I absolutely love The Chosen. I think it’s a wonderfully, prayerfully crafted show. From casting to acting, from script writing to set and costume design, you can tell how much care has been put into every element of the series, and how careful the show runners have been to stay true to the Bible. Unfortunately, like most incredibly popular pieces of art, it’s incredibly divisive. I find it heartbreaking how many Christians find the show blasphemous.
Is the show word for word exactly the same as Scripture? Of course not. Characters have been written in and backstories have been expanded. The writers of the Gospels were more concerned with conveying the teachings of Jesus and the events of His life, death, and resurrection, than with telling a compelling story. And yet, the writers of the show are incredibly careful to never deviate from the Gospel. They are merely trying to showcase the unlikely cast of characters Jesus called to follow Him, the eponymous chosen, and give us an idea of who they might have been.
The Chosen is not presenting itself as the fifth Gospel. It seeks to tell a good story, a story that has been expanded in terms of character development so that we can remember that the disciples were people like us. Such stories used to be more common, with Ben-Hur and The Robe serving as examples. We as a modern society have lost the distinction between truth and fact. A story can be true without being comprised of only fact. After all, Jesus most often taught in stories, though we fancy them up by calling them parables.
And now, onto this actual book.
The Chosen: I Have Called You By Name is a direct novelization of season 1 of the show. And I do mean direct. This is nearly word-for-word, scene for scene, the entire story of that season. As a lover of the show, this didn’t bother me. I might have hoped for a little bit of new or different or a slightly deeper dive into the internal monologues of the characters, but I was still happy with the story being told. I found it well written, though most of the chapters were almost obnoxiously short, and I say that as a reader who prefers short chapters. Some of these chapters were only a page long. I felt like they likely lined up exactly with the length of the scenes from the show. But overall, this was a fun way to revisit the show, and is among the better biblical fiction I’ve read.