The Jesus of The Chosen, Part I

An "Authentic" Jesus?

In a show designed to entertain, I think it is fair to ask whether this purpose also applies to its presentation of Jesus. And if it does, isn't it also fair to ask whether this "entertaining" Jesus is a new Jesus? Dallas Jenkins doesn't believe this. In fact, he believes that the presentation of the fictitious but "plausible" humanity of Jesus is indeed the "authentic" Jesus. How it is not a shameless mind game of gaslighting to call anything fictitious "authentic" I do not know. Jenkins seems to be operating on a syllogism that goes something like this: all humans experience certain emotions and struggles; Jesus was human; therefore, Jesus experienced these common (and generic) human emotions and struggles. Therefore, the generic becomes the authentic. It seems, therefore, that Jesus' emotions would include those "textbook" emotions known to humanity.

A "Human" Jesus?

But for Jenkins to imply that emotions are unique to humanity is grossly simplistic in itself. Where does he suppose we even get our emotions from, if not from God in Whose image we are created? My capacity to love with my soul speaks of my Creator's image in me as His unique creation, for God is love. My capacity to love with my spirit speaks of my Redeemer's image in me as His new creation, for Christ is love. God Himself is the source of love, and God's love grieves and becomes angry. God's love also hates evil. We as His creation made in His image are capable of experiencing all of these emotions--love, grief, anger, hatred--without sin. Certainly, we lost the sinless nature of these emotions in the Fall, but not one of these emotions is unique to our humanity. Therefore, for Jenkins to suggest that Jesus became human so that He could experience our "human emotions" is odd indeed, since our Creator-Redeemer certainly experienced these emotions long before we did, and since the only emotions unique to human beings are those resulting from sin.

To be sure, when sin entered the human race, so did the emotions of pride, guilt, fear, and anxiety. Tragically, it is these emotions--those originating from sin or in themselves sin--that we often associate with being "human," perhaps because these sin-related emotions have so intertwined our God-given emotions that we tend to be suspicious of all of them. It seems obvious, therefore, that to assign "human emotions" to Jesus is a task doomed from the start. What does this even mean? Jesus certainly had emotions long before He took on human flesh, but if He had uniquely "human" emotions once He took on flesh, then that would mean that He experienced those sinful emotions unique to humanity. But that just isn't so. Pride, guilt, fear, anxiety--these emotions are foreign to Jesus because they cannot be felt without sin, and although He took upon Himself our sin, He yet remained sinless even in doing so. This paradox is beyond our capacity to grasp, but, if in taking our sin upon Himself, Jesus sinned, the Cross was futile and we can never be saved, for God would not have accepted His sacrifice. For this reason, Jenkins must be extremely careful not to place upon Jesus emotions that He could not feel and remain sinless.

Problems and Contradictions:

So, it becomes clear that Jenkins has assigned himself an impossible task. Not only can he not assign uniquely human emotions to Jesus without portraying Him as sinning, he cannot even portray any of Jesus' sinless emotions as being merely "human." It seems patently obvious that any emotion of Jesus would be felt in the totality of His nature as both human and divine. It seems grossly trite even to speak, therefore, of Jesus' "human" emotions as if we could or would even want to "halve" His emotions into "human" and "divine" compartments. If we're going to focus on Jesus' emotions at all, we must understand from the outset that all of His emotions will be felt with an unadulterated purity almost impossible for any "human" being to comprehend. This is just one more reason that Jenkins' attempt to make Jesus "relatable" is so wrongheaded. Having a mere mortal attempt to act out any of Jesus' human and divine emotions would result in an immediate and immeasurable reduction of meaning. This is why I do not believe anyone can portray Jesus.

What we don't understand about film is that, by attempting to make the intangible tangible or the spiritual visual, we have produced a "mass" or "standard" impression that everyone simultaneously is supposed to feel, but when we read the power of language and specifically the inspired words of Scripture, our spirit, not our senses, is engaged, and the Holy Spirit Who promised to lead us into all truth is just as surely leading even the unbeliever who picks up the Word of God to read for truth. We joke that the book is better than the movie, but it is, and much more so when that book is The Book! We could argue that those who lived in those times were allowed to "see" what was going on, and to that I would say that they saw the reality, not a reproduction. Does this mean we should not have Christmas pageants or the Ark Encounter? No. But the portrayal of Christ Himself is very different than the portrayal of any other Bible character.

What is so problematic for Jenkins, whether he knows it or not, is that he has not only subtracted from the power of Jesus' emotions by isolating them as "human," he has rendered impotent his scenes of fictionalized emotions that have no resonance in Scripture. The power is not in the imagination; the power is in the truth. We can imagine all we please, but we can't make any of our imaginations true. The "He must have felt this" argument is a non sequitur. But Jenkins would consider himself source sufficient for predicting and interpreting Jesus' emotions. And yet, not only has Jenkins falsely read Jesus' humanity as the sole source of His emotions, it feels to me as if he sees Jesus as a stock character whose emotions can be easily invented simply because He is human. Beyond this, Jenkins would seem to imply not only that Jesus' emotions on earth are restricted to His flesh but that they originated with the Incarnation, as if He felt no emotion as the preincarnate and eternal Son of God. Jenkins is playing with so many hotwires of heresy that they can hardly all be avoided.

I think the ultimate problem is that Jenkins does not understand the Incarnation. I do not believe he even wants to understand it because, if he did, there would be no "need" for his show. How can he literally see Jesus' divinity as a barrier to understanding His emotions and, therefore, His humanity, when it is Jesus divinity that defines both His emotions and His humanity? Without a doubt, Jenkins fails to understand that it requires not the separation of Jesus' humanity from His divinity but the Incarnation of divinity with humanity to show us who Jesus even is. Without Jesus' divinity, we wouldn't even care about His humanity, for it would not be sinless and perfect. This is the most elementary fact to believe if we even believe in Jesus at all. And yet how Jenkins dares to tamper with truth is beyond alarming.

Conclusions:

Dallas Jenkins reminds me of Victor Frankenstein, who presumed that, if he had the right knowledge of all the components of the human body, he could recreate one. He found his "material" by robbing graveyards at night, but what he created was a monster with no likeness whatsoever to the miracle of human creation. And his monster was a monster because he created him in his own image, according to his own knowledge and understanding. I don't know what Jenkins has created, but if he has tampered with creating another Jesus, we know this much: Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light (II Corinthians 11:14). Jenkins' Jesus may very well be no monster but only a "beautiful" deception whom we find "relatable" because that's who we really are.