Chosen for The Chosen

Tyler Thompson ’10 has always loved two things: a good story and a good story told on film. In 2005, after graduating from high school in Fremont, Illinois, he had planned to study film at Columbia School of the Arts. But his sister, Ashley (Thompson) Anderson ’07, then a Moody Bible Institute student, suggested a different plan.

“Ashley said, ‘I think you should come here and get a foundation and then go to film school,’” Tyler recalls. “Well, I went to Moody, and then I just never went to film school.”

When he chose Biblical Languages as a major, he had no idea that it would pave the way for his current position as a writer for the award-winning television series The Chosen. In fact, after graduating, he laughingly remembers thinking, “Why did I study Hebrew? It’s going to be really hard to get a job.”

In his first semesters at Moody, Tyler’s love of relatable characters, historical settings, and engaging plots was already singling out some of his courses as favorites. “I wanted to learn Hebrew and study the Old Testament,” he says. “I really liked stories, and I knew I wanted to make films. And I also thought that the Hebrew language was just very beautiful aesthetically.”

“I took Hebrew from Michael Wechsler, and he didn't teach it just as a language the way you might learn Spanish or Portuguese. He taught it with a lot of storytelling and with a focus on how the words fit into the context of the narrative. And so that has followed me on the set (of The Chosen) because it was kind of like a masterclass in Jewish Studies.”

Dr. Wechsler MA ’96 isn’t surprised that Tyler has landed in a career that uses both his writing skills and his passion for ancient culture and Hebrew. “I remember that Tyler was an especially exuberant student,” he recalls. “He exhibited a genuine love for God’s Word and was fascinated with the details of the Hebrew language, which he saw as more than just an ancient language. He understood that the language of Scripture is a perfectly preserved lens through which to access the living truth of the people and events in Scripture.”

While at Moody, Tyler put his love of story into practice by writing one of his own for an on-campus competition, the Jerry Jenkins Writers Award. Tyler’s story about his own family’s practice of “modern Sabbath” choices that included a focus on resting and spending the day together as a family won him second place, which included a cash prize presented by Jerry Jenkins ’70 himself.

After graduation in 2010, Tyler worked as a video editor at a Chicago-area church where, ironically, he met Jerry’s son, Dallas Jenkins. The two shared a love for the impact of visual media as a whole and film in particular. Tyler clearly recalls telling Dallas that though he liked editing, he wanted to write. And he wanted to write for film.

Tyler and Dallas began working on short film projects, including a 2017 feature called The Shepherd, the story of the first Christmas told from the perspective of a first-century sheep herder. That focus of a biblical story explored through the unique viewpoint of a biblical character eventually led to the pair sketching out the framework for what would become the series The Chosen.

Dallas, who is part of the three-man writing team that includes Ryan Swanson as well as Tyler, is also the show’s director. After years of working alongside Tyler on many projects, Dallas says, “Everything with Tyler is big and dramatic, which is why we complement each other so well. He's an extremist with empathy, and I’m a pragmatist with no empathy, and the result is The Chosen!”

“Tyler has one of the most unique writing brains I’ve ever come across,” Dallas continues. “His visually poetic ideas are responsible for lines such as ‘I was one way, and now I’m completely different, and the thing that happened in between was Him’ and sequences such as the backstory and connection between Simon the Zealot and the man at the pool of Bethesda.”

Jerry Jenkins agrees with Dallas’ assessment of Tyler’s skills. Jerry, who is currently writing a series of novels based on seasons of The Chosen, doesn’t work on set with the writing team, but he regularly sees the scripts that Tyler helps create and finalize. Jerry doesn’t hesitate to say, “His writing is brilliant. I come in at the back end and base The Chosen novels on the scripts and the shows, and I often find some of my favorite sources were originated by Tyler.”

For Tyler, the series is intentionally not like any other film project about Jesus, and even the title goes beyond a singular description of Jesus as “the chosen.” “It's an exploration of the person of Jesus Christ through the eyes of those with whom He chose to spend His time,” Tyler explains. “And then it explores this broader thing of Israel as the chosen people. And we sort of morphed Jesus’ teaching in the Decapolis and including Gentiles into a larger sort of chosen family of God. It’s a multifaceted meaning.”

The series, which began in April of 2019 and is currently airing season three on Prime, Peacock, Netflix, and The Chosen app, centers on three years in the life and ministry of Jesus and His disciples. “We call them the year of preparation, the year of popularity, and the year of persecution,” Tyler explains. “So we’re kind of splitting it into three acts across seven seasons where you have Someone who is preparing and gathering, Someone who is seeing a great following, and then Someone who’s really getting dragged down toward an ultimate Good Friday situation.”

Rather than drawing from just one gospel writer as other productions have done, the writing team gleans from all four gospels. The show features what Tyler calls “plausible fiction” as it depicts day-to-day occurrences and interactions that would fall in line with the lives of first-century rabbis and their students but may not be directly found in the Bible.

Tyler says The Chosen wants to delve into the humanity of the disciples as well as their point of view. He sees this as another unique aspect of the show that’s been overlooked or under-emphasized in other productions. “They (the disciples) tend to be just kind of stock characters in the background. Maybe a little bit of Peter, and maybe a little bit of John, and then everyone else. It’s like ‘second cowboy from the left’ in a western. They’re all just kind of like flat.

“So because this is a multi-season series, we have the time and space to really explore these human facets, and we find that the more we do that, the more relatable each of them is. It kind of makes a really good apologetics case for the Bible because the more we look at the stories, there’s such a consistency of human behavior over thousands of years. That’s why people relate to the show because they can see their own shortcomings in some of the disciples or their own challenges and feel like, ‘I did that too’ or ‘I feel that way too.’”

And it isn’t just the show’s audience who has responded to the focus on encountering Jesus through the viewpoint of ordinary men and women. “Every actor on the show has been impacted by being on it,” Tyler observes. For some who are Christians, the emphasis on digging into the characters’ encounters with Jesus “really blew the thing open for them.”

Other cast and crew have been impacted by meeting Jesus for the first time through biblical narratives they knew nothing of. “It's a professional Screen Actors Guild show,” explains Tyler. “We have people from all over the world. People who are Jewish, people from Israel and other places in the Middle East. And no matter what their faith background, everyone has become very attached to their character and has learned a lot.”

Cast comments range from “This deepens my faith,” to “This got me curious about what these stories really mean,” to “I never knew that there were so many interesting stories in the Bible. I thought it was just a religion.”

“There are a lot of screenwriters out there, but they don’t really know about Old Testament biblical history,” Tyler says. “There are also hundreds and hundreds of Moody grads with a Biblical Languages degree, but they might not have a flair for screenwriting. So I feel very blessed that these two callings sort of intersected with The Chosen. There’s no other TV show where that would be the case.”

Tyler looks back on his time at Moody as laying the foundation for his ability to see the personal impact Jesus made on the people He encountered—and to tell those stories through the eyes of those everyday characters.

“That’s the biggest thing, I think, that I took away from my time at Moody—understanding the religious and cultural context of these people before they met this Person, who to them was just a person from their time—until He wasn’t, you know? I’m just really grateful for my education.”