When Jesus walked in Leicester Square

As the The Chosen’s latest series premieres, Natalie Garrett analyses the TV show’s appeal.

Natalie Garrett

Natalie produces and narrates The Seen & Unseen Aloud podcast. She's an Anglican minister and a trained actor.

A group of actors walk together at a film premiere

Jonathan Roumie, centre, with the cast of The Chosen.

So, I’ve met Jesus twice before. Over 20 years ago, I joined the cast of The Life of Christ at Wintershall, the epic outdoor drama experience that takes you through the story of Jesus’ life (and it’s still going strong). As well as being Crowd Person 176, with glorified tea towel on head, I was cast as the bride at the wedding at Cana. Apart from Jesus, the rest of the cast were local, normal people (as in not professional actors) and I rather shyly attended the first rehearsal knowing no-one. I had been sitting on my own for a bit when Jesus walked in and caught my eye. He walked straight over to me and shook my hand, “You must be Natalie,” he said. For just a moment, I forgot that he was an actor and I thought, “You really are Jesus, you know me by name!” But then I remembered that I was the only new addition to the cast, and he was just a really nice guy welcoming me to the company.

Some eight or so years later, I was involved with the Oxford Passion, a Passion play written for and produced by Creation Theatre company in Oxford. I helped write the script and played the role of Mary Magdalene. The actor, Tom Peters, who played Jesus in that production was incredible. As an actor and as a Christian, it was an extraordinary experience, sharing some powerful scenes with Jesus. Each night for several weeks, I had to watch my beloved Christ being crucified all over again. I wept deeply, every night.

Then fast forward to Monday 22 January 2024, and I’m at the cinema UK cinema Premiere of season four of The Chosen in London’s Leicester Square and I see Jesus walk the red carpet. Surreal.

So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus.

In case you haven’t come across The Chosen, it’s a ground-breaking historical drama series. Created, directed, and co-written by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins, it is the first multi-season series about the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. Primarily set in Judaea and Galilee in the first century, the series centres on Jesus and the different people who met and followed or otherwise interacted with him. The emphasis is on portraying the “authentic Jesus” through the point of view of the people who spent time with him, asking the question, what did it really look like to be a follower of Jesus? It has quickly become a highly successful crowdfunding project, with episodes viewed 700 million times and a big vision to reach a billion viewers by the end of season seven.

Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus in The Chosen, says,

“Our fanbase was entirely Christian at first, but because of its popularity the show has attracted people from all faiths and no faith to the character of Jesus. We’re trying to really portray his message of love and tender mercy.”

To raise awareness for the show, which can be streamed on Netflix and Amazon Prime (or for free on The Chosen app), season four was launched with a cinema release in Leicester Square. So, there I was, in all my finery, lurking about, hoping to get a selfie with Jesus. And I had to pinch myself. When did Jesus become a world-wide celebrity with people whooping and whistling and jostling for his attention? Well, it happened when he rode a donkey into Jerusalem on the first Palm Sunday, but not so much in the last 2,000 years, especially not in recent years in the West.

What have the creators of The Chosen got so right that millions of people tune in to binge watch the narrative of the gospel story?

First up, Jesus laughs. A lot. He smiles and he hugs people. He is intensely personable and bloke next door-y (he’s not very good at ball games for one thing). But he also, when necessary, exerts huge personal authority. There is a confident, courageous, generous, humility to him that is hugely attractive. When the going gets tough, you think, he’d be good to have around. But also, he’s great company around the dinner table, telling stories and listening, too.

Because of the way the story is told, through the eyes of those who knew Jesus, we get drawn into the personal dramas of the Twelve Disciples as well as a wider group, including several women. It even includes some Romans, who are clearly the “bad guys” but drawn equally plausibly as the other more sympathetic characters. In the lives of these people, we find the domestic reality of the human experience – working hard to put food on the table, relating to family members, suffering illness and even miscarriage. And then we see the difference that it makes to have the Son of God around. And that’s the hook, that’s what means the viewer becomes deeply invested in the show because it turns out the people in the Bible aren’t super spiritual giants, they are people just like you and me. They struggle with the day-to-day realities of life, they’re confused, and they mess up. And then they meet Jesus.

It’s a huge risk creating a show when everyone knows how it ends. As we watch, even the early seasons, we know where the narrative arc is going. And yet, somehow, we still want to find out what happens. Because: we are invested in the stories of the Roman Centurion who looks as if he might come over to the light side; we’re keen to find out how Simon Peter and his wife get over their marital difficulties; we’re cheering for the success of the olive oil business set up by Zebedee (that’s James and John’s Dad) along with the help of some shrewd businesswomen who are also numbered amongst The Chosen.

When I see a dramatized version of any book I’ve read, I usually get quite angry – “that’s not what he/she looks like! That’s not how they talk!” And dramatizing part of the bestselling book of all time, the four Gospels of the Bible, is quite a risky choice for a TV programme. But I recognise the Jesus in The Chosen as the Jesus I know and love. And there is no higher accolade I can give than that.

The extraordinary success of the show is that millions of people have watched it and been drawn in. Millions of people have invested not just their time and viewing commitment, but also their own money. The show is entirely crowdfunded, and the show’s makers are deeply committed to building community around what they’re doing. Fans are invited to participate in the crowd scenes (being the 5,000 who get fed, for example) and there is almost as much behind-the-scenes content produced as the show itself. There’s a buzz around what they’re doing and it’s spreading way beyond the homes of a Christian fanbase.

When Jonathan Roumie arrived for the season four premiere in Leicester Square, it was like a rock star had stepped out of the car, such was the reach and excitement around his portrayal of Jesus in The Chosen. For hundreds of years, Christian artists have used the creative arts at their disposal – stained glass windows, music, fine art – to try to convey the authentic Jesus to the world. In our time, TV programmes are the artform of greatest impact and the digital distribution now available to the makers of The Chosen affords unprecedented access to their material around the world, as they aim to dub it into 600 languages ensuring 95 per cent of people worldwide can watch it spoken in their native language.

Is it too soon to suggest that The Chosen may be the Sistine Chapel of our age? It’s certainly too early to try guess the impact that this cultural phenomenon will have on the world’s faith journey. But if the reaction on the red carpet at Leicester Square last Monday night is anything to go by, Jesus seems to be making a comeback.

Episodes 1&2 of season four of The Chosen are showing in UK cinemas from Thursday 1 February 2024 - with other episodes being released later in the month. This is the first time ever that a full season of a streaming TV show will be released exclusively in cinemas.

Article

Culture

14 March 2024

5 min read

What AI needs to learn about dying and why it will save it

Those programming truthfulness can learn a lot from mortality.

Andrew Steane

Andrew Steane has been Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford since 2002, He is the author of Faithful to Science: The Role of Science in Religion.

An angel of death lays a hand of a humanioid robot that has died amid a data centre

A digital momento mori.

Nick Jones/midjourney.ai

Google got itself into some unusual hot water in recently when its Gemini generative AI software started putting out images that were not just implausible but downright unethical. The CEO Sundar Pichai has taken the situation in hand and I am sure it will improve. But before this episode it was already clear that currently available chat-bots, while impressive, are capable of generating misleading or fantastical responses and in fact they do this a lot. How to manage this?

Let’s use the initials ‘AI’ for artificial intelligence, leaving it open whether or not the term is entirely appropriate for the transformer and large language model (LLM) methods currently available. The problem is that the LLM approach causes chat-bots to generate both reasonable and well-supported statements and images, and also unsupported and fantastical (delusory and factually incorrect) statements and images, and this is done without signalling to the human user any guidance in telling which is which. The LLMs, as developed to date, have not been programmed in such a way as to pay attention to this issue. They are subject to the age-old problem of computer programming: garbage in, garbage out.

If, as a society, we advocate for greater attention to truthfulness in the outputs of AI, then software companies and programmers will try to bring it about. It might involve, for example, greater investment in electronic authentication methods. An image or document will have to have, embedded in its digital code, extra information serving to authenticate it by some agreed and hard-to-forge method. In the 2002 science fiction film Minority Report an example of this was included: the name of a person accused of a ‘pre-crime’ (in the terminology of the film) is inscribed on a wooden ball, so as to use the unique cellular structure of a given piece of hardwood as a form of data substrate that is near impossible to duplicate.

The questions we face with AI thus come close to some of those we face when dealing with one another as humans.

It is clear that a major issue in the future use of AI by humans will be the issue of trust and reasonable belief. On what basis will we be able to trust what AI asserts? If we are unable to check the reasoning process in a result claimed to be rational, how will be able to tell that it was in fact well-reasoned? If we only have an AI-generated output as evidence of something having happened in the past, how will we know whether it is factually correct?

Among the strategies that suggest themselves is the use of several independent AIs. If they are indeed independent and all propose the same answer to some matter of reasoning or of fact, then there is a prima facie case for increasing our degree of trust in the output. This will give rise to the meta-question: how can we tell that a given set of AIs are in fact independent? Perhaps they all were trained on a common faulty data set. Or perhaps they were able to communicate with each other and thus influence each other.

The questions we face with AI thus come close to some of those we face when dealing with one another as humans. We know humans in general are capable of both ignorance and deliberate deception. We manage this by building up degrees of trust based on whether or not people show behaviours that suggest they are trustworthy. This also involves the ability to recognize unique individuals over time, so that a case for trustworthiness can be built up over a sequence of observations. We also need to get a sense of one another's character in more general ways, so that we can tell if someone is showing a change in behaviour that might signal a change in their degree of trustworthiness.

In order to earn our trust, an AI too will have to be able to suffer and, perhaps, to die.

Issues of trust and of reasonable belief are very much grist to the mill of theology. The existing theological literature may have much that can be drawn upon to help us in this area. An item which strikes me as particularly noteworthy is the connection between suffering and loss and earning of trust, and the relation to mortality. In brief, a person you can trust is one who has ventured something of themselves on their pronouncements, such that they have something to lose if they prove to be untrustworthy. In a similar vein, a message which is costly to the messenger may be more valuable than a message which costs the messenger nothing. They have already staked something on their message. This implies they are working all the harder to exert their influence on you, for good or ill. (You will need to know them in other ways in order to determine which of good or ill is their intention.)

Mortality brings this issue of cost to a point of considerable sharpness. A person willing to die on behalf of what they claim certainly invests a lot in their contribution. They earn attention. It is not a guarantee of rationality or factual correctness, but it is a demonstration of commitment to a message. It signals a sense of importance attached to whatever has demanded this ultimate cost. Death becomes a form of bearing witness.

A thought-provoking implication of the above is that in order to earn our trust, an AI too will have to be able to suffer and, perhaps, to die.

In the case of human life, even if making a specific claim does not itself lead directly to one's own death, the very fact that we die lends added weight to all the choices we make and all the actions we take. For, together, they are our message and our contribution to the world, and they cannot be endlessly taken back and replaced. Death will curtail our opportunity to add anything else or qualify what we said before. The things we said and did show what we cared about whether we intended them to or not. This effect of death on the weightiness of our messages to one another might be called the weight of mortality.

In order for this kind of weight to become attached to the claims an AI may make, the coming death has to be clearly seen and understood beforehand by the AI, and the timescale must not be so long that the AI’s death is merely some nebulous idea in the far future. Also, although there may be some hope of new life beyond death it must not be a sure thing, or it must be such that it would be compromised if the AI were to knowingly lie, or fail to make an effort to be truthful. Only thus can the pronouncements of an AI earn the weight of mortality.

For as long as AI is not imbued with mortality and the ability to understand the implications of its own death, it will remain a useful tool as opposed to a valued partner. The AI you can trust is the AI reconciled to its own mortality.