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.

Column

Culture

1 December 2023

4 min read

Depreciating human life: a year-end market report

The cold currency of trading hostages repels George Pitcher, who explores the casual acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Three men huddle around a laptop and talk animatedly.

Israel's Prime Minister monitors the recent hostage exhchange.

Prime Minister's Office, Israeli Government.

There is something peculiarly horrific about the barter of Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. And it isn’t only the unimaginable suffering these innocent civilians have to endure somewhere on an unknown scale between life and death.

It’s also that their lives are reduced to their commodity value. Hostages are assets to be traded in the market for peace, not human beings. It’s difficult to write this, but it’s almost as if three dead hostages, including a 10-month-old baby, said to have been killed in an Israeli airstrike, have lost their asset value. These ones are no good – they don’t work anymore.

Negotiating the release of hostages for peace terms is as old as the Hebron Hills. An Egyptian pharaoh once released his enslaved Israelites to Moses in return for the lifting of the plagues being inflicted on his people. But there is something of the neo-liberal free market in the way that post-modern conflict resolution uses human life as a currency of exchange.

Ryan Gilfeather wrote excellently here how this material valuation offends against the human dignity in which the divine invests. The imago dei that humanity bears, if you like, is not to be reduced to a bounty, a financial liability or an asset value.

As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise.

I’d want to take that a step further, to ask how that depreciation has come about with such ready acceptance and to note a couple of instances where the mentality of the trade in human existence has become a natural process of marketing.

The attitude, I think, has its roots in the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Don’t get me wrong: This is no censure of progressivism. Universal literacy, healthcare, scientific endeavour and the birth and growth of democracy are all very good ideas indeed. But the Enlightenment also brought the capitalist mindset to almost every area of human existence. Our lives, in many contexts, became actuarial.

This is not my idea. The great, perhaps the greatest, Christian mind of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, railed against how Fascism and genocide were the bastard offspring of our common-law marriage to progressive thinking, in that traditional values of human existence were now only there to be debunked.

I am indebted to Lewis’s biographer, A.N. Wilson, for this. In Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man, he writes of “The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens… begins to affect our very language.’

Lewis was no white-knuckled reactionary, but he did recognise that the values and virtues of ancient religious thought were binned at humanity’s peril. We had begun to understand the price of human life, rather the the value of it.

This is not to suggest for a moment that the ancient world was a nirvana (or even a Narnia). The Garden of Eden was lost at the beginning of time, not at the Enlightenment. Brutality, slavery and cruelty are part of our post-lapsarian world.

It’s just that religious virtue used to be a bulwark against such things. As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise. By the 21st century, we can look behind us to see how that has played out. Allow me to elucidate a couple of examples of how casual is our acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

The first is the almost clownishly implemented government policy proposal to redeploy migrants to the UK to Rwanda. Almost clownishly, because it would be funny if it didn’t involve a trade in human misery, the idea that desperate people endangering their lives and those of their families in small boats can be made someone else’s problem to sort out, simply by looking away. These people are worthless, you see, because they are not us and only we belong here (whoever “we” may be). The idea is that we pay Rwanda per capita to take them, rather as we might send our plastic refuse to China for landfill.

A second example of merchandising human life I would cite are the repeated attempts to have assisted suicide, or voluntary euthanasia, legalised in the UK, rather than enhancing palliative end-of-life care. These proposals depend entirely on the state legislature endorsing that some human lives aren’t worth living and are disposable.

At base, it’s the same principle as the Rwanda policy, other than we’d be killing them, or assisting them to kill themselves, rather than disposing of them in a central African waste-bin.

These are the “anythings” that humans believe in when they stop recognising the sanctity of human life. The value equation used for Gazan hostages is on the same continuum as the human trafficker and the politician who tries to stop him, or the calculation of the cost to the state and their family of a terminally ill patient offered an alternative way out.

It’s just that these equations have become invisible to the naked eye. We don’t see them anymore. But, I’d suggest, for Christ’s sake we’d better start looking.