Review

Culture

Film & TV

1 February 2024

6 min read

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.

Explainer

Creed

Film & TV

Politics

Truth and Trust

13 November 2025

6 min read

The BBC and the quest for Truth

Space for neutrality is shrinking; two French philosophers explain why

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

BBC.

Watching American news always feels very different from the British version. Changing channels from CNN to Fox News feels like you're switching to a different universe altogether, as on each one you're getting a very different interpretation of events. The BBC has always been thought to rise above this. In the UK and beyond, through the World Service, the Beeb has, until recently, been viewed as an oasis of impartial, authoritative reporting in a world of propaganda and state-run media.

Now, allegations of bias, with evidence that BBC editors doctored a speech of Donald Trump to make it sound worse than it was, one-sided coverage of transgender issues, and perceived anti-Israel prejudice, have led to doubts about the truthfulness of BBC reporting, and the resignations of the Director General Tim Davie and its CEO, Deborah Turness.

It does seem that the BBC has fallen into an echo chamber, reflecting the generally liberal, metropolitan left-leaning ethos of the chattering classes. And that is a problem, especially for a taxpayer-funded corporation. At the same time, it is much harder for media companies these days to be neutral. Once upon a time, there was perhaps a broad space for impartiality and a general trust that institutions like the BBC could be trusted to tell the truth. Trying to be politically and culturally balanced these days, however, is like trying to walk along an ever narrowing mountain arête with an increasingly slim path of independence, while the steep and sheer slopes of the culture wars beckon on either side. The idea of a media platform maintaining strict neutrality is becoming harder and harder to sustain these days.

In Britain, that narrow arête has become smaller and smaller, with the BBC perceived as falling on one side of the debate, and GB News emerging to offer a perspective from the other, offering different assessments on what's going on, increasingly mirroring their American counterparts.

Now there is a reason why this space for neutrality is narrowing, rooted in cultural and philosophical developments over the past 50 years or more.

Foucault’s challenge

In the 1970s and early 80s, French philosopher Michel Foucault taught a whole generation of students - and his ideas became embedded in universities across the world - that claims to truth were in essence assertions of power. Foucault had been a Marxist, believing that power had to be wrested away from the hands of the ruling classes and placed in the hands of the proletariat. After the Paris student riots of the late 1960s, he changed his mind and started to believe that power is never concentrated in one place. It flows in multiple directions in any human relationship or institution. In such interactions, all kinds of power dynamics are at play, and you need to be very watchful to notice how they work. Power produces ‘truth’ - in other words a justification for its existence - and such ‘truth’ produces power, in that this ‘truth’ reinforces the power relations it was designed to justify. He often claimed not to be making a moral judgement – in fact moral judgments were irrelevant: “My point”, he said, “is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.” If all truth is power, then nothing is neutral. Everything is dangerous. You can’t trust anyone.

The result is that there is really no such thing as a neutral, absolute truth. All claims to truth come from a particular perspective on things. There is no ‘view from nowhere’ that stands above all our limited perspectives, and therefore the idea of finding ultimate absolute truth is fruitless.

Foucault’s target was the idea inherited from the Enlightenment that we could find truth through impartial rational inquiry. So for him, the idea that something like the BBC was an arbiter of neutral, rational truth was a mirage all along. The irony is that if the BBC has drifted into a left-leaning echo chamber, it has wandered into space deeply influenced by Foucault’s ideas – ideas which by definition make its claim to any kind of neutrality increasingly difficult to sustain.

The prevalence of these ideas explains why it is harder and harder for news outlets to remain neutral, or claim to offer the truth of things.

Pascal’s perspective

So what does Christian theology say to this? At one point in his Pensées, another French philosopher, Blaise Pascal (unlike Foucault, a Christian one from the seventeenth century), says to the Foucault-type sceptic of his own day:

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

In other words, it's impossible to be a total sceptic about truth. Even the most progressive philosopher puts the kettle on and expects it to boil. He wakes in the morning expecting the sun to rise. There is such a thing as capital-T Truth and an order to the world that we didn’t create, and can be relied upon. We simply have to receive it and be grateful for it.

So far, so conservative. Yet Pascal then casts doubt on our ability to know that truth absolutely:

“Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed, that truth lies beyond our reach and is an unattainable quarry, that it is not to be found here on earth, but really belongs in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Pascal agrees with Foucault, that absolute truth is unattainable to us here, at least if we think we can find it by some process of impartial human reason. Only God knows the truth. Our perspectives are inevitably limited and the only way we can know the ultimate truth is if it is revealed to us.

Which points to the heart of what a Christian believes about truth - that ultimately it is not so much rational and propositional but personal. Jesus does not say ‘here is the truth’, or ‘this is the truth’, but ‘I am the truth’.

Truth, in other words, is not just something you read on a page. It is not the product of brainy people sitting in a room analysing the data. Data always has to be interpreted and that's when fallible, inevitable and unspoken human prejudice creeps in. Truth is personal. You see it in a life – most perfectly in the life of Jesus. And if it is to be found here and now, it comes out of a life that has learned to be like Jesus, truthful in all kinds of simple personal interactions, honest even when it's inconvenient, generous even when you have little to give.

Truth, in Christian understanding, is a quality of life. It is not something that can be expected to arise from some august body of clever people – the Royal Society or the BBC. The BBC, like ITN, GB News, CNN, and Fox – and like the rest of us - will always be biased - and maybe it’s better to acknowledge that than try to hide it. To have a limited take on things is part of the human condition.

The only way we can rise above that to the ‘truth that comes from above’ as the Bible calls it, a truth which is “pure, peaceable, gentle, full of mercy, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” is the spiritual path of inner growth, through prayer, the practice of goodness and compassion.

Truth is not something we possess but something we grow towards. When the BBC – or any corporation for that matter - embraces the spiritual path of yearning for the ‘truth that comes from above’, then we might get nearer to trusting it again.

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