Is The Chosen Biblical? Why a Disclaimer Is Not Enough

Researchers once gave people an accurate history to study. Every word of it was true. Then they showed those same people a movie about the same events, and the movie got some things wrong.

A week later they tested everyone. And when the movie and the book disagreed, which one did people hand back? The movie. As fact. Sometimes half the time.

Think about that. They read the truth first. They watched the drama second. And a week later, what came out of their mouths? The drama.

So the researchers tried to stop it. They warned people before they watched. Did it work? Almost nothing they tried worked. But one kind of warning did, and it worked completely. That warning is what this whole Chosen series is.

"These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so." — Acts 17:11 (KJV)

Somebody Is Going to Fill It In

When you close your Bible and open your memory, something has to be there, doesn’t it? A face. A voice. A tone. Somebody is going to fill that in for you.

We want it to be the Bible. We want it to be the Jesus of the Bible. Not a screenplay.

You already know how this works. Think about a book you read for school and then watched as a movie. When you think about that story now, whose face do you see? The actor’s. The movie moved right in and took over the picture you made while you were reading. With a novel, that’s harmless. But what happens when the character is the Son of God? Then it isn’t harmless at all.

The Best Case for the Show

We want to be fair here, so let’s give the show its strongest argument.

The Chosen says it has never claimed to be Scripture. It calls itself historical fiction. It tells you that up front, and the people who made it have said plainly that you should go read the Bible for yourself.

It’s drama, and drama needs dialogue. Scripture doesn’t tell us what Peter said to his wife over supper, so somebody has to write it.

And here’s the part that carries real weight. The show has moved people to tears over a Christ they had never thought about for five minutes. There are people reading the Gospel of John right now because of a television program. That is not nothing.

So the argument goes like this: it’s fiction, it says it’s fiction, and it points people to the real thing. Where’s the harm?

What Actually Happens to a Viewer

Here’s the harm. And it isn’t just our opinion. Somebody measured it.

In 2009, four researchers at Washington University in St. Louis (Andrew Butler, Franklin Zaromb, Keith Lyle, and Henry Roediger) ran the experiment we started with. Their subjects read accurate historical texts. Then they watched film clips on the same events, clips that were partly right and partly wrong.

A week later, any time the film contradicted the text, people repeated the film as fact, sometimes as much as half the time. Did reading the truth first protect them? No. It didn’t.

Now here’s the part that answers the disclaimer argument, so read this one slowly. Some viewers got a general warning ahead of time: movies like this sometimes get things wrong. What did that warning do? Nothing. Those viewers made the same mistakes as the people who got no warning at all.

But there was a second kind of warning, a specific one. This scene is wrong. This detail is wrong. Here’s what actually happened. And that one worked. It wiped the effect out completely.

So a disclaimer at the start of a series is what kind of warning? The kind that doesn’t work. And a post that says “here is the exact line, here is the exact verse, here is the exact difference” is what kind? The kind that does.

There’s more. Elizabeth Marsh and Lisa Fazio found that readers don’t naturally check a story for accuracy while they’re inside it. Being told to watch for errors didn’t help. It only helped when people had to stop and flag every single error as it went by, and even then it didn’t fully undo the damage.

So being carried along by a good story is not a neutral place to be, is it? When the writing is good and the acting is good, you have less access to what you already know. That means the quality of The Chosen isn’t a defense of it. The quality is the very thing that slips it past your discernment.

And You Will Feel Like an Expert

There’s a second trap, and you can test this one on yourself tonight.

When we see something clearly, we feel like we understand it. Think about watching a video of somebody fixing a car. You finish it and you think, I could do that. Then you’re under the hood holding the wrong wrench, and you realize you don’t know what you’re doing at all.

Vividness feels like what? Knowledge. But it isn’t knowledge.

And Scripture said it first, and said it harder.

"And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know." — 1 Corinthians 8:2 (KJV)

"Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him." — Proverbs 26:12 (KJV)

So a person can watch every season and come away feeling like he knows the life of Christ. And he can be further from the Bible than the day he started watching the series, and yet, feel closer. That’s the trap. Not that you learn nothing. That you feel like you learned everything.

This Is the Specific Warning

So this series isn’t about whether you’re allowed to watch a television show. It’s the specific warning. That’s all it is. We put lines from the show next to lines from the Bible, side by side, and you can see the difference for yourself.

Because there’s a verse standing behind all of this, and it is not gentle.

"For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him." — 2 Corinthians 11:4 (KJV)

Another Jesus. Did Paul warn the Corinthians about people who would deny Christ? No. He warned them about people who would offer them a different one. And he warned them about how easily they would put up with it.

And the answer to that has never changed. Acts 17:11 says the Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” How often? Daily. And searching for what? Whether those things were so. Not whether it moved them. Not whether it felt true. Whether it was so.

How to Put the Specific Warning to Work

So what do we do with this? Here’s the pattern the research points to, and it’s the same pattern the Bereans followed.

• Read first.Before you watch any Bible movie or show, read the passage it covers. Ten minutes in the Gospel will do more for you than ten hours of drama.
• Keep your Bible open.If you do watch, pause when Jesus speaks and find the verse. Can’t find it? Write that line down.
• Name the difference.Don’t just think “that felt off.” Write the show’s line on one side and the verse on the other. That’s the step that actually protects your memory.
• Memorize the real words.The best protection is having the true words of Jesus already in your head before anybody hands you new ones.

Keep Reading the Series

• Next · Part 2The Chosen and Nicodemus: What John 3 Says That the Show Leaves Out
• Also in This SeriesDid Jesus Tell Jokes? The Problem With a Joking Jesus (Part 8, coming soon)
• See Every PostThe Chosen series hub

Sources for the Studies

• Butler, A. C., Zaromb, F. M., Lyle, K. B., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Using popular films to enhance classroom learning: The good, the bad, and the interesting. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1161–1168.
• Marsh, E. J., & Fazio, L. K. (2006). Learning errors from fiction: Difficulties in reducing reliance on fictional stories. Memory & Cognition, 34(5), 1140–1149.
• Marsh, E. J., Meade, M. L., & Roediger, H. L. (2003). Learning facts from fiction. Journal of Memory and Language, 49(4), 519–536.