was born just a few years after John died—says John was imprisoned and executed in Machaerus, which is near the Dead Sea in modern Jordan.

This episode takes place mostly in and near Capernaum, on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, but Machaerus is about 40 hours’ walk south of there.

Given that this episode covers no more than 24 hours—in the next episode, which picks up right where this one leaves off, Matthew says the Sermon on the Mount took place “yesterday”—there is simply no time for Andrew to have traveled all the way to Machaerus, much less back again, within this episode’s timeframe.

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Judas is from Kerioth, and it appears he goes home and visits his sister there.

Kerioth is about 70 km (or 14 hours’ walk) south of Jerusalem.

In S1E8, Jesus and the disciples discussed how the walk from Capernaum to Jerusalem would take three days if they went through Samaria, and six days if they went around Samaria. Kerioth is at least an extra day’s journey beyond Jerusalem.

So if there is not enough time for Andrew to go to Machaerus within the timeframe of this episode, there is definitely no time for Judas to go to Kerioth.

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Following up on those last two points:

Nathanael tells Simon and Eden he can’t stay at Andrew’s one-bedroom apartment because Philip and Judas are staying there and it’s already too crowded—“they’re practically on top of each other,” he says—but it would appear that both Andrew and Judas were out of town when he said that. So the only person who should have actually been in that apartment, at that time, was Nathanael’s old friend Philip.

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Jairus tells Yussif he has worked at synagogues in Kadesh, Joppa, and Hebron, all of which are well south of Galilee.

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Humanization. This episode, more than most, develops characters by telling us about their families.

Sometimes it invents fictitious family members, like Judas’s sister and nieces.

Sometimes it invents fictitious details about family members we already know about from the gospels, like when Jairus says it is difficult for his daughter to make friends because of how often their family has to move, or like when John the Baptist says Joanna was angry that John didn’t call out her own husband’s adultery.

And sometimes it builds on fictitious relationships that were introduced in earlier episodes. Most obviously, it begins and ends with scenes between Matthew and his parents, who we first glimpsed through a window in S1E2. (We didn’t actually meet his mother until S1E7, or his father until S1E8. Matthew also had a sister in those episodes, but she has not been mentioned yet this season.) This episode also tells us that Simon’s mother-in-law is staying with her sons, who we first met in S1E1.

Incidentally, this is not the first dramatization of the gospels to humanize Judas through his relationship with female relatives. In 2018’s Mary Magdalene, Judas is a widower who joins the Jesus movement because he wants to be reunited with his dead wife and daughter in the Resurrection.

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This episode also leans into the sexual and romantic relationships between certain characters.

Simon, for example, is clearly happy to be home with Eden again, and he is happy to be alone with her—the last time he was in Capernaum, Eden’s sick mother was staying with them—but then Nathanael shows up, looking for a place to sleep.

Nathanael goes on to say that he can “put a pillow over my ears” whenever Simon and Eden want to make noise together—and this comment elicits a gasp from Eden.

Meanwhile, Thomas is looking for opportunities to be with Ramah.

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Timeline. The prologue, in which Matthew’s parents learn that he is their tax collector, is set in AD 24, two years before the main action of this series.

Matthew said in S2E2 that he began working for the Romans as a bookkeeper at a very young age, and he bought his first house when he was 13. I assume he had already become a full-fledged tax collector before this prologue takes place, but apparently he let someone else handle his parents at first—and apparently his father did not feel the need to completely disown Matthew until Matthew, himself, took over their file.

It would be interesting to know why Matthew got assigned to his parents in the end—and whether the Romans had any concerns about a conflict of interest on his part. Matthew does bend the rules for his parents in this prologue, and he offers to help them out financially in S1E7. Could he have paid their taxes for them, perhaps?

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After the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his followers, “It’s been quite a journey these last several weeks.”

In context—Jesus goes on to talk about Eden missing Simon while the disciples were away—it would seem that Jesus is indicating it has only been “several weeks” since he and the first disciples left Capernaum in S1E8. But it has actually been more like several months. 

Matthew revealed in S2E1 that the disciples left Capernaum in the month of Adar, while S2E4 took place during the Feast of Tabernacles—which is in Tishrei, seven months later—and the Sermon on the Mount began about a month after that in S2E8. So it would seem the disciples have been away for eight months now.

It is possible that Matthew was mistaken about the timing of the disciples’ departure, but given his attention to detail, that doesn’t seem likely.

Also, it’s worth noting that Jesus said, in S2E7, that he had been preparing the Sermon on the Mount “for some months now.” It was not clear whether he had started preparing the sermon before or after he began calling the disciples, but if it was after, then that would confirm that several months, not weeks, have passed since the disciples left Capernaum.

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Language issues. Simon says Andrew has “a flat” in the east quarter of Capernaum. “Flat” is a British term for what Americans would call an “apartment”.

This feels, to me, a little reminiscent of how Nicodemus said he was going to stay in Capernaum for another “fortnight” in S1E4. For the most part, the characters in this series speak in a modern American vernacular, but every now and then the script throws a word in there that no American ever uses, just to be… different?

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Thomas and Ramah discuss whether they should meet after “first meal” or “second meal”. I guess “breakfast” and “lunch” might have sounded too modern?

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Judas says he believes Jesus is going to “change the world”.

In context—coming from a person who is trying to explain his impulsive decision to join Jesus’ ministry—that phrase sounds fair enough. But I am reminded of how odd it sounded when Jesus himself used that phrase to define his mission in 2013’s The Bible miniseries. Back then, I called that phrase—and others like it—“the language of talk shows and infomercials, not the language of first-century Jews and Christians”.

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Miscellaneous. The first time I interviewed series creator Dallas Jenkins—three years ago, right after Season 1 came out—I asked if the series would introduce Joanna at some point, and he said yes, it would. And now, here she is. Woo-hoo!

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The Chosen interviews:

• Season 1: Dallas Jenkins, co-writer/director (Dec 2019)

• Season 2: Dallas Jenkins, co-writer/director (May 2021) | Derral Eves, producer, on Christmas with The Chosen: The Messengers (Nov 2021) | Dallas Jenkins on the ‘The Chosen Is Not Good’ marketing campaign (Apr 2022)

• Season 3: Jordan Walker Ross, Little James (Oct 2022) | Vanessa Benavente, Mother Mary (Nov 2022) | Kirk B.R. Woller, Gaius (Nov 2022)

The Chosen recaps:

• Season 1: review | scripture index
  Episode recaps: The Shepherd | one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight

• Season 2: The Messengers review | scripture index
  Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | The Messengers

• Season 3: Episodes 1 & 2 notes | scripture index
  Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight

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The Chosen can be streamed via Angel Studios or the show’s app (Android | Apple).

The episode premiered in theatres on November 15, 2022, and it premiered online in a livestream on December 11, 2022. This is the trailer for the theatrical release:

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TV show recaps:
Prophet Joseph | The Bible | A.D. The Bible Continues | Of Kings and Prophets

Movie scene guides:
Risen | The Young Messiah | Paul, Apostle of Christ | Mary Magdalene