The Chosen is a multi-season dramatic television series depicting the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, told primarily from the perspective of his disciples. Created and directed by Dallas Jenkins, the son of Jerry B. Jenkins (co-author of the Left Behind series), it launched its first episode in 2019 after a crowdfunding campaign that raised over ten million dollars from 19,000 individual donors - making it, at the time, the largest crowdfunded media project in history. By 2024, cumulative views across its app, streaming platforms, and theatrical releases had exceeded 600 million, making it the most widely watched faith-based media production ever made.
The series' central innovation is its narrative perspective. Rather than following Jesus from his own point of view or presenting the Gospel events as a docudrama, The Chosen focuses on the experience of the disciples - fishermen, tax collectors, women, religious students - as they encounter Jesus and are gradually transformed by that encounter. This choice opens up enormous dramatic territory that the Gospels themselves leave largely unexplored: What was Peter like before he met Jesus? What did Matthew's colleagues think of his decision to follow a wandering rabbi? How did Mary Magdalene's encounter with Jesus change her over time, rather than instantaneously?
The series draws on all four Gospels simultaneously, weaving together scenes that are separate in the canonical accounts and inventing biographical context for the disciples that the Gospels do not provide. The invented context - Peter's marriage, Matthew's troubled family relationships, Nicodemus's spiritual crisis - is clearly marked as dramatization rather than scripture, but the blend creates a texture of historical and emotional realism that audiences found compelling. Jenkins and his writers worked with a team of theological consultants from multiple Christian traditions to ensure that invented content did not contradict what the Gospels directly assert.
Several scenes have become particularly memorable for the way they render familiar Gospel texts with fresh emotional immediacy. The call of Simon Peter in Luke 5 - "Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch" - is staged as the climax of a story that begins with Peter's debt crisis and his desperate need for a successful catch. His response, "Because you say so, I will let down the nets" (Luke 5:5), is rendered as a decision made by a tired, skeptical, debt-ridden man who has nothing left to lose. The miraculous catch, and Peter's immediate "Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!" (Luke 5:8), land with an emotional force that reading the passage cold rarely produces.
The scene of Jesus's encounter with the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11) is staged with similar care. The series shows Jesus writing in the sand (an action that John's Gospel describes but does not explain) and allows the visual and dramatic context to do the interpretive work that centuries of commentary have attempted. His line "I do not condemn you" (John 8:11) is spoken to a specific woman, in a specific moment of danger, with an emotional register of tenderness rather than legal declaration.
John 11:35, the shortest verse in the Bible - "Jesus wept" - receives extended treatment in the series' portrayal of the Lazarus episode. The brevity of the verse is itself a theological statement, recording a specific moment of grief that John considered important enough to preserve. The series shows why: Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus is not weeping because he does not know the outcome (he has already told the disciples that Lazarus will be raised) but because the death of a friend, the grief of Mary and Martha, the reality of human loss, is genuinely grievous even when resurrection is forthcoming. The episode is one of the series' most theologically precise moments.
The production model of The Chosen - distributed free through a dedicated app, funded by fan donations, produced outside the Hollywood studio system - was itself a cultural statement. Jenkins argued that the conventional faith-film model (low-budget, direct-to-video, aimed at the existing Christian market) was inadequate for a genuine retelling of the Gospel, and that the internet made a different model possible: free distribution, global reach, audience ownership through direct financial support. The model proved correct, and it has influenced other faith-based media projects that have followed The Chosen's path.
The series has attracted attention from viewers across the Christian spectrum, from evangelical Protestants to Roman Catholics to Eastern Orthodox viewers, as well as from non-Christian viewers who found the human portraiture compelling regardless of their theological commitments. Jewish viewers have noted with approval the series' careful depiction of first-century Jewish religious life - the prayers, the festivals, the synagogue culture - which earlier Jesus films had often flattened or distorted. The series' portrayal of Matthew's character, in particular, as likely having characteristics now associated with autism spectrum disorder, generated wide discussion about neurodiversity and inclusion in the Church.
The Chosen represents a significant moment in the history of biblical adaptation because of its scale, its model, and its narrative method. It may be the largest single audience for dramatized Gospel narrative since the medieval mystery plays, which performed biblical stories for entire town populations in public squares. Like those plays, it aims to make the Gospel story not merely known but felt - not a set of propositions to be believed but a set of relationships to be inhabited.