The Chosen: Christian entertainment sans cheese/plus a Jesus with a sense of humour

Bad scripts and worse acting are frequently heard criticisms when it comes to the Christian entertainment genre. The “big knock” against the Christian movie, television and streaming genre for more secular audiences – aside from the fact the films are Christian – has long been heavy-handed theological scripts, clunky acting and cheesy sets, with mainly bad plots, which, to be charitable, do little more than preach to the choir. There hasn’t been, aside from the occasional blockbuster, much for broader audiences to judge such films or television on if they were done, well, well. You know, decent scripts, good actors, high production values, that sort of thing. Hollywood, which is usually a synonym for Sodom or Gomorrah in the vocabulary of many Christians, is seldom on the side of the angels, unless commercial potential can stand in for faith in salvation if need be.

The Chosen TV series debuted on Dec. 24, 2017. Two seasons have aired. Season 3 is expected to air later this year. Seven seasons are planned.

Angel Studios, the streaming platform behind the Christian series The Chosen, announced in early January that it had raised $47 million in funding from venture capitalists. The financing was led by VC firm Gigafund and Bain-backed Uncorrelated Venture. Original seed investors Alta Ventures and Kickstart Fund also participated.

In addition to VC money, $5 million was crowdsourced directly from fans, and The Chosen is the most crowdfunded media project in history.  It has received 9.6 out of 10 on IMDb. John Jurgensen, a reporter who covers music, television and digital entertainment for The Wall Street Journal, wrote last November: “The success of the series is a powerful reminder to Hollywood that faith-focused projects can sometimes become breakthrough hits.” Chris DeVille, a journalist based in Ohio, writing for The Atlantic magazine last June, observed: “Take it from a critic and a Christian with an aversion to Christian entertainment: The show is good.”

I concur. It is the first Biblical series I’ve seen that consistently portrays Jesus as both “fully human” and “fully God.” Usually, I find the former left out. But Dallas Jenkins’ Jesus (Jonathan Roumie) has a very keen sense of humour when the occasion calls for it. Who would have imagined? Jesus with a sense of humour. Indeed, these Apostles (my favourite, I think, is young Matthew [Paras Patel], the tax collector, who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder), Pharisees (shout out to Erick Avari as Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin), Sadducees, and assorted residents of the Red Quarter of Jerusalem, located near the Gate of the Moors and Coponius Gate, in the southwestern part of the Western Wall, all appear as flesh-and-blood real people might well have in the 1st century Anno Domini (AD).

For background expertise and script consulting, the creators of the show have been conferring with Father David Guffee, a priest of the Congregation of Holy Cross, based at St. Monica Catholic Church in Santa Monica, California, and national director at Family Theater Productions; Rabbi Jason Sobel of Fusion Ministries in Hollywood, and Professor Doug Huffman, associate dean and professor of New Testament, overseeing the undergraduate division of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California. Last weekend, Jeanette and I watched Dallas Jenkins, creator, director and co-writer of The Chosen, do a “deep dive” into the first season’s eight episode on the show’s free mobile app with the three Biblical consultants, Father Guffee, Rabbi Sobel, and Professor, and Jenkins kicking off the 40-minute or so deep dive roundtable discussion with the timeless, “A Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, and an evangelical scholar walk into ….” This sounds like the beginning of a joke with reference to a drinking establishment, but 1st century Jerusalem Anno Domini (AD) and theology is what’s on tap here.

I first got to know the work of Dallas Jenkins back in 2011 with Jeanette at the Winnipeg Real to Reel Film Festival, as he had just directed What If … the previous year.

What If, a film about a businessman who is shown by an angel what his life could have become if he had followed God’s calling for his life, starred Kevin Sorbo, Kristy Swanson, Debby Ryan, and John Ratzenberger, who portrayed mail carrier Cliff Clavin on the comedy series Cheers, for which he earned two Primetime Emmy nominations. As “Mike the Angel,” Ratzenberger throws what I consider to be the best guardian angel punch in cinematic history to date at Ben Walker (Kevin Sorbo).

Dallas Jenkins dad, Jerry B. Jenkins, did most of the actual writing of the Left Behind novels, while Tim LaHaye was primarily the idea man. Left Behind started out as a series of 16 best-selling novels, published between 1995 and 2007, dealing with the Protestant evangelical Christian predispensationalist “End Times” view of the Rapture and the Tribulation that follows. The drama comes from the struggle of the rag-tag Tribulation Force against the Global Community and its leader Nicolae Carpathia – the Antichrist.

I’ve read the 16 novels – from Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, published in 1995, and then Tribulation Force: The Continuing Drama of Those Left Behind; Nicolae: The Rise of Antichrist; Soul Harvest: The World Takes Sides; Apollyon: The Destroyer Is Unleashed; Assassins: Assignment: Jerusalem, Target: Antichrist; The Indwelling: The Beast Takes Possession; The Mark: The Beast Rules the World; Desecration: Antichrist Takes the Throne; The Remnant: On the Brink of Armageddon; Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages; Glorious Appearing: The End of Days; The Rising: Antichrist is Born: Before They Were Left Behind; The Regime: Evil Advances: Before They Were Left Behind; The Rapture: In the Twinkling of an Eye: Countdown to Earth’s Last Days, right through to Kingdom Come: The Final Victory in 2007.

Left Behind isn’t great literature,” wrote Alissa Wilkinson, critic-at-large at Christianity Today in the Washington Post in 2016, “but it’s highly engaging reading for a mass market, fast-moving fiction with elements drawn from sci-fi, romance, disaster porn, and political and spy novels. Left Behind has the code-cracking conspiracy feel of a Dan Brown novel, but also the appeal of a familiar story – one that inscribes the reader’s own world, with its televisions and airplanes and phones and computers, into biblical events.

“This is the genius of the Left Behind books: They work on two levels.”

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Potential for aerosal airbone transmission of Ebola hemorrhagic fever has been studied by U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland and in Canada at Special Pathogens Program Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba

In an op-ed article, “What We’re Afraid to Say About Ebola,” published in the New York Times Sept. 11, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, the McKnight Presidential Endowed Chair in Public Health and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, wrote the Ebola scenario “virologists are loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private: that an Ebola virus could mutate to become transmissible through the air. You can now get Ebola only through direct contact with bodily fluids. But viruses like Ebola are notoriously sloppy in replicating, meaning the virus entering one person may be genetically different from the virus entering the next. The current Ebola virus’s hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years. Each new infection represents trillions of throws of the genetic dice.

“If certain mutations occurred, it would mean that just breathing would put one at risk of contracting Ebola. Infections could spread quickly to every part of the globe, as the H1N1 influenza virus did in 2009, after its birth in Mexico.”

In fact, there has already been some antigenic drift  in the current novel Ebola-Zaire (EBO-Z) subclade from viral samples sequenced in Sierra Leone in June and sequences from Guinea in March three months earlier.

Osterholm is also an international expert on American preparedness for an influenza pandemic, and from 2001 to 2005, served as a special advisor to then–U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on issues related to bio-terrorism and public health preparedness.

Ebola virus causes severe viral hemorrhagic fever with a high fatality rate estimated at about 70 per cent on average. Five Ebola virus species within the genus Ebolavirus are known, including four that cause Ebola virus disease (EVD) in humans:  Zaire, Bundibugyo, Sudan and Taï Forest, while Reston.  the fifth species, has only caused disease in non-human primates.  The current outbreak in West Africa, plus a handful of travel-related additional cases in Madrid in Spain and in the United States in Dallas and New York City, is Ebola Zaire, the deadliest form of the disease in previous outbreaks with case fatality rates of 90 per cent reported.

With more than 10,000 reported cases and more than 5,000 people dead (for what is widely believed to be a vastly under-reported case fatality rate of about 50 per cent), the 2013-14 outbreak  in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone,  Mali, Nigeria and Senegal in West Africa, caused by Ebola virus (Zaire ebolavirus species), is the 20th, largest and most complex outbreak of EVD in its 38-year history, with more cases and deaths in this outbreak than all others combined, since the disease was first discovered in 1976 during two simultaneous outbreaks, one in Nzara in Sudan, and the other in Yambuku in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was then called Zaire, where a Belgian Roman Catholic nun at a small mission hospital was infected. The latter occurred in a village near the Ebola River in what was then northern Zaire, from which the disease and species both takes their  names. When those first cases were reported in the mid-1970s they were from remote villages in Central Africa, near tropical rainforests. The World Health Organization (WHO) said earlier this month the Ebola outbreak is now over in both Nigeria and Senegal, although the disease is threatening  the Ivory Coast,  which shares a 716-kilometre international border with Liberia in the southwest; a 610-kilometre border with Guinea to the northwest; and a 532-kilometre border with Mali to the north and northwest.

It began last December with an index case in Meliandou, in southeastern Guinea, not far from the borders with both Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Two decades ago, scientists at the  U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), based  at Fort Detrick, Maryland, exposed  monkeys to airborne Ebola, which “caused a rapidly fatal disease” in four to five days, they  concluded in their 10-page August 1995 article,  “Lethal Experimental Infections of Rhesus Monkeys by Aerosolized Ebola Virus,” published in the International Journal of Experimental Pathology.

The  researchers hypothesized Ebola can spread through air but likely hasn’t in Africa because the equatorial region is generally too warm, with temperatures rarely dropping below 18.3°C or 65°F.

In 2012, Canadian researchers here in Manitoba, led by Gary Kobinger, head of Special Pathogens and Vector Design and Immunotherapy at the Special Pathogens Program of the  Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory of the Public Health Agency of Canada on Arlington Street in Winnipeg, along with researchers from the National Centre for Foreign Animal Disease in Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, observed transmission of Ebola from pigs, which can remain largely healthy and carry Ebola with only minor ill effects, including heavier breathing and mild fever, to monkeys where the disease was fatal, indicating the Ebola virus may spread between species through the air, although the researchers could not  say for certain that is how the transmission actually occurred. Their research was published in  Scientific Reports 2 on Nov. 15, 2012.

The Biosafety Level-Four (BSL-4) National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg is where some of the world’s deadliest pathogens  – such as Ebola, Marburg, Lassa and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever viruses and Nipah Virus Encephalitis  – are studied.

In December 1989,  not far away from USAMRIID, in a strip mall in Isaac Newton Square in suburban Reston, Virginia, army scientists  from nearby Fort Detrick, Maryland were called in when monkeys from the Philippines,  kept by Hazelton Research Products for shipment to other U.S. laboratories,  began to die in their cages, one by one, after contracting what is now known as Reston ebolavirus species, the only known form of Ebola that causes disease only in in non-human primates. While the Reston Ebola species can infect humans no one got sick in Virginia 25 years ago and no serious illness or death in humans have been reported to date as a result of human exposure to the the Reston Ebola species. The Reston episode would become a key part of author Richard Preston’s electrifying 1994 non-fiction thriller, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story, an earlier version of which had appeared in The New Yorker magazine on Oct. 26, 1992 as “Crisis in the Hot Zone.”

The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says in its “Review of Human-to-Human Transmission of Ebola Virus” summary of published information on the current science that “airborne transmission of Ebola virus has been hypothesized but not demonstrated in humans. While Ebola virus can be spread through airborne particles under experimental conditions in animals, this type of spread has not been documented during human EVD outbreaks in settings such as hospitals or households.”

Referring to the USAMRIID experiment that provided the data for the 10-page August 1995 article,  “Lethal Experimental Infections of Rhesus Monkeys by Aerosolized Ebola Virus,” published in the International Journal of Experimental Pathology, CDC says, “In the laboratory setting, non-human primates with their heads placed in closed hoods have been exposed to and infected by nebulized aerosols of Ebola virus.”

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