I take your point but, but don’t find most of these kind of things distracting. In most cases, we just don’t know enough about “that” culture to determine if some similar idioms were *not* in use at the time, so pre-supposing they could have been seems reasonable.
Good info in Lazarus though - interested in seeing how they develop that plot line. IIRC, in the flash forward when Mary Magdalene visits “Mother” Mary, there was a hint that Lazarus was not completely out of danger at that time.
It's a tricky thing, writing dialogue that sounds like it could have come from another time and place but still "works" for its intended audience. Charlton Heston often praised the script polish that Christopher Fry did on Ben-Hur, because he thought lines like "Was the food not to your liking?" struck a nice balance -- not too familiar, but not too strange.
I can sort of see a rationalization for words and phrases like "weaponize" and "not too shabby". It's harder to justify an expression like "persecution complex", which comes from modern psychiatry and has all the baggage associated with that. And lines like "middle class" just reflect a set of beliefs about society and its organization that the ancients didn't have. At a certain point it just takes you out of that world altogether.
But ever since I noticed this stuff in The Chosen, I've started noticing it in other shows, too. I think Britannia -- which takes place in Roman-occupied Britain during the reign of Claudius, only 15-20 years after The Chosen -- had a bit where someone said something like, "If I could turn back the hands of time...," which just struck me as weird because clocks with moving hands weren't invented until over a thousand years later. (I've sometimes said that, ever since I saw Britannia, I feel I owe The Chosen an apology!)
I dunno - “persecution complex” may not have been a term back then, but the Jewish people may have felt somewhat similar. In fact, the Psalms is filled with of laments about how psalmists, as a member of the “chosen people”feel abandoned by God and mistreated by other nations/peoples. (Side note: I often think of Tevye’s comment to God in Fiddler “ Can’t you choose someone else sometimes?” when I read these passages.
“Middle class” however is a fairly recent concept - it appears it was mostly the “rich” and “poor” throughout much of human history. There is an argument to be made that a “reasonably well off middle class” is the result of the relatively modern economic model of capitalism / entrepreneurial class.
Many people have felt persecuted over the years; the issue is the word "complex", which comes out of modern psychology (Jung, Freud, etc.), and reflects modern ways of thinking about how the mind works.
“Some fans won’t care about this…”
✋
I take your point but, but don’t find most of these kind of things distracting. In most cases, we just don’t know enough about “that” culture to determine if some similar idioms were *not* in use at the time, so pre-supposing they could have been seems reasonable.
Good info in Lazarus though - interested in seeing how they develop that plot line. IIRC, in the flash forward when Mary Magdalene visits “Mother” Mary, there was a hint that Lazarus was not completely out of danger at that time.
It's a tricky thing, writing dialogue that sounds like it could have come from another time and place but still "works" for its intended audience. Charlton Heston often praised the script polish that Christopher Fry did on Ben-Hur, because he thought lines like "Was the food not to your liking?" struck a nice balance -- not too familiar, but not too strange.
I can sort of see a rationalization for words and phrases like "weaponize" and "not too shabby". It's harder to justify an expression like "persecution complex", which comes from modern psychiatry and has all the baggage associated with that. And lines like "middle class" just reflect a set of beliefs about society and its organization that the ancients didn't have. At a certain point it just takes you out of that world altogether.
But ever since I noticed this stuff in The Chosen, I've started noticing it in other shows, too. I think Britannia -- which takes place in Roman-occupied Britain during the reign of Claudius, only 15-20 years after The Chosen -- had a bit where someone said something like, "If I could turn back the hands of time...," which just struck me as weird because clocks with moving hands weren't invented until over a thousand years later. (I've sometimes said that, ever since I saw Britannia, I feel I owe The Chosen an apology!)
I dunno - “persecution complex” may not have been a term back then, but the Jewish people may have felt somewhat similar. In fact, the Psalms is filled with of laments about how psalmists, as a member of the “chosen people”feel abandoned by God and mistreated by other nations/peoples. (Side note: I often think of Tevye’s comment to God in Fiddler “ Can’t you choose someone else sometimes?” when I read these passages.
“Middle class” however is a fairly recent concept - it appears it was mostly the “rich” and “poor” throughout much of human history. There is an argument to be made that a “reasonably well off middle class” is the result of the relatively modern economic model of capitalism / entrepreneurial class.
Many people have felt persecuted over the years; the issue is the word "complex", which comes out of modern psychology (Jung, Freud, etc.), and reflects modern ways of thinking about how the mind works.