The Chosen's Last Supper sequences

A detailed look at which Bible passages the show uses and in what order, and at how the Last Supper sequences do and don't agree with ancient customs and the show's own continuity.

The Last Supper in The Chosen: Last Supper aka The Chosen: Season 5.

When I first learned that Season 5 of The Chosen would cover just a five-day span—from the Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday to the betrayal of Jesus on Holy Thursday—I had a few questions about how it would be paced.

I assumed, of course, that it would be padded out with flashbacks and fictitious subplots. But, on the assumption that it would follow the events of Holy Week chronologically, I assumed that at least one of its eight episodes would be devoted to the Last Supper. I assumed, in other words, that there would be an entire episode in which Jesus and the disciples sat around some tables and talked. And I wondered how the writers would keep that episode dramatically engaging.

As it turns out, Season 5 of The Chosen doesn’t have an episode devoted to the Last Supper. Instead, it spreads the Supper out across the entire season, by making the pre-credits sequence in every episode a flash-forward of sorts to the Last Supper.

What’s more, there’s a deliberate structure to these pre-credits sequences, as they move backwards in time from the very end of the Last Supper to its beginning. Meanwhile, the rest of the season moves forwards through Holy Week, towards that fateful night.

The overall effect is reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Memento: the main narrative in that film moves backwards through time while the interstitial scenes move forwards, whereas in The Chosen Season 5, the main narrative moves forwards in time while the pre-credits sequences move backwards.¹ In both cases, the two timelines meet at the end.²

I got curious as to what The Chosen’s version of the Last Supper would be like if the pre-credits sequences were arranged in chronological order.

I also got curious as to how The Chosen had mixed and matched different elements from the four—no, five!—accounts of the Last Supper that appear in the New Testament. (The Supper is mentioned in all four gospels, natch. It is also mentioned, very briefly, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians—and there is one detail in that letter that none of the gospels have, and which The Chosen uses.)

So, what follows is a detailed breakdown of which passages have been used by The Chosen, and in which order, and with what sorts of added material.

A few quick preliminary points:

• All of the Last Supper footage combined runs about 50 minutes—so about the length of a regular episode, as I expected.³

• There are some huge differences between the Last Supper accounts in the Synoptic gospels (i.e. Matthew, Mark, and Luke) and the Last Supper account in John. These differences pose some interesting challenges when you try to weave all the accounts together the way The Chosen does.

  • The Synoptic accounts are very brief (less than a chapter in each case), while John’s account is fairly long (five whole chapters).

  • The Synoptic gospels seem to indicate that the Last Supper was a Passover meal, while in John’s gospel, it pretty clearly isn’t.⁴

  • The Synoptic gospels describe how Jesus instituted the Eucharist, by calling the bread his body and the wine his blood and telling his disciples to eat the one and drink the other, while John’s gospel, despite the length of its Last Supper account, does not describe any of that.⁵

• The Chosen follows the Synoptics in depicting the Last Supper as a Passover meal—but it depicts the meal as a modern seder, which has a number of rituals that wouldn’t have existed in Jesus’ day.

  • While the ancient Israelites had always commemorated the Passover in some way, the seder as we know it was formalized after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, and some of the specific rituals depicted or hinted at in The Chosen—such as singing the Dayenu, leaving a chair for Elijah, or removing drops of wine from the cup with one’s finger as one recites the list of plagues—were added to the seder centuries later, during the Middle Ages.⁶

• It is fascinating to see how The Chosen handles situations where the gospels (and Paul) tell different versions of the same thing.

  • Sometimes, it chooses one version to dramatize and ignores the others. This is how it handles the bit where Jesus reveals or confirms to someone that Judas is the traitor he’s been talking about: it uses the version in John, where Jesus responds to a question from the beloved disciple, and it ignores the version in Matthew, where Jesus responds to a question from Judas himself.

  • Sometimes, it blends the different versions into a single unified new version. This is how it handles the dialogue when Jesus tells the disciples to eat his body and drink his blood: it creates a new version of what he said using elements from all four biblical versions (in Paul, Mark, Matthew, and Luke).

  • And sometimes, it dramatizes all of the different versions as separate, distinct actions or lines of dialogue. This is how it handles Peter’s insistence that he will die for Jesus: the biblical Peter makes this declaration once in each gospel, but there are three different versions of how he says it, so in The Chosen, Peter makes all three statements at different points in the dialogue, just to make his insistence seem that much more emphatic.

One last note: One thing I found rather striking, as I looked at how The Chosen combines elements from different sources, was how the process of combining different sources can be seen within the gospels themselves—and particularly within Luke.

Most scholars agree that Paul wrote his letters before the gospels were written. Most scholars also agree that Mark was the first Synoptic gospel to be written, and that Matthew and Luke are both based on it somehow (though exactly how they are based on it—who borrowed from whom, etc.—is a matter of some debate).

What’s striking to me is that the author of Luke’s gospel—traditionally believed to be Paul’s “dear friend Luke, the doctor” (Colossians 4:14)—was clearly trying to integrate the traditions he inherited from Paul and Mark. Luke’s gospel borrows the narrative structure of Mark, setting the Last Supper before and after certain events, but sometimes it uses narrative elements from Paul’s letters, like the dialogue Jesus speaks at the Last Supper: given a choice between Mark’s version of the words Jesus said over the bread/body and Paul’s, for example, Luke basically uses Paul’s.⁷

In addition, Luke adds elements that are unique to his own gospel, sometimes to set up events that appear in the other gospels. For example, all four gospels report that one of Jesus’ disciples cut off the ear of one of the people who came to arrest Jesus—but it is only Luke that has dialogue which establishes that the disciples had swords with them at the Last Supper before Jesus was arrested (Luke 22:38).

The Chosen then takes this a step further, by adding fictitious dramatic elements that explain how those swords ended up at the Last Supper in the first place… but to discuss that in any detail would take us into the rest of Season 5, which is beyond the scope of this post.⁸

My point here is that exploring how The Chosen reworks the gospel narratives has opened my eyes to how the gospels themselves sometimes rework each other’s narratives—integrating different sources, picking and choosing which bits to keep, rearranging the chronology, and adding elements that give more context to things that didn’t have much context in the first place.

So to anyone who would complain that The Chosen is changing things or going beyond its sources… well, yes, of course. And that is what the gospels do, too. The Chosen might not be scripture, but it’s engaging in the same process of narrative integration, expansion, and re-working that is reflected in the scriptures themselves.

And now, without further ado, my analysis of the Last Supper sequences—rearranged in chronological order (so, the first sequence is from Episode 8, the next one is from Episode 7, etc.), with scripture references and occasional notes about the evolution of Jewish tradition, some of the continuity issues within The Chosen, and more.

The sequence-by-sequence analysis is then followed by two appendices: one that simply lists the biblical passages used by the Last Supper sequences, in the order that they are used and without any commentary by me; and one that reproduces the biblical passages about the Last Supper in full, with the dialogue that is used by The Chosen in bold (and the dialogue that isn’t, not in bold).