A title card says the prophets of Israel have been “silent for 400 years.” Historians and theologians would quibble with that on a number of levels.įor starters, there was no settled canon among the Jews of this period. This exchange is based on John 1:46, in which Nathanael, one of Jesus’ future disciples, is told that Jesus, the messiah, comes from Nazareth, and Nathanael says, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” The gospels do not specify whether Nathanael was repeating a popular saying or simply expressing his own opinion of the place. Namely, when Simon meets Joseph and Mary and learns that they are from Nazareth, he starts to say that people say nothing good can come from Nazareth (which might not be the best thing to say about a stranger’s hometown when you’ve just met them!), and Joseph interrupts him, saying, “I know what they say about Nazareth.” This episode also brings in an element from one of the other gospels: This resembles how Matthew 2:6 quotes an overlapping but slightly different part of Micah 5. Similarly, this episode also features a scene in which someone quotes part of a prophecy from Micah 5. This passage is quoted more or less verbatim in Matthew 1:23, but not in Luke. However, the episode does play heavily on the idea that the birth of Jesus was predicted by the scriptures - and in this, the episode is following Matthew, rather than Luke.įor example, as the shepherds run to the stable, this episode features a voice-over of someone quoting Isaiah 7:14, which says that “a virgin will conceive and bear a son”. (Specifically, the episode is based on Luke 2:1-20.) The Chosen does not combine the two accounts – at least, not at the dramatic level. Instead, the pilot episode states right up front that its depiction of the Nativity is based on just one account, that of Luke 2. Gospels. There are two accounts of the Nativity in the gospels, in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 2. Many dramatizations of the Nativity, such as The Star and The Nativity Story, try to combine these accounts, for example by having the Magi (mentioned in Matthew) and the shepherds (mentioned in Luke) pay homage to the newborn Jesus on the same night. The other major theme in this episode is that the coming of the Messiah was foretold in the Jewish scriptures - and that, of course, is a theme that one finds throughout the New Testament (e.g. And there is nothing in Simon’s personal story to explain why his conception of the Messiah would have changed since the earlier scenes. They would not have thought of the Messiah as someone who had to die. So the Jews of this period – decades before Jesus’ ministry – would not have conceived of the Messiah as any sort of sacrifice. Just a few scenes earlier, Simon asked this very same Pharisee if the Messiah would save them from the Romans, and the Pharisee replied that, yes, the Messiah will be a great military leader. Theologically, because the film seems to be imposing a Western Christian tradition onto the ancient Jewish setting – one that insists the primary way to think about Jesus’ death is to imagine it as a sort of legal transaction sealed by a kind of blood sacrifice.Īnd dramatically, because the episode has emphasized all along that the Jews of that era were praying for deliverance from the Roman occupation. Themes. The episode ends with a Pharisee asking if Simon has found “a spotless lamb for sacrifice.” Simon, who has just returned from visiting the newborn Jesus, smiles as if to indicate that, yes, he has. This is problematic, both dramatically and theologically.
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