F4F | A Brief Reality Check About The Chosen

Fighting for the Faith

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Welcome to another installment of Fighting for the Faith, my name is Chris Roseborough, I'm your servant in Jesus Christ.

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This is the channel that compares what people are saying in the name of God to the Word of God. Now this will be a short episode.

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I have been getting a lot of questions regarding the, it's really not a television series, but we'll just call it that for lack of a better way of putting it, the series called

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The Chosen. You know, what should be our attitude towards a piece of art like this?

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And so what I wanted to offer up would be, well, let's say my battle -hardened experience in dealing with Christian fads, because that's what we're dealing with here, is

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The Chosen right now is an extremely popular series, you know, kind of like Netflix Stranger Things or something like that.

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The issue that I have is that the director, Dallas Jenkins, claims that this is all about presenting the authentic Jesus, but the reality is that it's not, and this is where we just need to speak honestly about what this is.

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One of the reasons why The Chosen is so popular has everything to do with the fact that Dallas Jenkins is an extremely gifted storyteller when it comes to the visual arts.

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This is like the first piece of Christian video work that I've seen as far as storytelling that isn't a three -legged janky dog with one eye, two teeth, and bad breath.

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Dallas Jenkins knows what he is doing. My issue is that when we look at what it is that he's presenting, the

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Jesus that is being put forward, he keeps claiming that this is the authentic Jesus, and it's not.

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Let's be blunt, that if we were to compare this to the Star Wars universe, there were a whole series of books and things that were written before Disney took control of the

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Star Wars franchise, and all of those stories that were written, they are considered to be non -canon.

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And so, you know, there's canon Star Wars and there's non -canon Star Wars, and the non -canon

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Star Wars, well, some of it, the best way I can describe it is that it's well -written fan fiction, and that's what

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The Chosen is. It's not the authentic Jesus, it's fan fiction.

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And until a few months ago, I hadn't even watched a single episode, and due to the overwhelming number of people asking about it,

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I went ahead and watched all of season one, and I've watched several episodes of season two, and I'm pretty much done with it.

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The reason why is because there's enough of the canon in here, of canonical

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Jesus in there, but there's so much that's been added to, you know, that at best,

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The Chosen is an extremely well -told fan fiction about Jesus.

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And a lot of people justify what's going on in The Chosen by basically saying, listen, there are a lot of people who are, you know, they're discovering

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Jesus for the first time, or they're interested in him after having not been interested in him for a long period of their life, and I'm not going to challenge that at all.

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I would just like to say, can we please have an honest conversation about the real

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Jesus? The Jesus that we're seeing in The Chosen is not the authentic Jesus.

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I'm gonna refer to him moving forward as Jenkins Jesus. That's who he is, what he is.

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And for me, the episode that really kind of soured me to the whole thing was the episode that took place in Samaria and created an entire episode around Jesus' multi -day stay there in Samaria, filling in the details that the

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Bible doesn't give. And we'll note that in doing that, Jenkins is drawing on his own experiences, his own theology, and let's just say that the people who he's working with as advisors on this program, some of them are really sketchy at best.

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You know, one in particular is a fellow who's appeared on Sid Roth's It's Supernatural, then you've got the whole

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Mormon Church connection, Roman Catholic Church connections, and so as a result of this, if you're finding discrepancies between the

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Jesus of The Chosen and the Jesus of Scripture, well, yeah, there are very notable discrepancies and differences, and this is why it's not the authentic Jesus.

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This is the best told fan fiction about Jesus I've ever seen in my life, and a lot of people have gotten on board and invested money to make sure that the production costs for The Chosen are covered so that they can see more episodes and get all the way through the life of Jesus.

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So, that being the case, let's talk realistically what would be a good way to handle this as a discerning

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Christian, and that is that as somebody who's been around the block a few times and I've seen for myself and experienced for myself, you know, evangelicalism's proclivity for fads.

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The Chosen is a fad right now. It is the thing of the moment. It's akin to the purpose -driven life, you know, more than a decade ago.

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I think of the prayer of Jabez, and then everybody remember those bracelets that everybody wore that said

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WWJD? That was a fad, man. And so The Chosen is a fad, and the best thing that you can do in a situation like this is to speak the truth about it and basically say, you know,

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I appreciate the artwork, I appreciate the great storytelling, and see if you can engage people in meaningful conversations about the real

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Jesus. Because Jenkin Jesus isn't the authentic Jesus, he's not the real

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Jesus, and Jenkin Jesus has some pretty notable differences in his theological views to the real authentic Jesus.

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And so we're not gonna stop the fad, the fad's gonna barrel down the track, and here's the thing, in ten years it'll be a different fad.

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But in the meantime, if you run across somebody who says, hey, have you seen The Chosen? You might want to ask them, you might say, yeah,

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I have seen several episodes of The Chosen, but let me ask you, what do you think about the real Jesus?

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And take the conversation into the canon, into the New Testament, the four Gospels, and help somebody see the difference between Jenkin Jesus and the authentic, biblical, real

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Jesus, and tell them the truth of the Gospel. And let's just put it this way, enough people with discernment are alerted to the things that Dallas Jenkins is saying and doing that are contrary to Scripture, that the growing body of discrepancies is, let's just say, notable.

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Notable. But ultimately, what we want to be able to do in a situation like this, since people are talking about Jesus, let's introduce them to and have them engage with the real one, the one that is found in Scripture, the one who so loved the world that he gave himself and laid down his life, bore your sins and mine on the cross so that we can be forgiven, pardoned, and reconciled to God.

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That's the idea. Engage them with the authentic Jesus because, well, Jenkin Jesus isn't that.

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That's the idea. Hopefully you found this helpful. If so, all the information on how you can share the video is down below in the description.

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And until next time, may God richly bless you in the grace and mercy won by Jesus Christ and his vicarious death on the cross for all of your sins.