The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
509. Retelling the Greatest Story Ever Told | Dallas Jenkins
Mon, 23 Dec 2024
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with “The Chosen” creator and showrunner Dallas Jenkins. Set in the house of Caiaphas, they discuss Dallas’ early failures and the transformative experiences that led him to bring forth the most important story ever told. They discuss proper sacrifice, intention, and offering, the role of the Herald in the modern day, and how to honor Jesus as both God and man. This episode was filmed on December 10th, 2024. | Links | For Dallas Jenkins: Watch “The Chosen” https://www.thechosen.tv/en-us Dallas on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/DallasJenkinsOfficial/ Dallas on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dallas.jenkins/?hl=en
Chapter 1: What is the setting of the podcast?
Hello, everybody. I'm probably in the most unlikely stage setting today that, I don't know, I've ever been in, although I've been in some unlikely places. This is the house of Caiaphas, the high priest during the time of Christ. It's the setting for part of The Chosen, one of the most successful series, and I would say probably indisputably the most successful religiously-based series
ever produced. I'm here today to talk with the creator, producer, director, and writer of that series, Dallas Jenkins, who's invited us down here to see the studio and to see the sets and to talk about how this most unlikely of all occurrences made its manifestation. So what did we talk about?
Well, the emergence of The Chosen as a spectacular success occurred on the heels of a relatively cataclysmic failure. The precursor movie, so to speak, at least from a career perspective of Delis, was a failure. It launched as a Hollywood production and spiraled downward almost immediately. And we talked about the desperation
the despair and hopelessness that accompanied that failure, and then the surprising and remarkable consequences that unfolded across time. And I don't want to spoil the story. You have to hear it in its details to really understand what transpired. But out of the ashes of that defeat, let's say, rose the radical success of The Chosen, very unlikely enterprise.
And I was extremely curious about how that happened. I wanted to know how it happened personally, What was Delis' response to his failure? And how did the idea of the Chosen make itself And what did that mean practically? And why did the audience respond? And how was it financed? And what was the marketing approach? And why did that work?
And what does it mean for the culture, more broadly speaking? And what has been the effect worldwide? And how are we to understand that? And we did what we could to... investigate all those questions and to provide some at least provisional answers to them in the 90 minutes that we were fortunate to talk today.
And so if you're interested in that story, and it's an extremely interesting story about the attempt to film the most interesting story ever told, you might say, then join us for this podcast. Well, let's start by talking about where we are, because we're in this remarkable set. part of a remarkable series. And so let's talk about the set first and then the series.
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Chapter 2: What led to the creation of The Chosen?
We are in Caiaphas' house. Yeah. High priest Caiaphas. Now, it's in Texas, not Israel. We film in Texas. Texans believe Jesus lived here anyway. So that's why we film in Texas. This is where he would choose to live. Exactly. And when he comes back, he's coming to Texas first. But we built this set. This is a season five set. It has not been released to the world yet.
So you're introducing Caiaphas' set to the world. Chosen fans have not seen it yet. But this is the room in which not only Caiaphas and Judas make a deal, but ultimately where we'll see Jesus come for his quasi-trial. His Sanhedrin trial took place at Caiaphas' house under cover of night, away from the traditional place because they were trying to do it quickly.
With that uplifting, lighthearted note, this is where we're filming this conversation.
Right, and this is part of a large macro set consisting of a number of large buildings, each of which have sets built inside it. They're all soundproofed. When did you set all this up?
Well, season one of The Chosen was... crowdfunded and at such a low budget. We were starting from scratch, so we were finding places to film and trying to make them look bigger. It was after season two that we realized we have to have our own place. We can't just keep chasing The kinds of places around the country that some of which don't exist.
We need our own home and we need to stay in one spot. And so that's when we started to build some of these places on here in Texas on a property owned by the Salvation Army. There's no pun intended on that. It happens to just be the place that had... That's hilarious. Yeah, hundreds of acres of open land and some already interesting infrastructure. And so we built these sound stages.
So right now we're in a sound stage that contains Caiaphas's house. 50 yards away is a potential place where we would film the Garden of Gethsemane. There's another building that has Simon Peter's house, Pontius Pilate's house. We had a place where we've got the room for the Last Supper. And then we've got a backlot where we've got a first century Capernaum recreation.
So it's all over the place, but within about half a mile of each other.
Well, let's familiarize everybody watching and listening with the with the story of The Chosen in the broadest possible sense. You just pointed out that it was crowdfunded to begin with. And so why don't you start at the beginning of the vision for the series and the ambition for the series and just tell the story because lots of people who are engaged in this podcast won't know it.
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Chapter 3: How did failure influence Dallas Jenkins' career?
And within a couple hours, I went from being a filmmaker who had a very bright future to a filmmaker with no future because the movie bombed. The other stories that we were hoping to tell with these companies, the companies said, no, never mind. Apparently, clearly we don't understand this audience, this approach, the kind of faith-based filmmaking.
And so out of that, I was home alone with my wife, Amanda. And we were crying and praying and confused because You hear all the time, God's not the author of failure. And so when you fail, you must assume that the calling that you thought you'd received to do this work must not have been a true calling.
You know, any time we feel called to something, it's hard to decipher sometimes whether it's a calling from God— Or a temptation. Or a temptation, or just a desire, a fleshly desire. And sometimes it's a fleshly desire, and it's okay. It's not, you know— When we choose what we're going to eat for dinner tonight, I don't wait for God to reveal it to me.
I just have a desire for something, and it's fine. But I had spent two years of my life developing this story and seeing so many moments throughout that where doors were opening and God clearly seemed to be present. And so then when it failed, I thought, I guess I was wrong. I guess God wasn't present and wasn't calling me to this. And so in the midst of my devastation,
Amanda came to me and said, I feel very strongly and clearly like God is putting it on my heart. Open the story of the feeding of the 5,000 in the Gospels. I don't know why. I just know that that's what we're supposed to do. So we open the Bible to the feeding of the 5,000. That's a story I've heard many times before. I've been a believer as long as I can remember.
So what about that story was for us? Well, the thing that we noticed in that story was that Jesus had been preaching for several days. The disciples come to him and they say, Master, the people are hungry. We need to send them home to get food. And what I hadn't noticed before in the story was that Jesus didn't say, oh, good point. I hadn't realized that. We should get this taken care of.
He already knew it. In fact, it was his fault they were hungry. He'd been talking for two days, two, three days. And his response was, oh, no, we can't send them home because they're so hungry they'll faint along the way. So we realized in that moment, just because you're at a place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God's not in it. And in fact, it may mean he is in it.
Depending on your theology, he either allowed it or he caused it. But being brought to that place of hunger and desperation doesn't necessarily mean that God— You're being abandoned.
Right. Or even necessarily that you were wrong.
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Chapter 4: What was the significance of the feeding of the 5,000 story?
Why did God tell the Israelites to camp out at the edge of the Red Sea? in advance of the Israelites being pursued by the Egyptians, he said, go to the edge of the Red Sea and camp out. He put them in this place where they had no place to go. When the Egyptians came and pursued them, they had no escape. And he put them there on purpose.
And he says three times in a span of several verses, so that I will get glory.
It's a tricky problem, eh? Because you don't want to be opaque to failure. I mean, it's a terrible problem. You don't want to be opaque to failure. And being persistent and being opaque to failure are often hard to distinguish. How do you know if you're... assiduously pursuing your goals in the face of trouble and opposition or stubbornly clinging to your tyrannical failures, right?
Very hard thing to... That's part of that problem of separating the wheat from the chaff or discriminating the spirits. And so you had... spent a lot of time in your career trying to get in a position where you were attractive to the mainstream Hollywood studios. That had happened. It seemed, as far as you were concerned, that you were pursuing the right path.
Then you get devastating news, and in relatively short order, that at least part of what you had envisioned just wasn't going to happen. And you must have been wondering at that point too, and I'm curious about what you think about that now, Do you have some sense of why the film... I mean, there's lots of reasons films don't succeed, many, like any product.
First of all, the probability that any product is going to succeed, even if it's a good product, is low. Everything has to be timed exactly right, including things you can't control. But so... What did you conclude at that moment along with your wife that was the nature, let's say, of the failure? And then let's go back to the story of the feeding.
Yeah, so that didn't happen until that night. So in the midst of the failure, you're wrestling with what caused it. And for me as an analyzer, I analyze well. I solve problems. I wrestle with causes and effects. It's one of the things that I'm fairly good at. And then I'm realizing maybe I'm not good at it. Maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm not. So there's the calling. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
There's the calling. There's the spiritual direction that I believe God had given me. Now I'm questioning whether that's real. Yeah, well, that's the thing about— And then there's the surface. There's the practical. What mistakes did I make to bring me to this place?
Yeah, well, that's an unpacking of levels, right? I mean, there's actually some psychological rules for approaching a situation like that because— Any failure brings up the specter of cataclysmic, characterological inadequacy, right? Do not pretend that I know what you just said.
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Chapter 5: How does Dallas Jenkins define success?
So God brings us to the latter. He's saying, he's helping us wrestle with Our calling, and his first message to us, or at least what we are wrestling with, is the macro level, the foundation to your point. Was I wrong all along?
So in that moment, reading that story of the feet of the 5,000 was very comforting because it's a, okay, this doesn't necessarily mean that God's abandoned me to your point or that I'm fundamentally flawed in my calling. Now, I don't know what's next.
I don't know the strategic— Right, but you don't have to draw that conclusion. That. So in the story of Job, I mean, the decisions, Job makes a series of decisions in the aftermath of his cataclysmic failure, let's say, which is multidimensional, right? Because he loses his enterprise, he loses many of the members of his family, he ends up ill and disfigured, his friends are basically...
accusing him of moral impropriety of the sort that would lead to that outcome. And Job's decision at that point is not to lose faith in the essential goodness of his being, even though he recognizes that he's flawed like every other person, or to lose faith in the benevolence of the divine, let's say. And so he goes to the bottom.
His wife says to him, there's nothing left for you except to curse God and die, right? That's her conclusion, given the dismal circumstances. But he doesn't do that. He maintains faith in himself, and he maintains faith in the benevolence of existence, even though he can't necessarily perceive it at that moment.
Yeah, so... I'll get to that because what I did was in the moment, I'm struggling with faith in myself, for sure. Struggling with faith in my ability to hear God's voice and know what I'm supposed to be doing. And God brings in this reminder of a story that makes me feel a little bit better of foundation.
And this came to your wife's mind, this story. That's why you investigated it.
Yes, that's her contradiction. She was not Job's wife. She did not say, God, I. That's interesting.
So one of the things that does happen to people in circumstances like this, and it's worth noting psychologically, is that if you are wrestling with a very complex problem, you can watch memories and images flip through your mind. You can think of it, your imagination, what your imagination is trying to do is to sketch out the nature of the new landscape.
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Chapter 6: What role does storytelling play in filmmaking?
Jesus brought them to that place so that they were hungry and desperate, so that the only solution to their problem was a miracle, the thing that only he could do.
Yeah, you know, you mentioned the Exodus story. One of the... What would you say? God, if I remember correctly, God justifies his actions in hardening the heart of the Pharaoh because that increases the majesty of his eventual victory.
So that I will get glory.
Yes, exactly. Three times in one chapter. Yeah, right, right, right. So that's a very complicated thing to unpack. And I don't remember if we went into that in the Exodus seminar in the Daily Wire series, but I suspect so. And so...
What you're doing is you're laying out the narrative of those events to point out the, what would you say, it's the magnification of what happens that's beneficial by the precursor of the tragic. And it is definitely the case that there's this dynamic in our life that What's good would not be as good as it is unless it could be contrasted with suffering and misery, right?
You need that expanse of experience for things to have their majesty. That's a good way of thinking about it, Tim.
So in the moment... A bad thing has happened, but it's the precursor to something great. So what is it? We know that Jesus is about to do something extraordinary in the feeding of the 5,000. So what is God about to do with us?
And we're thinking— So that's at least a possibility then.
Yeah, maybe. We're thinking tonight. the numbers might so dramatically shift in a miraculous way that God will get glory and that our movie will actually surprise and counteract the math equation that has taken place. And so we're thinking, don't be surprised if tonight the numbers... magically, supernaturally, miraculously turn around. The math equation that Hollywood is used to is upended.
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Chapter 7: How does the audience's perspective affect storytelling?
And he felt just as clearly as my wife had felt God putting her into the story of the feeding 5,000, he felt God putting it on his heart. Tell Dallas it's not his job to feed the 5,000. It's only to provide the loaves and fish. And he said, no, I barely know Dallas. That's a very condescending thing to say to somebody who's clearly— Well, and a strange thing.
It's like its meaning is opaque. Yes. It's a very particular reference, right?
Right, right. Contextless. Yes. So he wrestles with that and doesn't want to do that and thinks ultimately, well, God won't let me off the mat. He keeps pressing this into me, so okay. I'm going to share this with Dallas. It's four in the morning back there anyway, so he won't see it for a while anyway.
And of course, he gets this immediate response and informs me that God had been pressing it on his heart to tell me that. So two things happen. Number one, it all hit me in that moment. Like, I understood what he meant, and that's what you're asking. So in the story of the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus could have said,
Assuming you believe the story and you believe all the stories of the miracles that he performed, he could have manifested loaves and fish from nothing. And he could have fed 5,000 people, and the loaves and fish could have just emerged in their laps. But he says, I need food. Someone bring me some food. Bring me something. And a boy brings five loaves and two fish.
And Jesus takes those five loaves and two fish and he blesses them and then multiplies them to the point where we can feed 5,000 people. And so why does he do that? Why does he involve us, or in the case of this story, the boy, in the process when he doesn't have to? So the principle of your job is to not be responsible to feed 5,000, to not think of the results. I'm a results guy.
I'm a problem solver. The numbers didn't match. We didn't feed 5,000. It failed. And this gentleman is telling me, no, no, that's not your job to worry about. You didn't fail.
So you're looking at the wrong marker of success in relationship to your endeavor. So as long as you did the right thing all the way along, which is something you have to contend with in relationship to your conscience, the outcome is not the measure.
Correct. So in that moment, when I'm literally... analyzing what I did wrong, coming off of a day of wrestling with the story of the feeding the 5,000, this gentleman randomly out of the blue tells me, it's not that. It's not that you failed per se. It's not that you, we could argue about, did I make the best five loaves and two fish? Was the recipe a good recipe?
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Chapter 8: What is the importance of backstories in biblical narratives?
And so he's unwilling to condemn himself or God, for that matter, because of this momentary failure, cataclysmic though it is, because... Everything has not yet been revealed. Now, that's complicated because it still leaves us in an uncomfortable situation, which is, well, if you can't use the result as the marker for success or failure, what do you use as a marker?
So now you went over your conduct. You got this message and you presumed, I'm leaping ahead a bit, my suspicion is that you presumed that perhaps this hadn't been a failure. Like, how did you make the judgment? How did that change your judgment of the situation?
It took a year, and I think it's still taking place today as you and I talk about this show, that, spoiler alert, has become one of the most successful shows in the world, and I have gotten some of those things that I used to pursue. but it's different now. So we'll put a pin in that. We'll come back to this moment. I don't know yet. I'm going, okay, so he's right.
So you set the stage so this could be successful. And so you did your part. That's the message.
The message is you did your part, but the reality Did I do a good job? Was the fish and loaves the best? I don't know yet. I don't know what the reason is for this because if the feeding, if the result, the miracle isn't a good result for the resurrection of Gavin Stone, the name of the movie, if it's still failing, if it's never going to succeed, then what is the, I gave my loaves and fish.
He's just saying to me in that moment, don't worry about it. Be okay, because I'm wrestling with, so what's the next step? And I don't know. And God's economy of time is different from humanity's economy of time. So I'm wanting the answer now. He's saying, you don't have that answer now. Just know, just stop thinking about the result. Think more about the five loaves and two fish.
And so for me, as someone who over 40 years of my life had always measured myself by the results, was seeking a particular result, Affirmation was my drug of choice. Legitimacy was my drug of choice. It was my voice, my vice. Narcissism was my struggle. In this moment, I think that the feeding of the 5,000 refers to many things. It refers to financial success. It refers to Hollywood legitimacy.
It refers to what people think of me, the audience. The audience rejected what I was bringing to them, right? So did Hollywood. So did... Anything that I'm seeking. So, okay, well, that's nice to hear. But in that moment, I realized from now on—and I became a different person that night, that morning, 4 o'clock in the morning. Okay. God—
as long as I am in your will, as long as I am providing five loaves and two fish that you deem acceptable, the transaction's over. No longer will I seek the feeding. I'm not going to be the boy who provides the five loaves and two fish, sees it multiplied, goes home to his parents and says, look, mom and dad, I fed 5,000 people today. That would be ludicrous.
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