The Chosen – season two, episode eight

Jesus does sermon prep, the disciples put on a show, and Judas makes a real estate deal in 'Beyond Mountains'.

Season 2, Episode 8 — ‘Beyond Mountains’
Matthew 5-7

Synopsis. Little James, Thaddaeus, and Nathanael are walking around Galilee, looking for a place where Jesus can deliver his Sermon on the Mount. They find a spot they like, but the local landowner is reluctant to let them draw a crowd there. As they all talk about it in the pub, a couple of businessmen with an interest in real estate overhear the conversation and propose a deal that works for everyone. Meanwhile, Yanni and Shmuel give their list of complaints about Jesus to Shammai, who plans to use this information against the school of Hillel when the time is right. Jesus and Matthew go over the latest draft of the sermon, and conclude that it needs a more positive intro. Finally Jesus comes up with the Beatitudes. The disciples build a stage, spread leaflets all over town, and help Jesus pick what to wear. A crowd shows up—including the two businessmen, one of whom reveals his name is Judas—and Jesus steps out from behind the curtain, ready to give his sermon.

-

Gospels. This episode is all about the build-up to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), and along the way we hear a number of teachings from that sermon.

Much is made in this episode of Jesus’ efforts to fine-tune the sermon in advance, but most scholars would argue that the sermon as we have it is actually a literary device used by Matthew’s gospel after the fact to gather a number of Jesus’ teachings in one place. In reality, Jesus would have said most of these things on multiple occasions, and in slightly different forms—and, notably, many of the teachings from the Sermon on the Mount do appear in other forms and contexts within the other gospels (especially Luke), and a few of them are even repeated elsewhere in Matthew.

Significantly, just as there is a Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel, there is a much shorter Sermon on the Plain in Luke’s gospel (Luke 6:20-49) that has many of the same teachings. Matthew’s sermon takes place on a mountain because Matthew is drawing a parallel between Jesus and Moses, who received the Law on Mount Sinai, while Luke’s sermon takes place at ground level because Luke wants to show how Jesus came down to earth to relate to average people on their own level.

The most obvious overlap between the two sermons is that they begin with a series of blessings known as the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12, Luke 6:20-26)—and Jesus’ recitation of the Beatitudes is arguably the central scene in this episode. The Jesus of this series recites the more familiar version of the Beatitudes from Matthew’s gospel, but there are some significant differences in Luke’s gospel worth noting:

• Luke has the blessings for the poor, the hungry, the mourners, and the hated, but not the blessings for the meek, the merciful, the pure, and the peacemakers.

• Luke’s Jesus blesses those who are “poor” and those who “hunger”, period, not those who are “poor in spirit” or those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness”. Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes is arguably more “spiritualized” than Luke’s.

• Luke follows the four blessings with a list of four woes—some would say curses—for those who are rich, well-fed, laughing, and spoken well of by others. This combination of blessings and woes fits the topsy-turvy politics of Luke’s gospel, such as when Mary recites the Magnificat (“He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty,” etc.) in Luke 1:46-55.

Notably, this episode’s version of the Beatitudes leaves out the final phrase from Matthew 5:12, where Jesus says the persecuted will be greatly rewarded in heaven “for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

Here is a quick rundown of the other teachings from the sermon that we hear in this episode, grouped according to how they overlap (or don’t) with other gospels:

First, here are the other teachings from this episode, besides the Beatitudes, that appear in both the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain:

• “If anyone were to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.” (Matthew 5:40, Luke 6:29)

• “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44, cf Luke 6:27, 35)

• “Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” (Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31)

Second, here are two teachings that appear elsewhere in Luke:

• “Therefore do not be anxious about your life, what you’ll eat, what you’ll drink, about your body, what you’ll put on.” (Matthew 6:25, Luke 12:22)

• “The gate is narrow and hard that leads to life.” (Matthew 7:14, cf Luke 13:24)

Third, here is a teaching that appears more than once in Matthew’s gospel:

• “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out.” (Matthew 5:29, 18:9) Both of these verses are also linked to verses about cutting off one’s hands and feet.

Fourth, here is a teaching that repeats an earlier teaching of John the Baptist’s:

• “Trees that bear bad fruit [will be] cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Matthew 7:19; John the Baptist says this in Matthew 3:10, Luke 3:9)

Fifth, here are three teachings that are unique to the sermon in Matthew:

• “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.” (Matthew 5:14)

• “Anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery.” (Matthew 5:28)

• “Depart from me, I never knew you.” (Matthew 7:23)

And finally, here is a phrase from the episode that is sort of unique to Matthew:

• “You are the salt of the earth.” (Matthew 5:13) This phrase does not appear in the other gospels, but the question that follows it—“But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again?”—does appear in Mark 9:50 and Luke 14:34.

In this episode, Jesus tells Matthew salt is good because it prevents decay, it brings flavour, and it also brings healing. The middle point is also made by Paul when he says our conversations should be “full of grace, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:6).

-

Before Jesus comes up with the Beatitudes, Matthew tells him there are 19 “sections” in the sermon so far, and they discuss whether it should go up to 20 or down to 18.

The sermon is not divided into “sections” at all in the original Greek, but a quick look at the New International Version’s translation of the sermon does indicate that, yes, the sermon—with the Beatitudes—has 20 different subheadings there. So this line appears to be a nod to how modern translators have subdivided the sermon.

-

The Jesus of this episode is hoping to attract a large crowd to his sermon.

The biblical Jesus, however, may have gone up the mountain precisely to get away from the crowds. The verses immediately before the Sermon on the Mount state:

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them. (Matthew 5:1-2)

There is no indication there that the crowds went up the mountain. Jesus did, and the disciples did, and he began to teach them in what sounds like a fairly intimate way, sitting and talking to them rather than standing and speaking to a crowd.

This attempt to avoid the crowds would fit with other occasions when Jesus went up mountains to conduct private business with God, the disciples, or both:

• Jesus went up a mountain by himself to pray, after he had fed the 5,000 (Mark 6:46, Matthew 14:23, John 6:15).

• Jesus took three disciples up a mountain to witness the Transfiguration (Mark 9:2-13, Matthew 17:1-13, Luke 9:28-36).

• Jesus called twelve disciples up a mountain when he appointed them to The Twelve (Mark 3:13-19, Luke 6:12-16; cf Matthew 10:1-4).

But then, the verses immediately after the Sermon on the Mount state:

When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law. When Jesus came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. (Matthew 7:28-8:1)

So did crowds pursue Jesus up the mountain? They certainly seem to have done so on at least two other occasions:

• The feeding of the 5,000 happens in all four gospels, and in John’s version, it took place on a mountain (John 6:1-15; cf Mark 6:32-34, Matthew 14:13-21, Luke 9:10-17).

• The feeding of the 4,000 happens in two gospels, and in Matthew’s version it took place on a mountain (Matthew 15:29-39; cf Mark 8:1-10).

So how big was the crowd at the biblical Sermon on the Mount? Was it a smaller “crowd of his disciples” (à la Luke 6:17) that was distinct from the “large crowds” waiting at the bottom of the mountain? Did the sermon’s audience grow as Jesus was speaking? (And how far did his voice travel, if he was sitting down as he spoke?)

Whatever the answer, the basic point here is that, every single time a crowd followed Jesus up a mountain, they did so unbidden; the biblical Jesus did not solicit their attendance in advance the way the Jesus of this episode does.

-

Jesus sends three disciples to find a location where he can deliver the sermon, and it is implied that Jesus might already know which location they will find.

This might parallel the stories about how Jesus sent disciples ahead of him to find a donkey for him to ride (Mark 11:1-7, Matthew 21:1-7, Luke 19:28-35) or a place to have the Last Supper (Mark 14:12-16, Matthew 26:17-19, Luke 22:7-13).

Jesus seemed to know in advance what the disciples would find before they got there on those occasions, too—but while some might think that Jesus was prophesying what the disciples would find, others think Jesus planned those meetings in advance.

-

This episode introduces Judas Iscariot, the one future member of The Twelve—the core group of disciples—who had not yet been introduced in this series.

Judas is identified in all four gospels (and the book of Acts) as the member of the Twelve who betrayed Jesus (Mark 3:19; 14:10-11, 41-46; Matthew 10:4; 26:14-16, 20-25, 45-50; Luke 6:16; 22:1-6, 47-48; John 6:70-71; 12:4; 13:2, 18-30; 18:2-5; Acts 1:16-17).

-

All four gospels portray Judas doing dodgy things for money. The three Synoptic gospels say he was paid to betray Jesus (Mark 14:11, Matthew 26:15, Luke 22:5), and John’s gospel says he was the treasurer, or “keeper of the money bag,” for the Twelve, and that “he used to help himself to what was put into it” (John 12:4-6, 13:29).

What’s more, two gospel traditions say that the money Judas got for betraying Jesus was used to buy a field that came to be known as the “Field of Blood”. Matthew’s gospel says a remorseful Judas returned the money to the priests before committing suicide, and the priests bought the field instead of putting the money back in the Temple treasury because it was “blood money” (Matthew 27:3-10), while the book of Acts—a sequel to Luke’s gospel—says the field acquired its name because Judas himself bought it and he died a spectacularly gory death in it (Acts 1:18-19).

Matthew’s gospel also says that the field became “a burial place for foreigners.”

All of these details—the ill-gotten money, the purchase of the field, the burial place for foreigners—might be reflected in the fact that this episode introduces Judas as someone who says he’s going to develop some tombs as part of a shady real-estate deal.

-

Judas is the only character with that name that we’ve met so far in this series.

The name Judas was fairly common back then, so the Judas introduced in this episode is identified repeatedly in the New Testament as Judas Iscariot, to help distinguish him from the other Judases—though on a few occasions, John’s gospel also identifies him as Judas the son of Simon the Iscariot (John 6:71; 13:2, 26).

The other Judases in the New Testament include:

• one of Jesus’ brothers (Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55, Jude 1);

• one of the other members of the Twelve, identified as “Judas son of James” (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13) and “Judas (not Judas Iscariot)” (John 14:42), who may be identical to the disciple who is known in this series as Thaddaeus (Mark 3:18, Matthew 10:3);

• Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), who supposedly founded the Zealot movement two decades before this series takes place (see my notes on S2E4);

• a man whose home Paul stayed in when he went to Damascus (Acts 9:11); and

• a prophet, also known as Barsabbas, who traveled to Antioch with Paul, Barnabas, and Silas to share the results of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15:22-33).

The name “Iscariot” is thought to mean that Judas or his father came from Kerioth, a Judean town about 15km south of Hebron (it is mentioned in Joshua 15:25).

-

The person who sells his land to Judas and Judas’s business partner says it has been in the tribe of Reuben “for 40 generations”.

That seems unlikely (see ‘Geography’ below), but I assume the number comes from the fact that there are about 40 to 50 generations between Jesus and Reuben’s brother Judah, depending on which genealogy you follow (Matthew 1:1-17, Luke 3:23-38).

-

Judas and his business partner trick the land owner into selling them his land for less than it’s worth, by not letting him know that it has rich salt deposits.

This is reminiscent of the parable Jesus told about a man who found a treasure hidden in a field, hid it again, and then bought the field (Matthew 13:44). Presumably that man did not tell the field’s original owner what his land was really worth, either.

-

Philip says the Pharisees used to “heckle” John the Baptist, and Andrew replies that John would heckle them.

John’s gospel describes priests, Levites, and Pharisees coming out to “question” John the Baptist, but it doesn’t necessarily depict them “heckling” him (John 1:19-27).

John definitely heckled the Pharisees and Sadducees, though (Matthew 3:7-12; cf Luke 3:7-18, where John says many of the same things, but his words are aimed at “the crowds coming out to be baptized by him”, not at specific rival sects).

-

This episode also has a flashback to John being arrested in the middle of nowhere.

Is this meant to be his most recent arrest, after he stormed into Herod’s palace and condemned the royal family? (How did he get past the guards on the way in? And how did he get so far back out of the palace before being arrested?) Or is this one of his earlier arrests? Maybe it’s not meant to be a literal depiction of any particular arrest.

-

Old Testament. Ramah recites Psalm 139:15-16 while learning how to read and write.

-

Jesus tells Matthew, “I’m not going nearly as far with metaphor as Solomon.”

This is presumably a reference to the Song of Songs, a work of erotic poetry that many have interpreted as a metaphor for God’s relationship with Israel, or Christ’s relationship with the Church; in other words, many have assumed that it uses sex as a metaphor for something else. But there are plenty of metaphors for sex itself within the poem, too.

-

Jesus’ mother calls him “our Prince of Peace.” The phrase comes from Isaiah 9:6.

-

Jesus says he knows what “the prophecy” says about his appearance, and he asks Mary if her costume recommendation is an attempt to improve that appearance.

Jesus doesn’t specify which prophecy he’s referring to, but it might be the ‘Suffering Servant’ passage from Isaiah, which is often cited as a description of the Messiah’s appearance even though it’s at least partly describing what the Messiah’s abuse looked like (“His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any human being and his form marred beyond human likeness … He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him”; Isaiah 52:14, 53:2).

-

Judas’s business partner comes from the tribe of Simeon, and the person selling his land says he comes from the tribe of Reuben, and he makes a dismissive comment about Simeon being Reuben’s younger brother. Reuben and Simeon were, indeed, the first two sons of Jacob, and they were born in that order (Genesis 29:31-33).

-

Judas says “man was formed from earth, and eventually he returns to it.”

The second creation story in the book of Genesis says God made the first human from the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7), and then, after the first sin, God said humans would be mortal from here on, “for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19).

-

Shammai repeats the Pharisees’ complaint that Jesus calls himself the “Son of Man”, a title derived from Daniel 7:13-14 (as per my notes on S1E6, S1E8, and S2E6).

-

Themes. Shula, the blind woman we met a few times in Season 1, returns with her friend Barnaby and insists that the sermon they are about to hear will not be “a show”.

Despite Shula’s insistence, this episode does go out of its way to depict the Sermon on the Mount as a theatrical event, and one that has aspects of a filmed production, even, insofar as Jesus sends three disciples to do some location scouting.

Judas’s business partner proposes the first-century equivalent of a product placement, telling the landowner his “products”—like milk and cheese—will get a sales boost because the sermon took place on his land. Nathanael designs a stage with a curtain. The disciples hand out leaflets and post advertising notices in a nearby town. The female disciples pay special attention to Jesus’ costume, to give it “a pop of colour”. Jesus himself worries that the sermon doesn’t have the right intro at first.

One thing Jesus doesn’t have is an emcee or a warm-up act.

-

Jesus spends much of his sermon-prep time looking at the disciples’ camp from a distance, and when he finally recites the Beatitudes, we get flashbacks to things that the disciples and others have done in earlier episodes of the series. Jesus then says, “If someone wants to find me, those are the groups they should look for.”

The implication here seems to be that Jesus was looking to his followers for inspiration as he tried to come up with a less “negative” opening for his sermon, and that the version of the Beatitudes that appears in Matthew’s gospel was a response to the positive things that Jesus witnessed in his followers.

This parallels how earlier episodes have created character-specific back-stories for things that seemed more general in the text, like Simon’s confession of sin after Jesus helped him catch some fish (in S1E4), or Jesus’ statement that he saw Nathanael under a tree (in S2E2). As with those back-stories, so here: one might ask whether creating origin stories for each of the Beatitudes broadens or narrows their meaning.

On a related note, it would be interesting to know what sort of stories might lie behind the “woes” or curses that follow Luke’s version of the Beatitudes.

-

Questions about Jesus’ knowledge and infallibility come up a few times.

On the one hand, Jesus tells Little James, Thaddaeus, and Nathanael to find a location for the sermon, but he describes what he’s looking for with just enough detail that Thaddaeus says, “It’s like he already knows the place”. To this, Nathanael replies, “Yeah, we just have to find it.” So, if Jesus already knows what the location is like, does he also know where it is? If he does know where it is, why doesn’t he just tell the disciples? Does the act of searching for the location benefit them somehow?

On the other hand, Mary Magdalene says Jesus has been getting up every morning to work on his sermon because “he’s just trying to get everything right.” Ramah asks, “Can he get anything wrong?” Mary Magdalene replies, “I mean, for the people.” It’s an interesting clarification, as it suggests that anything Jesus says is bound to be good and true—but he might still have to put effort into how he communicates goodness and truth, into how he crafts his message of goodness and truth for the audience that he’s speaking to. And that, in turn, might raise questions regarding whether Jesus himself benefited, as a human being, from that sort of mental exercise, the same way his disciples might have benefited from looking for places he already knew about. (Luke 2:52 says the adolescent Jesus “grew in wisdom”. Did he ever stop growing? Was there a finite point at which his wisdom became as infinite as it was going to get?)

Finally, Simon says he doesn’t want Jesus to be caught off guard by the size of the crowd, and Andrew replies, “Is he capable of surprise, or being thrown off?”

-

Jesus says he’s starting a “revolution” but not a “revolt”, i.e. he’s starting a movement that is open to everyone and requires radical new thinking, but it isn’t violent.

Jesus also says of his teachings, “These things will make sense to some, but not to others.” He said the same thing to John the Baptist in S2E5.

Jesus then adds, “I don’t want passive followers. Those who are truly committed will peer deeply into it, looking for truth.” This line exists in an interesting tension with Mary Magdalene’s comment that Jesus was trying to “get everything right … for the people.” It matters how Jesus crafts his words—but it also matters how people hear them. Jesus will make an effort, but he won’t do all the work for us.

-

Salt is a recurring theme in this episode. Jesus has to explain his “salt of the earth” metaphor to Matthew, and Judas helps buy a field to mine it for salt. (In Judas’s case, the salt is already in the earth and needs to be extracted from the earth.)

-

Historical quibbles. Judas and his business partner, while hiding their true intentions for the land, tell the landowner they’re planning to make affordable tombs for “the middle class”, because only the wealthy can afford tombs close to the city.

It is true that only the wealthy could afford rock-cut tombs; the two contemporaries of Jesus who are identified as tomb-owners in the gospels—Lazarus and Joseph of Arimathea, the latter of whom was a member of the Sanhedrin—were both wealthy.

(Lazarus’s tomb is featured in John 11, and his wealth can be inferred from the fact that his sister had a jar of perfume worth a year’s wages, as per John 12:1-5. As for Joseph of Arimathea, see Mark 15:42-47, Matthew 27:57-61, Luke 23:50-55, John 19:38-42; Matthew specifies that Joseph was “rich”, Matthew and John specify that the tomb was newly cut, and Luke and John specify that no one had been buried in it before.)

But whether the middle class even existed in Roman-occupied Palestine is a more controversial question. Ben-Zion Rosenfeld and Haim Perlmutter have written that the ancient literature tends to speak in binary terms of “rich” and “poor” and doesn’t really have a term for groups in the middle that weren’t clearly one or the other:

Since there is no term to define these middling groups, perhaps they did not see themselves as a collective social stratum (as did the middle class that emerged after the industrial revolution). Instead, each profession or owner of property belonged to an identified group based on his vocation. These groups were neither rich nor poor but did not comprise a collective middle class. They were separated from the elite because they had to work for their livelihood, while the upper class had a passive income from which to support themselves.

In modern terms, the rise of the “middle class” as a collective, self-conscious entity coincided with the rise of capitalism and the rising influence of merchants who were neither peasants nor noblemen in the 18th century.

-

Judas’s business partner says, “Our business has a reputation of doing things the right way.”

The reference to a “business” as an entity unto itself—a corporation distinct from the people who work for it—feels like a modern concept. Admittedly, private associations with legal rights did exist under Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus, and they may have existed for some time afterwards, but I’m not sure traditional Palestinian Jews committed to concepts like lineage, covenants, and the need to keep land within the tribe would have cared much for private Roman businesses of that sort.

–

Judas’s business partner says 49 talents is worth “more than ten years’ wages.”

Quite a bit more, it seems. In the parable of the vineyard workers, the workers agree to do one day’s work for a single denarius (Matthew 20:2), and there were 6,000 denarii in a single talent—so, assuming there were roughly 300 working days in a year once all the weekly Sabbaths and other holy days are bracketed off (the NIV says “three hundred dinarii” in John 12:5 was equal to “a year’s wages”), a single talent would have been worth 20 years’ wages. And if a single talent was worth that much, 49 talents would have been worth almost a thousand years’ wages.

-

Matthew wonders if people attending the Sermon on the Mount will think that Jesus is telling them to “salt the earth”. Matthew says the crowd might start thinking of how the Romans salted the earth after defeating Carthage in the Punic Wars, in 146 BC.

There is no evidence that the Romans actually did this. The earliest known claim to that effect was made in the late 19th century. However, the Old Testament describes an incident in which Abimelek, the son of the Israelite judge Gideon, destroyed the city of Shechem and salted the earth there after killing everyone (Judges 9:45).

So if the audience at the sermon was going to think of any earth-salting incident, they might have thought about the one from their own scriptures!

-

Yanni says Tamar, the Ethiopian woman, is a “Gentile”.

Is that a safe assumption, though? The book of Acts talks about an Ethiopian eunuch who went to Jerusalem to worship, and then converted to Christianity when he met Philip the evangelist (who is different from the Philip that we see in this series; Acts 8:26-39)—and it seems possible that the Ethiopian was Jewish on some level.

The Christian and Jewish communities in modern Ethiopia both have traditions about their supposed descent from the ancient Israelites, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church even claims that it and its antecedents have had the Ark of the Covenant since the 10th century BC. There are also other African communities, such as the Lemba from Zimbabwe and South Africa, that claim descent from the ancient Israelites and may have the genetic evidence to back it up, at least to some degree.

The early Church didn’t seriously debate whether Gentiles could be Christian until Peter baptized a Roman in Acts 10, after Samaritans and Ethiopians had started converting—so it would seem that those groups were, if not Jewish per se, at least Jewish-adjacent in the eyes of the early Church and the readers of Acts.

-

Shammai says Hillel was the grandfather of Shammai’s current rival Shimon.

Hillel was actually the father of Shimon, as previous episodes have acknowledged.

The mistake here may be due to a last-minute change to the script. In one of his “reaction” videos, series creator Dallas Jenkins says Shammai was originally supposed to identify his rival as Gamaliel (cf Acts 5:33-40, 22:3), the grandson of Hillel, and not as Shimon, the son of Hillel—but the line was changed at the last minute and the actor who plays Shammai had trouble adjusting to the new line. So my guess is that the actor who plays Shammai was reciting the line he had originally memorized, and he stuck with the word “grandfather” even as he switched names.

-

Shammai tells Yanni and Shmuel to file a report “with the clerk of the special counsel for false prophecies at the Archive.”

There’s an official archive that keeps track of all the false prophecies?

-

This episode assumes a significant degree of literacy in first-century Galilee.

The land Jesus uses for the Sermon on the Mount has a sign that says, “No trespassing. Violators will be prosecuted.” And the disciples hand out leaflets and post notices on walls in the local villages, to advertise the Sermon.

-

The man who owns the land where the Sermon on the Mount takes place says, “If I find one piece of trash left behind, I’ll sue for damages.”

Was “suing for damages” a thing in first-century Palestine?

-

Judas’s business partner, and the person whose land they buy, say they are from the tribes of Simeon and Reuben, respectively.

It’s debatable whether anyone would have self-identified as coming from those tribes at this late date. A brief history lesson, if I may:

• There were twelve tribes in ancient Israel, geographically speaking, and there was a thirteenth tribe—the Levites—who worked in the Temple and lived in cities spread throughout the other tribes.

• The geographical boundaries of the tribe of Simeon were defined rather vaguely, such that it seems to have existed within or even as part of the tribe of Judah.

• The Israelites split into two kingdoms after the death of Solomon in the 10th century BC: the kingdom of Judah, which had two tribes—Judah and Benjamin—and the kingdom of Israel, which had all the other tribes (I Kings 12:20-24, II Chronicles 10:16-11:4). The Levites from the other tribes reportedly moved to the kingdom of Judah as well (II Chronicles 11:13-17). The fact that Simeon isn’t even mentioned in these accounts, despite being surrounded on all sides by Judah, could be a sign that it had already been absorbed into Judah outright.

• In the 8th century BC, the kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians, who deported many of the Israelites and imported many foreigners, who blended with the remaining Israelites to become the Samaritans (II Kings 17:3-6, 24-41). That left only the tribes within the kingdom of Judah intact, as it were.

So, in New Testament times, most Jews would have identified as members of Judah—the word “Jew” comes from “Judah”—and some, like Paul, self-identified as members of Benjamin (Romans 11:1, Philippians 3:5). Plus, of course, there were the Levites who worked in the Temple, and other Levites such as Barnabas (Acts 4:36).

All that being said, Luke’s gospel does say that the prophetess Anna, who met Joseph and Mary shortly after Jesus was born, was of the tribe of Asher (Luke 2:36). So it would appear that some people self-identified as members of the “lost tribes”.

-

Mary Magdalene says the colour blue is a symbol of peace, like water and the sky.

The words “water” and “peace” wouldn’t necessarily have gone together in the ancient mind. To the ancients, water represented chaos: God brought order to chaos by separating the waters above from the waters below (Genesis 1:6-8), and during the Flood, creation returned to its chaotic state when the waters above and the waters below came together in the form of rain and “the springs of the great deep” (Genesis 7:11).

Similarly, the ancient Canaanites told myths about their gods defeating the chaotic god of the sea, and some of the Hebrew scriptures use that imagery too, where the chaotic sea that God defeats is sometimes characterized as a monster named “Rahab” or “Leviathan” (e.g. Job 26:12-13; Psalms 74:13-14, 89:9-10; Isaiah 27:1, 51:9-10).

In fact, it has been argued that the reason three of the gospels call the Sea of Galilee by that name—the body of water in question is actually a lake (limnē), as Luke’s gospel clarifies, not a sea (thalassa) in the conventional sense—is precisely to evoke the sense of chaos that people back then associated with the Mediterranean and other seas, a chaos that Jesus overcame by calming the storm (Mark 4:35-41, Matthew 8:23-27, Luke 8:22-25) and walking on the water (Mark 6:45-52, Matthew 14:22-33, John 6:16-21).

(Interestingly, Luke’s gospel—the one that calls the Sea of Galilee a “lake” rather than a “sea”—is also the only gospel that does not have the story about Jesus walking on the water and thereby proving his mastery over the forces of chaos in that way. Luke’s gospel does, however, have the story about Jesus calming the storm on the lake.)

-

Geography. Three disciples are scouting locations for the Sermon on the Mount, and Thaddaeus says they can’t use the hills north of Chorazin because Jesus wants the sermon to take place “within a day’s walk” of Tiberias and Magdala.

Chorazin is a four-and-a-half hour walk from Tiberias, and Magdala is on the path between the two, so it would seem that the hills north of Chorazin aren’t that far from those towns. Plus, this is quite a bit shorter than some of the other walks these characters have done in one day, like when Jesus walked from Jotapata to Capernaum and back again in S2E7, a round trip that would have taken about 17 hours.

But if Jesus really is planning to do the sermon so close to Tiberias and Magdala, both of which are on the coast of the Sea of Galilee, why is he planning the sermon at a camp near Jotapata? Why go so far away from the Sea of Galilee only to insist that the sermon be delivered within sight and easy walking distance of that lake?

-

The man who sells his land to Judas and Judas’s business partner says it has been in the tribe of Reuben “for 40 generations”.

That seems highly unlikely, as the tribe of Reuben was further southeast than any of the other Israelite tribes—it was one of three tribes on the other side of the Dead Sea and Jordan River, in modern-day Jordan—and this episode is set north of the Sea of Galilee, which is kind of at the other end of the Israelite nation.

In addition, the tribe of Reuben was effectively conquered by the Syrians during the reign of Jehu in the 9th century BC, as were the other two tribes on that side of the Jordan (II Kings 10:32-33). And that was before all the other exiles and disruptions. So it’s doubtful that the land would have stayed in Reubenite hands all that time.

-

Humanization. As noted above, a big chunk of this episode is about Jesus preparing his sermon and apparently finding inspiration in the lives of his disciples.

The Beatitudes, in particular, are presented not as perfect abstract truths that come straight from heaven but as something that Jesus kind of finds his way towards—partly by looking at his followers, and partly by taking to heart Matthew’s concern that the first draft of the sermon is too “negative” because it doesn’t have an intro like the Beatitudes.

-

Jesus and his mother share a moment before the sermon, putting their heads together and remembering Jesus’ adoptive father Joseph, who isn’t alive to see the sermon. Among other things, Jesus says he “misses” his father, but he is “glad” Mary is there.

-

Timeline. The day before the Sermon on the Mount, Simon the Zealot says he has seen Jesus leave the camp with Matthew every morning “for the past week.” So it has been about a week since Jesus woke Matthew up at the end of the previous episode.

That might fit with the fact that Shmuel and Yanni seem to be back in Jerusalem now, after being in Galilee during the previous episode. It was stated in S1E8 that the journey from Capernaum to Jerusalem usually takes six days.

Adding Simon the Zealot’s “past week” to the timeline cues in the last few episodes, it would seem that this episode takes place in the middle of Cheshvan, a month that corresponds to late October or early November on the Gregorian calendar.

(S2E4 took place on the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles, which is on the 15th of Tishrei, and S2E6 took place two weeks after that. If another two weeks have happened since then—one for the disciples to walk back to Galilee, and another for Jesus to work on his sermon—then that takes us to mid-Cheshvan.)

-

Language issues. Matthew wonders if people attending the Sermon on the Mount will think that Jesus is telling them to “salt the earth” when he says that they are the salt of the earth. Does that pun work in Aramaic?

-

Ramah is learning how to read and write from a text written in Hebrew, but when she tries to spell a word out she uses Roman letters (“B… I…”).

-

Shammai and Yanni discuss the fact that Shimon’s secretary dismissed some of Jesus’ supposed violations of Jewish law as “minutiae”, a Latin word for trivial details.

Are they discussing the secretary’s use of a Latin word, or are they discussing his use of a Hebrew or Aramaic word that just happens to be represented in this English screenplay by a Latin word that was adopted into English a few centuries ago?

-

Miscellaneous. There are some nods to Greek culture in this episode.

John tells Simon the Zealot his frequent exercising smacks of Hellenism—the Greeks were big believers in physical activity and the perfection of the bodily form, as seen in the Olympics—while Judas’s business partner says his and Judas’s “acting skills” would have impressed Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus, three Greek playwrights from the 5th century BC.

-

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

-

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

The episode premiered in a livestream on July 11, 2021, but the livestream is no longer on YouTube. A clip of Jesus reciting the Beatitudes is now online, however:

The ‘Come and See’ show that followed the premiere is also online; it includes an interview with Luke Dimyan, who plays Judas:

Jenkins also posted a “reaction video” responding to comments about the episode:

-

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