If you are a Christian in America, online, and haven’t heard about The Chosen: Last Supper yet, I congratulate you. I have been seeing advertisements constantly for the past couple of months. It hits theaters on April 28, and I have been told I should get my entire church to go see it and also build a Bible study around it (so says a marketing firm which fills my inbox on a regular basis).
I have watched the first couple of seasons of this show, and it has redeemable characteristics. It can help you get a feel for how first-century Judaism might have been under Roman rule. It will make you laugh and cry at the story lines they come up with for all the apostles and the women mentioned in the New Testament. They are pretty slick at cinematography, sound, and story.
However…
In the jail a few weeks ago, a young man told me he thought the gospel was about Jesus and the twelve apostles.
I said, “The apostles did preach the gospel, but it’s not about them.”
He frowned and then began talking about what all the different apostles did.
I said, “For the most part, the Bible only follows the paths of two apostles—Peter and Paul—and Paul was chosen after Jesus had already ascended back to heaven—” I stopped mid-sentence because a thought had hit me. “Are you getting this information from The Chosen?”
Yes, he had. This man, not having read the NT gospels perhaps even once, thought everything he watched on The Chosen was biblical truth.
This has always been my fear with these kinds of shows. When people blend fact and fiction (with a heavier emphasis on the fiction, let’s be honest), anyone who does not diligently study the Bible cannot distinguish between the two! They will, perhaps for the rest of their lives, believe that Peter’s wife had a miscarriage and that Jesus heavily consulted with his apostles and a few women about the color of the sash He would wear to preach His sermon on the mount. They will believe Matthew was autistic and that Jesus spent time in the woods making wooden toys for the kids.
I would encourage my flock NOT to rush to see The Chosen this weekend. Is it sin to watch it? No, I don’t think so. But there are dangers. It does not teach the unadulterated word of God but serves a cheap imitation. Sure, the actor portraying Jesus (and I would shudder to be in his place) speaks many lines from the Scriptures. But he also speaks other lines not found there. He uses mannerisms and facial expressions that he assumes Jesus must have used in these situations, and so burns an image in our minds that God may have never intended for us to have.
If you want to know all that Jesus did or said…you can’t. John finished his gospel with this:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.
John 20.30–31
This is the disciple who is bearing witness about these things, and who has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true. Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.
John 21.24–25
We don’t NEED to know anything else about Jesus other than what God has revealed to us in Scripture. We have a human craving to know more than what we have. We always want to know more than what is revealed, and many happily make things up to fill in perceived gaps.
Trust in the Lord. Trust in His Word. Trust in the things revealed.
The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
Deut. 29.29