The Chosen is a video series based on the Biblical New Testament. It does like to take a good bit of creative liberty, to make it a good series, such as fleshing out minor characters in the Bible, inventing backstories and personalities for them, many are fully fleshed characters based on some brief description from the Bible.
One of my favourite things they’ve done was by representing St Matthew The Evangelist - one of Jesus’s disciples and author of the Gospel of Matthew - as being autistic. I find him quite a lovable character who I can empathise with at times in the series and I’m really glad for this inclusion 🤣
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Interesting! I’ve recently gotten into learning about the Bible, even going to a well-educated and motivated Pastor for classes. Can you elaborate on making St Matthew autistic? Is he known to have autistic traits, or is it more of a thought exercise?
Feel free to infodump. I want to know more about this!!
Sure!
The Chosen takes a LOT of creative liberty for character building, a lot of decisions they make you can kind of see how they came to that decision. The Bible doesn’t have much indication of St Matthew being autistic (unlike it implying Joseph, Mary’s husband, was dead by the time Jesus’ ministry began), but here’s why I think the writers of The Chosen came to the conclusion,
First, here’s some things we know about Matthew:
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He is a disciple of Jesus
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He is Jewish
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He is the most likely candidate for writing the gospel of Matthew
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He was a tax collector, but Jesus called him out of that.
The first doesn’t really carry any bearing, I just thought it was important to note. The second point affects the third. The Gospel of Matthew starts with a genealogy, and throughout the Gospel a lot of references are made to Jewish Scripture/Old testament. There’s also quite a lot of detail in Jesus’ teachings (It carries the most detailed account of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7 and Jesus’ teachings), so the writer of it was basically a nerd in Jewish scripture and tradition and very well educated in it.
Fourth point about being a tax collector, tax collectors needed to be well educated and the job was well paid but generally meant taking money from people who couldn’t afford it. It was also a role carried out by Jews for the occupying Romans. So basically anyone who did it was immediately an outcast, but it required good education and had good pay. So it would make sense for an autistic person who would struggle with social concepts and would already be seen as an outcast of sorts but was fine with education to take up the job.
If you have any more questions about anything Bible/Christianity related, please let me know!
Neat! Thanks for sharing 😀
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