Why The Chosen is more blasphemous than Monty Python
This year (2025, if you’re reading this later) is the 50th anniversary of the cult comedy classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Since the first time I saw it decades ago, I have considered it the funniest movie I’ve ever seen. The killer rabbit. How to discern a witch. The Knights Who Say “Ni!” Even the opening credits crack me up.
But over the years, as I’ve grown in the Lord, its entertainment value has become more and more tempered by its blasphemy. Its whole story is religious — King Arthur and his knights are commissioned by “God” to find the Holy Grail, the cup from which Jesus drank at the last supper (that legend is never mentioned). “God” himself appears at one point, as an animated caricature. The film includes a plethora of other religious symbols, dialogue, and points of humor, such as the “holy hand grenade.” That’s intermingled with sexual raunchiness and exclamations of Christ’s name. It’s an irreverent lampoon of the religiosity of the Middle Ages.
Holy Grail is not the troupe’s only or even worst foray into parodying Christianity; Monty Python’s Life of Brian is about a man who’s wrongly believed to be the Messiah. It ends with his crucifixion.
But as blasphemous as those movies are, they obviously don’t intend to actually portray God or Jesus. No viewer will come away thinking that’s what God is like (unless they already believed that). Holy Grail is a silly spoof not so much of the Lord, but of how some people in history have tried to serve Him — and some of their efforts, frankly, deserve it.
What’s worse
Contrast that against dramatizations that do try to depict the actual Jesus Christ and take creative liberties to various degrees. Most of them script dialogue for their Jesus character that He never said in the Bible. They don’t include much of what He did and said in the gospels. They give the character tones and mannerisms that aren’t revealed in Scripture. Worst of all, they can introduce ideas that are not only extrabiblical but unbiblical — things Jesus never would have said.
The drama that’s most guilty of all of the above is the streaming series The Chosen. By design, it’s almost entirely fabricated. Most of what it portrays is not from the text of the Bible, nor is most of what its Jesus character says. Almost all of his words are put into his mouth by the show’s writers. He occasionally acts out scenes from the gospels, but even those are enhanced with additional filler.
When Christ is fictionalized to that extent, it inevitably invents not only false words but false ideas, and in its fifth season, it goes way too far. In The Chosen’s depiction of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, the character abominably says, “I don’t think I can do this. You ask too much of me. I can’t.” That would be Jesus doubting the reason He came into the world. It’s heresy in that it effectively denies His deity — God would never say that. That pathetic “Jesus” can go to hell.
Whatever the Lord meant by “Let this cup pass from Me,” He didn’t mean that, because it blatantly contradicts what He said in John 10:
“For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one takes it away from Me, but from Myself, I lay it down. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.”
Also, in an earlier season, the Jesus character tries to dissuade John the Baptist from confronting Herod; nothing in the Bible suggests He would have ever done that. This is not to mention the many liberties taken with other characters, the most egregious of which may be the hostility its “Peter” shows toward “Jesus” in one entirely fictional arc. Peter had his issues, but it’s a serious stretch to think he would have angrily thrown to the ground a basket full of supernaturally created bread, right in front of Jesus. That may not be blasphemous, but it’s slanderous. How would you like it if someone’s depiction of your life made you look even worse than you are? How much does someone have to make up about you before it’s not you anymore?
The second commandment
That brings up the real issue here. The second commandment forbids making images into objects of worship. That includes not only false gods, but depictions of the one true God. This is demonstrated by the incident with the golden calf in Exodus 32. It was not the Israelites’ intention to worship another god, like Baal or Molech. No, they called that manmade object Yahweh (verse 5). “This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!”
The spirit of the second commandment is that any artificial image of God will misrepresent Him. It lowers Him to our understanding and preferences. It gives us something we can see when the Lord doesn’t. It creates a comfortable depiction of Him that we can control. God does not tolerate that.
The Chosen misrepresents Jesus many times over. Despite the insistence of its creator, Dallas Jenkins, that he’s not adding to the Bible — while calling his creation “authentic” and “plausible” — some viewers will incorporate his fiction into their understanding of Jesus. They say it helps them to know Jesus more, and Jenkins approves of comments like that. I’ve seen people say of the show, “This is my Jesus” and “This is the Jesus you need” — even though it’s not Jesus at all.
That’s why it’s more disobedient of the second commandment than Monty Python is. No one will endorse Holy Grail with “This is the God you need.” While in one sense it does present an image of God, in another sense it doesn’t, because it doesn’t mean to. In no way does it claim to be authentic or plausible, and no one will take it that way. The Chosen may have respectful intentions, but ironically, it’s better to not even try to honor the Lord that way. That’s what the Israelites did, but it was more about pleasing themselves than Him, even if they didn’t think so.
Some defend The Chosen by saying it gets people to read the Bible, and isn’t that always good? If you’re old enough, you may remember the controversy that stormed around the 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, which imagined its Jesus character having sex with Mary Magdalene — and, like in The Chosen, doubting His mission. I bet that got people to read the Bible, too. The worst heretics can do that. The ends do not justify the means.
Only a tiny fraction of one generation in human history, in a small area, got to see Jesus in the flesh, and God revealed Him to everyone else in successive generations through one method — the ink of the Scriptures. The Bible, therefore, is the perfect and sufficient medium. It tells us all that God wants us to know about Jesus, and therefore, it’s all we need to know. But for so many Christians, like the Israelites, what God generously gives us is not enough. They want to see the Bible “come alive,” which says they don’t think it’s already living and powerful.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail may be irreverent, disrespectful, and yes, blasphemous. But The Chosen is dangerous. Run away!
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