The Chosen and John 1: The Word Became Flesh
Short answer: The Chosen is a crowd-funded television drama that imagines the lives of Jesus and his disciples across multiple seasons, filling in scenes the Gospels do not record. It is not a documentary and not a sermon; it is historical fiction built on the gospel accounts. Whether you watch it or skip it, the standard for every portrayal of Jesus is the Word made flesh. John 1:1-14 says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." The series can put words in Jesus' mouth that Scripture never gives him, so the text must remain the judge of the picture, never the reverse. Christians differ on how much imaginative retelling helps or harms, and that disagreement is worth stating honestly rather than shouting down.
What The Chosen actually is
The Chosen began as a crowdfunded project by Dallas Jenkins and grew into a multi-season streaming series distributed through its own app and other platforms. Its premise is simple and deliberately modest: rather than retelling the Gospels scene for scene, it invents backstory, dialogue, and subplots for the people around Jesus. We see Peter before the call, Matthew at the tax booth, Mary Magdalene before deliverance, Nicodemus wrestling with his conscience. The show openly labels these as imaginative expansions. That is an important thing to notice, because the episodes are designed to feel like history even when they are invention, and viewers absorb invented scenes as if they were text.
This is not a new problem. Every generation has retold the gospel story in its own art form, from medieval mystery plays to Hollywood epics to children's storybooks. Some of those retellings served the church well; others buried the text under sentiment. The Chosen belongs to that long tradition. It is neither a betrayal of Scripture nor a substitute for it. The honest question is not whether a series may dramatise the Gospels, but whether the dramatisation leaves the viewer more or less hungry for what the Gospels actually say. A show that makes you open John is doing something useful; a show that replaces John is doing something dangerous.
Part of the series' appeal is production value and warmth. It portrays Jesus laughing, teasing, and looking people in the eye. Many viewers say that for the first time they pictured Jesus as a real person rather than a stained-glass figure. That impulse is not wrong. The Gospels show Jesus at table, at weddings, in boats, exhausted, grieved, and angry. A faith that cannot imagine him in ordinary human settings has drifted toward something closer to an idea than a person. The incarnation is not an embarrassment to be managed; it is the centre of the good news, and any honest portrayal will feel the pull of that reality.
Still, warmth alone proves nothing. A Jesus who is only gentle and never confronts sin, only approachable and never claims deity, is a different figure from the one in the Gospels. The test of any portrayal is whether it can hold together the tenderness of John 11 with the hard sayings of John 6, the friend of sinners with the one who tells a healed man to sin no more. Watchfulness here is not cynicism. It is the ordinary discipline of testing everything and holding fast to what is good, which Scripture commands of every teacher, screenwriter, or friend who claims to speak for God.
The Word who was with God and was God
John opens his Gospel not in Bethlehem but before time. He does not begin with a manger or a genealogy; he begins with a phrase that echoes the first verse of Genesis. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," John 1:1 says. The Greek term behind Word carries the sense of reason, message, and self-expression. John is telling us that God's own speech, God's own self-communication, is a person, and that this person already existed when everything else began. Whatever a dramatist shows us of Jesus on a dusty road, this is who is walking.
John then makes the connection explicit. Everything that exists came into being through him, and nothing that has come into being came into being without him. Life was in him, and that life was the light of humanity. Light and darkness are the great polarities of the Fourth Gospel, and John introduces them here so that the rest of the book can play them out: the light shines, the darkness does not overcome it, and people are divided by how they respond to it. When a television series shows Jesus healing a paralytic or arguing with a Pharisee, the theological freight of those scenes is far heavier than the scene itself suggests.
The most startling line in the passage comes a few verses later: the Word became flesh and lived among us. The verb John uses for lived carries the sense of pitching a tent, an unmistakable echo of the tabernacle where God's presence dwelt with Israel in the wilderness. John is saying that the glory that once filled a tent now walks on legs. He says that we have seen his glory, glory as of the only born of the Father, full of grace and truth. Grace and truth are not moods; they are the character of God revealed in a human life. The incarnation is not God pretending to be human. It is God genuinely human, and that is why the Gospels can show him tired, hungry, and weeping.
Notice also what John does not do. He does not explain the mechanics of how the Word became flesh. He does not tell us how two natures, divine and human, relate in one person. The church spent centuries working that out in creeds, and the creeds are faithful summaries, but John himself simply asserts the fact and moves on. That should give us some humility when a film or series takes liberties with chronology or invents a conversation. The deeper question is always whether the Christ being portrayed is the one John describes: eternal, divine, genuinely human, full of grace and truth. If he is not, no amount of good acting will save the portrayal.
Why the incarnation matters for storytelling
Because God became flesh, stories about him are not inherently irreverent. The gospel itself is a narrative: Luke 1:1-4 opens by telling Theophilus that many have undertaken to set in order a narrative of the things fulfilled among us, and Luke says he investigated everything carefully so that his reader might know the certainty of the things he had been taught. God chose to reveal himself through events, in places, at dates, with real people. Fiction that takes the incarnation seriously is not doing something alien to the Bible's method; it is borrowing it. That is one reason dramatised retellings can sometimes help a reader see what a bare text has grown too familiar to show.
But there is a limit, and it is a real one. Luke researched. He did not invent. He spoke to eyewitnesses, he ordered the material, and he wrote so that Theophilus could check it. A screenwriter inventing a scene in which Jesus says something no Gospel records is doing the opposite of what Luke did. He is not setting a narrative in order; he is adding to it. That does not automatically make the scene wicked, but it does mean the scene has no authority. It cannot be quoted, preached, or built on. The moment a viewer treats invented dialogue as the words of Christ, something has gone wrong, and the responsibility falls partly on the makers and partly on us.
The doctrine of the incarnation also guards us against the opposite error, which is to keep Jesus so exalted that he stops being human. Hebrews 4:15 says of our high priest that he has been tempted in all points as we are, yet without sin, and that he can be touched with the feeling of our weaknesses. A portrayal that shows Jesus genuinely tired, hungry, tempted, and grieved is not lowering him. It is taking that verse seriously. The danger is not that a Jesus who laughs is too human; the danger is a Jesus who never struggles, because then he cannot sympathise with us, and the gospel loses one of its comforts.
So the right posture toward a series like this is neither blanket endorsement nor reflexive suspicion. It is attentive gratitude. Thank God for anything that puts the Gospels in front of people who would never open them. Then open them. Read the accounts for yourself, slowly, and let the invented scenes fade as the real ones take hold. A retelling is a servant of the text at best. It can lead you to the well. It cannot be the water, and it was never meant to be.
What the series invents, and why that matters
The Chosen's most discussed creative choices are not the miracles but the gaps. We get Mary Magdalene's backstory, the politics of the Roman occupation, the inner life of Judas, the sorrows of Simon's wife. None of this is in the text. Some of it is plausible; some of it is speculation; some of it plainly serves the drama more than the history. The series is generally candid about this, but candid disclaimers do not stop a viewer's imagination from filing invented scenes under the heading of what happened. That is simply how stories work, and it is why teachers of Scripture should talk about the difference openly rather than pretending it does not exist.
There is a further issue of tone. The Gospels are selective. John 20:30-31 tells us plainly that Jesus did many other signs not written in the book, and that these were written so that readers might believe that Jesus is the Christ and have life in his name. John had more material than he used, and he chose it for a purpose. That means the gaps in the Gospels are not accidents or deficiencies; they are the shape of the witness. When we fill them in, we are not recovering what the evangelists forgot. We are making choices the evangelists did not make, and we should be honest that our choices serve our own interests as much as theirs.
Consider how this plays out in a single invented conversation. A scene where Jesus reassures a discouraged disciple is not in the text, but nothing in it contradicts the character the Gospels give him. A scene where Jesus says something ambiguous about his own identity, or downplays a miracle, or apologises for a hard saying, would contradict the text, and no amount of narrative skill would make it acceptable. That is the practical test: not whether a scene is recorded, since most dramatic material is not, but whether it fits the Jesus the Gospels actually present. Edification is not the same as addition, and addition is not automatically edification.
Parents and pastors should also recognise how the medium shapes the message. Television rewards sympathy, ambiguity, and slow revelation. The Gospels reward attention, repentance, and faith. A series may do its best work when it makes a viewer care about a tax collector or a fisherman, and its weakest work when it shades the claims of Christ into something softer and more modern. Watch with your Bible open, and notice where the show and the text part company. That habit protects you from absorbing fiction unawares, and it may also show you things in the text you had skimmed past for years.
Christ as the image of the invisible God
Colossians 1:15-20 says of the Son that he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, and that in him all things hold together. The word image is the same word used elsewhere for an idol or a representation, and Paul applies it to Christ deliberately: if you want to see what God is like, look at Jesus. That claim is far more demanding than any television episode can carry. It means every scene of Jesus is a scene of God's own self-disclosure, and it means the character of Jesus is the character of God. A show that gets his character wrong has not merely made a casting error. It has misrepresented God.
Philippians 2:5-11 gives that same Christ a shape: the one who existed in the form of God emptied himself, took the form of a servant, humbled himself to death on a cross, and was therefore highly exalted, given the name above every name, so that every knee should bow. That is the arc of the gospel, and it is not primarily a story about a wise teacher. It is a story about descent and exaltation, humility and glory. Any retelling that makes Jesus merely admirable, merely insightful, merely kind has stripped him of the cross, which is the centre of everything the New Testament says about him.
This is where the series has both strengths and limits. Its strength is that it takes the humanity and the ordinary settings of the Gospels seriously, and that is a real gift in a culture that often treats the incarnation as an abstraction. Its limit is that a long-form drama tends to postpone the cross, because the cross ends the story. Series need seasons. The gospel needs a crucifixion and a resurrection. A show that keeps Jesus on the road indefinitely is shaped by its own economics, not by the apostolic witness, and viewers should know that going in.
None of this makes the series useless. It makes it a tool, and tools are judged by the work they do. If it sends you back to the Gospels with sharper questions, better attention, and a greater hunger for the real words of Jesus, it has served you. If it settles into your mind as the version of the story you actually believe, then you have traded the fountain for a photograph of it. The Word became flesh and lived among us. Read the accounts that tell you so, and let every retelling, however moving, remain a servant of what they say.
How to watch wisely
A few plain practices help. First, read the Gospel passage before or after an episode that touches it. If the episode is about the calling of Matthew, read Matthew 9. If it is about the woman at the well, read John 4. Let the text set the frame before the drama fills it in, so the invented material is measured against something you have actually seen with your own eyes. That single habit does more than any amount of argument about the series' merits or faults.
Second, name the inventions out loud, at least to yourself. When a scene is not in Scripture, say so. This is especially important with children, who often cannot tell the difference between a vivid scene and a text they have heard read. When they ask whether something happened, answer honestly: the Bible does not tell us, and the show made it up. That does not have to be a rebuke of the show. It is simply telling the truth, and children handle that truth better than adults usually expect.
Third, watch for the character of Christ. Ask whether the Jesus on screen matches the one who says the hard things as well as the kind ones, who forgives and also calls to repentance, who is approachable and also claims to be one with the Father. Where the portrayal rings true, be thankful. Where it softens or sharpens him into someone else, notice it, and let the Gospels correct the picture. This is the ordinary work of discernment, and it applies to sermons and books as much as to television.
Finally, remember that the moving image is powerful precisely because it bypasses argument. A scene can shape your instincts about Jesus faster than a paragraph of theology, for good or ill. That is not a reason to avoid the medium; it is a reason to use it with your eyes open. Let the series, if you watch it, be a doorway into the Gospels and never a replacement for them. The Word became flesh and lived among us, full of grace and truth, and the written witness to that event is where the church has always been fed.
Biblical fidelity check
John 1:1-14 establishes several things clearly. The Word existed in the beginning, was with God, was God, and made all things. He became flesh and lived among us, and his glory is full of grace and truth. The passage does not give us a chronology of Jesus' life, a physical description, a set of invented conversations, or a licence to add to his words. It does not tell us what he looked like, how he spoke Aramaic, how his family related to him day to day, or what happened in the years before his ministry. Those are the gaps a dramatist fills, and every filling is a human choice, not a revelation.
A common misreading runs like this: since the show moves me and makes Jesus real, its scenes must be spiritually reliable. That is a category mistake. Emotional effect is not the same as truth, and vividness is not the same as accuracy. A second misreading runs the other way: since the show invents material, it is dangerous and should be avoided. Scripture itself does not command that, and it does not forbid dramatisation either. The faithful course is discernment, not panic: receive what is true, reject what contradicts the text, and keep the written Gospels as the standard by which every portrayal, including this one, is weighed.
Other passages that speak to John 1:1-14
Several related studies help round out this theme. For the claim that the eternal Word was from the beginning and was made visible to eyewitnesses, see What Does 1 John 1:1 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. For the honest reckoning with sin that must accompany any portrayal of Jesus, see What Does 1 John 1:8 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. For the promise that follows confession, see 1 John 1:9 Meaning: Confession, Forgiveness, and Cleansing. And for the warning against loving the world's version of the story more than the truth, see What Does 1 John 2:15 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application.
Frequently asked questions
Is it a sin to watch The Chosen?
Scripture does not address television, so it neither commands nor forbids watching a dramatised retelling of the Gospels. What it does command is discernment: test everything and hold fast to what is good. Watching is a matter of conscience and wisdom, not a moral absolute. Many believers find it helpful; others find it distracting or misleading. Both can be faithful. What matters is that the written Gospels, not the series, remain the authority for what you believe about Jesus. If a show is shaping your view of Christ more than Scripture is, the order has been reversed, and that is worth correcting.
Does The Chosen add to the Bible?
Yes, in the ordinary sense that it invents dialogue, backstory, and subplots the Gospels do not record. The series is generally open about this. The question is whether such additions are treated as Scripture. They are not, and they must not be. John 20:30-31 says the signs were written so that readers might believe and have life, which means the selection of material in the Gospels is purposeful, not accidental. Invented scenes have no authority and cannot be preached as though they did. Used as imaginative settings that send you back to the text, they are harmless; treated as revelation, they are not.
Can a TV series help me understand Jesus better?
It can, in a limited way. Seeing Jesus in ordinary settings can correct a vague, stained-glass picture and remind you that the Word genuinely became flesh. It can also prompt questions that send you to the text. But a series cannot give you the authority of the Gospels, and it cannot replace patient reading, prayer, and teaching in a local church. Use it as a doorway if it helps, and notice where it departs from the text. The deepest understanding of Jesus comes from the apostolic witness, read slowly and repeatedly, not from any dramatisation, however well made or moving it may be.
