The Chosen teases flashbacks and controversies for Christmas Day
The life-of-Jesus series will take its closest look at Jesus' family yet.
Next Sunday is Christmas Day. Next Sunday will also mark the first all-new episode of The Chosen in over a month. And the producers say it could be controversial.
Here’s what we know so far:
In this episode, Jesus will go to his hometown Nazareth for the first time since the series began.
In tonight’s episode of The Chosen Aftershow—viewable only on The Chosen’s official app—series creator Dallas Jenkins said the episode will tie into Christmas pretty nicely because it will have flashbacks to Jesus’ childhood with Joseph and Mary, and it will feature the same actors who played Joseph and Mary in the Christmas specials ‘The Shepherd’ and ‘The Messengers’.
(Note: this will mark the first time that the actors playing Joseph and young Mary have appeared together in a regular episode of the series. The actor who plays Joseph also appeared in Season 1 Episode 5, in a flashback depicting Jesus’ visit to the Temple when he was 12 years old, but Mary was played in that episode by Vanessa Benavente, who plays the older version of Mary in this series.)
A clip of the flashbacks played at the end of the Aftershow, and it shows Jesus as a toddler, playing with an even younger child and two women, one of whom is Mary. The younger child is eventually identified as Lazarus—so it appears that Lazarus is a childhood friend of Jesus’, and his mother was a friend of Mary’s.
The identification of Lazarus as an old friend who lives in Nazareth would seem to be confirmed by a teaser for next week’s episode that played at the end of tonight’s livestream of this week’s episode. (The teaser starts at the 1:57:04 mark; the livestream itself will be taken off YouTube in two or three days.)
Incidentally, we previously saw Lazarus in ‘The Messengers’. A much older Mary was staying with him in AD 48, two decades after the events of this series. I thought at the time that Mary was simply staying with one of Jesus’ followers, and I wondered why she wasn’t staying with John any more (we saw her living with John in a Season 2 Episode 1 flash-forward set in the early AD 40s)—but it seems Lazarus wasn’t just another follower, he was actually much closer to her.
In tonight’s episode of The Chosen Aftershow, Jenkins said next week’s episode may be a wee bit controversial. And why is that? Well…
In a livestream on September 20, we saw a clip from next week’s episode in which Jesus shares a meal with Mary and asks where James and Jude are.
James and Jude are, of course, the names of two of Jesus’ brothers. The brothers of Jesus are mentioned all over the New Testament, and the gospels of Mark and Matthew say he had sisters, too. But, because different churches have very different beliefs about whether Mary and/or Joseph were lifelong virgins, different churches have very different traditions about what kind of siblings Jesus had. Were they half-siblings? Step-siblings? Adopted? Cousins? Etc.
The first time I interviewed Jenkins, in December 2019, I asked if the series would depict Jesus’ brothers and sisters, and he replied: “I personally do not know yet if we are going to portray Jesus as having siblings. And that’s an honest answer. But I do know that, whether we do or don’t, it’s going to generate controversy.”
So the fact that Jenkins thinks next week’s episode could be controversial does not, in and of itself, indicate which way the series will go on this topic. No matter which way it goes, it will be controversial. But apparently it’s going somewhere.
I’m itching to say more about what this all might mean, but why speculate when we’ll get to see the full episode in just a week anyway? I can wait.
In the meantime, I’ve got to work on my recaps of this season’s first two episodes.
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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 | eightSeason 2: The Messengers review | scripture index
Episode recaps: one | two | three | four | five | six | seven | eight | The Messengers
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The Chosen can be streamed via Angel Studios or the show’s app (Android | Apple).