Published June 2020
IF you have never the read the Gospels (the books Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Bible) or have read them but found them hard to imagine as history and difficult to picture as real life events, then may I encourage you to watch the free series The Chosen about the life of Christ on The Chosen app?
With a 8.5 user score on IMDb with over 5,000 user reviews, making it the highest-rated faith project of all time, and 100% critic score and 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, this is not some painfully acted, poorly crafted Sunday school project.
The Chosen has surged into IMDb’s Top 250 All-time series list. It joins other prestigious series like Netflix’s The Crown and HBO’s hit series Band of Brothers and Chernobyl as the most highly rated historical dramas. Dubbed into Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian, besides its original English, it is currently being watched in nearly every country on earth.
Neal Harmon, CEO of VidAngel said “The Chosen is a series about hope and inspiration. It is a show about the Gospels the whole family can celebrate together. We believe that’s why it’s seeing so much interest both here in the U.S. and around the world.
“It makes it possible for millions to imagine what it might have been like to meet Jesus when he first walked the earth. This show helps us to read the New Testament with a fresh perspective.”
Indeed, the project sticks closely to the Bible narrative but also eshes out some of the background characters, so that we can get a context for their interactions with Jesus and understand the culture of the day.
In a nice touch, Matthew the tax collector is depicted as on the autism spectrum, which, on reflection on the style of his gospel, he might well have been!
True to Scripture, Jonathan Roumie, who plays Jesus is an ordinary looking man, dressed not in white robe and blue sash, but in dull, often dirty brown robes. Roumie portrays very well how Jesus impacted his followers not by outward appearance but by the extraordinary, audacious things He said, by His miracles and mostly, by His compassion.
See Jesus laugh and cry, argue and teach, eat and heal and dance. Appreciate how hard to was for some of those who met a craftsman from Nazareth to accept this was their God in the flesh, their promised Messiah. I’m sure it will make you laugh and cry, as it did me.
The moving multi-season series is the first ever about the life of Christ. Surpassing expectations and breaking records, it was named the #1 Crowdfunded Media Project in 2018 by raising over $10 million. The Chosen went on to become the first entertainment project to be released around the world in 180 countries on its own app. Due to the overwhelming response, it is projected that VidAngel will soon be able to produce a new season.