The Chosen – season two, episode seven

The disciples panic when Jesus is taken in for questioning by the Romans before he's even had a chance to finish planning his first big sermon, in 'Reckoning'.

Aug 18, 2022

Season 2, Episode 7 — ‘Reckoning’
Luke 11:1-3

Synopsis. Atticus comes to Quintus in Capernaum with news about Jesus of Nazareth. Quintus sends Gaius to bring Jesus in for questioning. Several disciples panic at the thought that Jesus might be on the verge of getting arrested just like John the Baptist. Andrew discovers that Tamar and her ex-paralytic friend are standing on street corners, telling everyone about Jesus, and he tries to get them to stop. Yanni and Shmuel also return to Galilee, hoping to dig up more evidence against Jesus. Quintus chats with Jesus and lets him go, because he doesn’t think Jesus is a threat. Jesus returns to the camp and teaches his disciples how to say the Lord’s Prayer.

Gospels. This episode does not adapt any major stories from the gospels.

It does conclude with John, the disciple, asking Jesus to teach his disciples a prayer, just as John the Baptist taught his own disciples how to pray. Jesus replies by teaching his disciples the first words of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-10, Luke 11:1-3).

This episode follows Luke’s gospel in presenting the prayer as something that Jesus teaches in response to a request from his disciples, after he had done some praying of his own, but it follows Matthew’s gospel in having Jesus teach the longer version of the prayer, which is the version that most people are familiar with.

Interestingly, Jesus uses modern English this time (“Your kingdom come, your will be done,” etc.). When Jesus taught the prayer to some children in S1E3, he used 17th-century English (“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” etc.)—which seemed odd, given how modern and colloquial the dialogue on this show normally is.

Jesus says he has received visitors from the Far East but he has never been there.

Jesus is referring to the Magi, or “wise men”, who came from the east to worship him shortly after he was born (Matthew 2:1-12). One could argue, though, that it was his parents, rather than the infant Jesus himself, who received those visitors.

The star that guided the Magi was depicted in the prologue to S1E1.

Simon calls John “Little Thunder”.

Jesus gave James and John the nickname “Sons of Thunder” in S2E1, as per Mark 3:17. It would appear the nickname has evolved so that each brother has his own “Thunder” nickname now. If John is “Little Thunder”, then James—who is bigger—would presumably be “Big Thunder” (just as he is also known as “Big James” to distinguish him from the other disciple called James, who is known as “Little James”).

Gaius asks if Jesus is armed, and Jesus says, “I am not, but some of my followers are.”

In this scene, Jesus is referring to John and Big James. In previous episodes, we’ve seen John and Simon Peter hold their knives when strangers approached in S1E6 and S2E2, and Thomas was cutting food with a knife and held it like a weapon when a demoniac approached in S2E5. (Would having a kitchen knife on your person count as “being armed” from a Roman soldier’s point of view?) Simon the Zealot had a dagger that was given to him by the Zealots, but Jesus threw it away in S2E5.

The fact that the disciples are using weapons in this series is consistent with how the gospels say the disciples had two swords with them on the night of the Last Supper (Luke 22:35-38), and one of those disciples—identified in John’s gospel as Simon Peter—used his sword against one of the high priest’s servants when Jesus was arrested later that night (Mark 14:47, Matthew 26:51-54, Luke 22:48-51, John 18:10-11).

Philip says the Pharisees in Jotapata are there “for God, or to preen.”

This parallels how the biblical Jesus said everything done by the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees was done for show (Matthew 23:5). Note also how often Jesus calls them “hypocrites” in that chapter—a Greek word for actors in a stage play.

New Testament. The ex-paralytic says Jesus can’t be a sorcerer because “witches and sorcerers require payment for their services.”

This may or may not be a nod to how Simon the Sorcerer tried to buy the ability to give people the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:18-24). Simon Peter condemned the Sorcerer’s offer and prayed for his forgiveness, but it would not have been surprising if, after purchasing that power, Simon the Sorcerer had tried to make some money off of it.

Old Testament. Yanni cites the commandment against bearing false witness. This is one of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:16, Deuteronomy 5:20).

Themes. Jesus is anticipating a crowd of thousands for his upcoming sermon, but he emphasizes the importance of making the sermon “personal”. “What makes this sermon important is each person who will be there,” he says.

He then asks Philip to describe the preaching of John the Baptist, and Philip says John “spoke directly to each person who was there. It was personal.”

Jesus also says people will be coming to his sermon because of the miracles he has performed, but he says he’s going to give them “something far more important: Truth. This will define our whole ministry, and that’s what we need to focus on.”

“No promises” is a recurring motif in this episode.

Jesus tells Quintus he cannot promise there will be no more spectacles or crowds. Quintus replies that he cannot promise that Jesus won’t stop breathing. Jesus replies, “It sounds like we’re clear on what we can and cannot promise.”

Then, at the end of the episode, Matthew asks if Jesus’ upcoming sermon will make things better or worse for those who love Jesus, and Jesus says, “No promises.”

The disciples spend much of the episode stressing out after Jesus is taken into custody by the Romans. When Jesus returns, he tells them, “You can’t just shut down when you’re fearful. What are you going to do when I’m no longer here?”

In S2E2, Simon was surprised when Jesus hinted privately that he would not be with the disciples forever. No one reacts quite like that on this occasion.

Historical quibbles. Quintus says the cohortes urbanae—the special quasi-military unit that Atticus belongs to—are “Caesar’s personal detectives, mostly in Rome but they go wherever.” He also says they don’t retire, they tend to get shipped off to Gaul.

All of this seems unlikely. As I noted when we first met Atticus in S2E4, the cohortes urbanae were created by the Emperor Augustus to keep order in Rome. In fact, they appear to have been created very near the end of Augustus’s life: the first clear reference to them in the literature concerns things that happened in AD 13, which is only one year before Augustus died and thirteen years before this episode is set.

As the cohortes were originally created to keep public order in the city of Rome itself—that’s what “urbanae” means—it is highly unlikely that they had significant duties outside of Rome, let alone at the edge of the Empire, so early in their existence. And it is highly unlikely that they had already developed a reputation for being “shipped off” anywhere. Very few of them would have served long enough to retire by now.

(The part about being sent to Gaul is kinda-sorta true, but still anachronistic. During the Flavian dynasty—between AD 69 and AD 96—the cohortes urbanae had grown so large that some of the cohorts were stationed outside of Rome in places like Lugdunum in Gaul, which is now Lyon in modern France. But the cohortes were stationed there, not sent into exile as Quintus seems to be implying.)

Quintus calls Atticus “the most tenured cohortes urbanae in the history of the Roman Empire”.

As noted above, the cohortes may have existed for as little as a couple decades by the time this episode takes place. Not much time to develop a “tenure”, there.

It is also debatable how old the Roman Empire itself was at this point. The Roman Republic certainly had a de facto empire when it started expanding outside the Italian peninsula in the 3rd century BC, but the Republic’s transition to an Empire was gradual, and its transition to rule by a single dictator-for-life began in fits and starts under Julius Caesar about 75 years before this episode takes place; it finally solidified with Julius’s adopted son Augustus about 50 years before this episode takes place.

Quintus calls Simon the Zealot a “Zealot Sicarii”.

As I noted when we first met Simon in S2E4, the Zealots and the Sicarii were actually two different groups that, according to Josephus, originated about half a century apart, with the Zealots being supposedly founded by Judas the Galilean in AD 6 and the Sicarii emerging during the procuratorship of Felix in the AD 50s.

The Pharisee in the alley in Jotapata is reciting a prayer known as the Weekday Amidah.

Jewish tradition says the prayer was composed in the Persian period, but it has been revised many times over the years. The Talmud says Gamaliel II, who led the Sanhedrin after the Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70, played a role in shaping the prayer and how it was used, and the most recent change accepted within Orthodox Judaism was made as recently as the 16th century.

I do not know how far back the excerpts quoted here go.

Geography. There’s a lot of travel between Capernaum and Jotapata in this episode.

Atticus meets Quintus in Capernaum, and then he goes with Gaius and some Roman soldiers to Jesus’ camp “just south of” Jotapata, and then they walk back to Capernaum with Jesus—and then Jesus walks back by himself to the camp, where he arrives late at night, after taking time to stop and pray by himself.

Capernaum and Jotapata are over eight hours apart from one another, on foot. So there is no way that three different trips between those towns could take place on the same day, especially if the first trip started during the day. (Also, these episodes are taking place in the late fall, a few weeks after the Feast of Tabernacles—so the days are shorter than they would be at, say, the beginning of summer.)

Yanni and Shmuel also start the episode in Capernaum and go to Jotapata, and so does Yussif, who warns Tamar that Yanni and Shmuel are looking for her.

Also, while Yanni and Shmuel are in Jotapata, they meet the two synagogue leaders from Wadi Qelt—which, as I noted in connection with S2E6, would have to be at least six days’ walk from Galilee, especially if these characters avoided Samaria on their journey north (as per the travel time that was spelled out in S1E8).

Simon and Andrew go fishing on a lake near the disciples’ camp.

How is this possible? The disciples are camped “just south of” Jotapata, according to Atticus, and Jotapata is nowhere near the water. The town is, in fact, almost exactly halfway between the Sea of Galilee and the Mediterranean Sea—and it is more or less at the highest point of land between those two bodies of water. Jotapata had no natural local water source, aside from the rain it could collect in its cisterns, and this posed a bit of a problem when the Romans laid siege to the town in AD 67.

Yussif says Tamar was last seen sharing her testimony on the street in Magdala. She is sharing it again in Jotapata when we see her in this episode.

The traditional location of Magdala—believed to be the birthplace of Mary Magdalene—is only two hours’ walk from Capernaum, and could very easily have been on the path to Jotapata from Capernaum. However, there is some debate as to whether the location of Magdala has been correctly identified, and there is even some debate as to whether the town was even known as Magdala at the time of the gospels.

(Some scholars think Mary Magdalene’s second name might not be a reference to her birthplace, but might instead be a nickname signifying that she was a “tower”, the same way “Peter” was a nickname for Simon that meant “rock”.)

Quintus asks if Jesus has been to the Far East, and Jesus says he has received visitors from there—meaning the Magi—but he has never been there himself.

The term “Far East” is a bit misleading, and possibly anachronistic. It is basically a European term for the region that is further east than the Middle East—so it basically refers to the region between, say, China and the Pacific Ocean. Quintus might very well mean the term that way, since he goes on to talk about people who eat raw fish, a diet that is commonly associated with Japan and other Far Eastern countries.

But the Magi are generally associated with ancient Persia, which is in the Middle East—and Judea, of course, is in the Middle East too. So it is doubtful that anyone from Judea would have thought of the Magi as coming from “the Far East”.

Humanization. Jesus says he prays so often because prayer is “the first step in getting the mind and the heart right.” Jesus may be God in the flesh—as he has clearly indicated elsewhere in this series—but he still needs to pray like any other human.

Jesus also tells Matthew that he has been preparing a sermon for several months and now he needs to “organize” it, and he talks about how he has been forming the teachings “in my mind”. All of this suggests that Jesus has mental processes similar to our own, despite the fact that he often seems to have divine omniscience, too.

(We caught a glimpse of Jesus doing sermon prep in S2E5, when he was trying to find the right way to express one of his teachings from the Sermon on the Mount.)

Timeline. Jesus says he has been planning his sermon “for some months now”.

It is not clear whether he started preparing his sermon before or after the first episode in this series. The entire first season took place in the month of Adar, according to something Matthew said in S2E1, and the last few episodes before this one took place in the month of Tishrei, because that’s when the Feast of Tabernacles would have taken place (as seen in S2E4). Tishrei is seven months after Adar, so if Jesus has spent “some months” working on his sermon, he could have started doing all that prep after the series began. But he could have started it even earlier than that, too.

We have seen Jesus share “fragments of teaching” from the Sermon on the Mount in earlier episodes, notably S1E3 (when he taught some children) and S1E6 (when he spoke to a crowd that gathered outside Zebedee’s house). So he was certainly forming at least some of those “fragments” in his mind at the beginning of this series.

Shmuel tells one of the Romans in Capernaum that Jesus was last seen in Jerusalem “five days ago”, during the Feast of the Tabernacles.

This makes no sense, for at least two reasons:

S1E8 established that it’s a six-day journey from Capernaum to Jerusalem if you go around Samaria, as Shmuel and Yanni almost certainly would have done. So they shouldn’t even be in Capernaum less than six days after the feast.
Shmuel and Yanni were still in Jerusalem, arguing with Dunash, in S2E6, which took place seven days after the end of the feast. (The feast ended the day before the Sabbath, and S2E6 began the day before the next Sabbath.)

So if Shmuel and Yanni were still in Jerusalem seven days after the end of the feast and they had to spend at least six days traveling to Capernaum after that, then it would now have to be more like two weeks since Jesus was last seen in Jerusalem.

Some of the disciples are also still griping about the fact that Mary Magdalene was gone from the camp for “two days” (between S2E5 and S2E6).

Mary’s absence took place while the disciples were camped near Jericho, which is about as far from Capernaum as Jerusalem is. So even if the disciples made a beeline straight for Capernaum after Mary returned to the camp (or, rather, after the incident at the synagogue in Wadi Qelt the following day), her “relapse” would still have happened about a week ago—and it would be even further in the past if the disciples took their time going back to Galilee. That’s a long time to hold a grudge.

The paralytic that Jesus healed in S1E6 says he was paralyzed for 23 years before the healing. That (fictitious) detail means he had been paralyzed since AD 3.

Language issues. The disciples are now calling Simon the Zealot “Zee”.

This is based on the American pronunciation of the letter Z, which is pronounced “Zed” in most of the English-speaking world outside of the United States.

The letter Z is used here because that’s the first letter in the word “Zealot”. In the Luke-Acts tradition, Simon is called “zēlōtēs” (Luke 6:15, Acts 1:13), and the first letter of that word in the Greek alphabet is called “zeta”. But the other gospels call Simon “kananaios” or “kananites” (Mark 3:18, Matthew 10:4), which is derived from the Hebrew word “qanai” meaning “zealous”, which begins with the Hebrew letter “qof”.

So the disciples arguably ought to be calling Simon “Zeta” or “Qof”.

Atticus says, “I watched a martyr throw down his weapon and take a knee.”

I noted, when we first met Atticus in S2E4, that Atticus was using the word “martyr” to describe the Zealots somewhat anachronistically. The word originally meant “witness”, like someone who testifies in court, but it came to mean someone who dies for their beliefs because that was how Christians testified to their beliefs.

Here, however, Atticus is referring to a person who hasn’t even died yet.

Jesus asks Gaius if he can say goodbye to his “eema”, which is a Hebrew term for one’s mother. He then says “mater mea”, which means “my mother” in Latin.

If the Hebrew dialogue is Hebrew and the Latin dialogue is Latin, then it almost makes you wonder what language these characters are “really” speaking when their dialogue is in English. They never seem to need a translator. Do all the Romans know Aramaic? Do all the Jews speak Greek, which was the lingua franca of the day?

Nathanael says Jesus said “three words: I will be back.” Matthew replies, “That’s four.”

Again, you wonder what language these characters are “really” speaking, and how many words it would actually take to say “I will be back” in that language.

Also: why did Nathanael say “I will be back” is three words? Maybe he was thinking of how the words “I will” can be contracted as “I’ll”. But is there an equivalent contraction in whatever language these characters are speaking?

When Simon and Andrew return to the disciples’ camp, one of the disciples says Jesus was “detained, not arrested”. Simon replies, “Those are just words!”

Is there a similar distinction between “detainment” and “arrest” in Aramaic?

Some more modern-sounding idioms:

Big James says to Andrew, “Sore loser and superstitious? Not a good look.”
Andrew says he wants people to use their “common sense”, and Simon replies that Jesus is more of an “uncommon sense guy”.
Gaius tells Atticus, “I am starting to get the picture.”
Simon tells Andrew, “Jerusalem doesn’t even open the mail from Wadi Qelt.”
Quintus says to Jesus, “No more draining my talent pool!”
Quintus says to Jesus, “Let’s leave on a high note.”

As noted above, Jesus uses modern English while teaching his disciples the Lord’s prayer (“Your kingdom come,” etc.), instead of the 17th-century English that he used when he taught the prayer to some children in S1E3 (“Thy kingdom come,” etc.).

Miscellaneous. Jesus’ mother, who is normally so calm and reassuring, gets a bit stern with the argumentative male disciples when she tells them, “Boys, stop it!”

It’s also interesting to see how John reacts by saying, “‘Boys’?” We already saw, in the prologue to S2E1, that John will one day be living with Mary as her “son”.

This series has a habit of multiplying arrests.

In the gospels, John the Baptist is arrested once, and Jesus is arrested once. But in this series, John has already been arrested twice, and he has a reputation as someone who has been in and out of jail frequently in the past. Likewise, Jesus has now been brought in for questioning long, long before his ultimate arrest and execution. It remains to be seen if he, too, will be detained and released multiple times.

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 June 30, 2021, but the livestream is no longer on YouTube. The ‘Come and See’ show that followed the episode is now online, however; it includes an interview with Brandon Potter, who plays Quintus:

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

Thoughts and Spoilers

Discussion about this post