The Chosen sneak-peeks two more scenes from Season 5

Plus: Did ancient Judean towns have "municipal coroners" issuing "death certificates"? And other anachronisms.

Shmuel (Shaan Sharma) makes a point in The Chosen Season 5.

Dallas Jenkins hosted another livestream to promote The Chosen last night. Among other things, he interviewed co-star Paras Patel (who plays Matthew on the series) and he shared a short documentary on the making of Season 4.

But the big hook for most fans was that he gave us all a sneak peek at two scenes from Season 5, which is coming to theatres next March.

In the past, clips like these have often been deleted from the livestreams in which they premiered, but for now at least, you can watch ’em in the video below—the first clip at the 11:56 mark, and the second clip at the 1:50:04 mark:

As most fans know, Season 4 ended with Jesus getting on his donkey and preparing to ride into Jerusalem the Sunday before Passover, and Season 5 will take place over the next few days, leading up to Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Both of the clips revealed last night come from Episode 4, which apparently takes place after Jesus has caused a stir in the Temple, and both clips show people trying to figure out what to do next. In the first clip, the Jewish elders argue over how to respond to Jesus’ actions, while in the second, Judas vents some of his frustrations with Jesus, who isn’t following up on the Temple incident the way Judas thinks he should.

Some fans won’t care about this, but the thing that leaps out to me from both of these clips is the relentless stream of anachronisms.

The Chosen has always used modern idioms in its dialogue, and that pattern continues here—for example in the second clip, when Judas says it will be easy for Jesus’ adversaries to “weaponize” his teachings, or when Judas tells Jesus, “I can tell when a deal is on the verge of closing or losing big,” and Jesus replies, “And so, to adopt your language for a moment, what is the ‘deal’ you are proposing I ‘close’?” (Even Jesus finds Judas’s language a little odd!)

I spoke to Jenkins about the show’s use of modern idioms back in 2019, after the first season came out, and he justified it on the basis that ancient Aramaic had its own idioms, and that they would have been equivalent to our own:

So we’ve had a few people who weren’t comfortable with Jesus saying “Not too shabby.” He didn’t say that in the gospels, and that’s modern language, and that phrase didn’t exist back then. And we have two responses to that: Yes, the words “not too shabby” did not exist two thousand years ago. Actually, the word “the” didn’t even exist two thousand years ago, because English didn’t exist two thousand years ago. However, they did have phrases, they did have idioms, they did have phrases that were casual, they did have their versions of these phrases, and so we’re just doing a transliteration of the kinds of things that they would have said back then, just in the way that they would be said now. So that’s one way to look at it. Yes, the words “not too shabby” didn’t exist, but there was a version of the phrase “not too shabby” that did exist.

Other bits in these clips can’t be explained away so easily, though.

For example, in the first clip, the Sanhedrin’s presiding elder says, “I hereby motion to open the floor…”, which makes the gathering sound like a modern board meeting guided by Robert’s Rules of Order. And then, when Shmuel says he has been following Jesus’ career longer than anyone else, Yusuf stands up and shouts “Objection!”, to which the presiding elder replies, “Sustained!”, which makes the meeting sound like a modern court case, even though no trial is taking place.¹

Similarly, Yusuf declares, “Lazarus’s death certificate was registered with the City of Bethany’s municipal coroner, signed by a notary!” Death certificates? Municipal coroners? These aren’t just figures of speech, these words suggest entire social and bureaucratic systems that are very, very unlikely to have existed back then.

Anachronisms like these aren’t entirely new to the show either, of course. From the hair salon in Season 1 to Judas and his “business” partner talking about “the middle class” in Season 2, The Chosen has gone out of its way to make these characters “relatable” not only by showing that they had the same emotions and personalities that we do, but by suggesting that their culture wasn’t much different from ours either.

But their culture was very different from ours. Jesus and most of his followers were rural pre-modern peasants living under the occupation of a brutal pre-modern foreign empire. From regular animal sacrifices to public crucifixions, these people lived in a world that was organized around a very different set of assumptions about the world and our place within it.

Ideally, a film or series about that time and place should make it feel different from our own—and, by drawing our attention to this difference, it would open our minds to new ways of seeing or thinking about what happened back then. Instead, The Chosen all too often falls into the habit of making that world seem overly familiar.

(And to the extent that the world of this series does feel different to modern audiences, it is largely because other anachronisms have been imposed on it, like some of the Jewish customs and rituals that came into being after the time of Jesus.)

Two more things:

First, these are not the first clips from Season 5 that have been shown to the public. In early November, a clip from the Last Supper was shown in theatres before preview screenings of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. I wrote about that scene here.

And second, one other noteworthy element here is the fact that Shmuel, in the clip of the Jewish elders arguing in the Sanhedrin, proposes murdering Lazarus to stamp out the rumours about Jesus raising the dead.

This comes straight from John 12:10-11:

¹⁰ So the chief priests made plans to kill Lazarus as well, ¹¹ for on account of him many of the Jews were going over to Jesus and believing in him.

The gospel doesn’t say whether the plot against Lazarus succeeded in real life, but we do know it won’t succeed in this series, because Lazarus is still alive almost 20 years later in the “future” scenes from the special Christmas episode ‘The Messengers’.

For what it’s worth, the plot to kill Lazarus has been depicted or alluded to in only a few films. Aside from the word-for-word adaptations of John’s gospel produced by The Visual Bible and The Lumo Project—which don’t do much more than narrate the fact that there was a plot—the only films I can think of that have depicted it in any way are The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), in which the plot is carried out by Zealots rather than the elders, and Jesus, the Spirit of God (2007), an Iranian film that tells the story of Jesus from a Muslim point of view. (In both films, the person who kills Lazarus is Saul, the future Paul!)

So, it would appear that we can now add The Chosen to the short list of films that have done something with this rather obscure bit from the gospels. How far will the series go with it? We’ll just have to wait ’til the next season comes out to find out.²

February 21 update: The two clips have since been posted as standalone videos:

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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)

• Season 4: Dallas Jenkins, Jonathan Roumie, Abe Bueno-Jallad, Vanessa Benavente, Yasmine Al-Bustami, and Brandon Potter at the press junket; Reza Diako, Alaa Safi, and Elijah Alexander on the teal carpet (Feb 2024) | Paras Patel and Noah James at the press junket; producers Chad Gundersen and Chris Juen on the teal carpet (Feb 2024)

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 | Episodes 7 & 8 notes | scripture index
  Episode recaps: one | episodes two to eight are still in the works

• Season 4: Episodes 1-3 notes

  Episode round-ups: S4E1 | S4E2 | S4E3 | S4E4 | S4E5 | S4E6 | S4E7 | S4E8

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

1. Question: How often in modern boardrooms do people shout “Objection!”? And how often does the chair reply “Overruled!” or “Sustained!”?

2. Oh, I just had a thought. What if Barabbas is part of the plot to kill Lazarus…?