You hear this all the time, people taking dramatic license. I have to do it a lot in my writing as a Christian playwright. Especially if I am writing a play based on a Bible story, or a work of non-fiction. One of my favorite TV shows in recent years is The Chosen. I think it is done very well, great casting, great story telling, great filming and direction. I think Dallas Jenkins is a genius. Now, I realize that even though it is extremely popular worldwide, it sparks a lot of controversy. One of the main complaints is that they appear to be re-writing the Bible. It is simply creating a fictional story and dialog to go along with the true scriptural passage. It is why my wife does not like watching the show with me. She keeps saying, “that’s not in the Bible”. Dallas would be the first to admit that much of what they tell probably did not even happen that way, but they see the probability/possibility/believability of it. I told my wife that she would not like most of my Bible based plays that I have written, because I have to do the same thing.
It is a difficult thing to create drama from a passage of scripture. There is what is there, written on the page. You can do just that and try to act it. There was a Jesus movie based on the Book of John (I believe) where they only spoke and acted the scripture. It worked I guess for what they were trying to accomplish. But when I did that once telling Paul’s story, it really lacked in telling the story, because we did not add anything to the dialogue. A few years ago, I was commissioned to write an Easter play based on the characters of Lazarus and his sisters. Well, if you remember, they are not mentioned anymore after the scene where Mary washes His feet with her hair and tears. So, I had to write a complete fictional story, based on real events. The Appearing was born from my speculation about how it could have happened. You create fictional characters to interact with the Biblical characters and tell a believable story about how they might have reacted to news of the resurrection.
Even writing a true story about people in history (other than Biblical), you have to create dialogue to make the scenes work and play out. When writing The Hiding Place (based on the Corrie ten Boom story), I had the book as a reference, but I still had to create more dialogue to play out the scenes as it is not all there in the book. Of course, I try to stick to the book as closely as I can. In my big passion play, Scenes From the Life of Christ, I decided to have Jesus’ lines be only scripture, while I created dialogue for everyone else. Not sure I would always do it that way. I have no problem with Jonathan Roumie’s portrayal in The Chosen.
Very interesting comments by author.