Testament (2025): Rising Tides [s1e04]

This post is part of a series looking at Testament. Spoilers throughout

Episode 5 of Testament, "Rising Tides" picks up again a few weeks after the events of episode 4, because Saul has been planning how to 'get' the disciples. He's clearly been spending his time laying an elaborate trap for them by having a network of conversations with both Sadducees and Pharisees in an attempt to get them arrested.

There's an interesting reference, during an early gathering of the temple hierarchy, to the Essenes, a word which Saul uses as a bit of a slur. When Minister Alexander asks him if he's "come to grovel for the Sadducee vote", he responds "I think I'd rather join the Essenes" to which another colleague jokes is "a low blow". This is perhaps accurate, but it does make me wonder what the Essenes would look like in the world of Testament and where they would fit in, in this modernised world in which the show has constructed.

There's another interesting quote that caught my ear early on, when Saul describes the Jesus movement as "a far worse threat to our faith, a disease, and it's spreading, coming to take everything we have. It must be stopped". Given Saul has moved into full-on zealot here it would also be interesting to see what the Zealot movement looked like in this world. Some scholars consider them closely linked to a certain brand of Pharisaism, not least because of Paul's use of the term "zealous" to describe his former status (Gal 1:14).

Essentially, anyway, what happens is that the Sanhedrin give the order to arrest the disciples, and we see the Twelve being brought in. As the series, has tended to do each episode introduces new characters and develops those that were previously just in the background. Here we get to meet some of the other members of the Twelve that we haven't really touched on more before. We meet another James and we get to know Matthias a bit more. And there are additional lines for some of the other minor disciples. Presumably, the new James, is James the son of Alphaeus. He doesn't appear to be James, the brother of Jesus, and his small stature perhaps reflects the way that church tradition has come to refer to him as James the less, or "little James" as both The Chosen and this series credits call him.

Interestingly, James practically says the famous words from Gamaliel's speech in Acts 5:33-39 only in reverse, a kind of paraphrase "if he wants it to remain standing, then regardless of whether we are in the picture or not, it will remain standing". 

And then I think we get the most interesting moment of the episode, which is the angel coming and releasing them all through prison. She's portrayed very simply (see below), and as a Black woman who just appears in the midst of the disciples, without any fanfare or special effects. While they are just talking, suddenly a voice casually says "You could just leave". They turn around, and she's there. When Peter asks "Leave how?" She just gets up, opens the cell door and walks out of it before opening the doors of the other cells. After hesitating for a moment the disciples walk through the unlocked doors too. The guard doesn't even seem to see them go. It's really nicely done. 

This episode also does a good job of capture the concern around the ideas that other people are feeling. There's quite a lot here about the tensions that are being felt within the community at this point. There's a mix of fear and duty, whisked up with some joy and some concern. This episode firms up my sense of the different approach between it and The Chosen. The Chosen seems like it is simultaneously trying to help those people inside the church to get to know Jesus better, and show people who wouldn't consider themselves Christians, what (the filmmakers think) he was like.

Testament feels much subtler to me. It's a fascinating exercise in putting the text in a modern context. If it has a target audience and a point it's looking to express, I wonder if it's trying to challenge those inside the church to live like the early church did, only in today's world, rather than how the church often is now. As I have said before, the series makes parallels with certain types of churches that come through again and again. Some of the leadership ideas that come through are interesting, and if feels like it is putting out a challenge for a more radical form of Christianity. 

Yet having escaped, the disciples then head straight back to the temple courts to preach again. This is written into the text (5:17-21 -- the writers make a lot of material out of just a few verses here) but it's done in quite a straight fashion forward. The disciples end up getting imprisoned again and given the lash. It's not clear how many times they get hit with the lash, but it is shown as being very brutal, with some quite nasty seeming injuries afterwards. If nothing else it's a chance for the special effects and makeup department to do something more challenging. 

Underpinning all of this we have Saul who, from Gamaliel's perspective, is going off the rails. He's frozen out of the discussions about the Twelve with the Sanhedrin when he thinks he should be right there at the heart of it. Time and again he's reminded that he's not a member of the council, This would be bad enough, but then Gamaliel makes a the speech for which he's famous (Acts 5:33-39), urging a more laissez-faire approach to this emerging movement.

This puts him very much at loggerheads with Saul, who confronts him afterwards angrily. Saul foams at the mouth, with huge globules of spit literally flying out of his mouth. He completely goes off the deep end about Gamaliel's seeming compromise. I wonder if there sufficient motive for this. Is it going to get unpacked in future episodes, or is it just something that's assumed and read into the text, but not really explained. Either way, Gamaliel's response it to withdraw his support for Saul's candidacy for the Sanhedrin.

Meanwhile a couple of interesting subplots are developing and, as ever, the editors do a good job of layering the various overlapping story-lines to keep each one of these parallel stories ticking over. Susanna and Mary Magdalene continue to be quite prominent. We also get to find out Dana's backstory (pictured). In the previous episode it was suggested that she was a former sex worker who was try to escape drug addiction, ably assisted by Mary Magdalene.

Here she is revealed to be the estranged niece of Captain Rosh, chief of the temple guards, which eventually leads to a touching reconciliation scene between them. I'm curious to see how that dynamic is going to work out. She's tempted to walk away from the followers of Jesus, not because she wants to, but because she feels unsafe. However, it's the temple authorities she fears, but the kind of people that she had in her previous life. It's interesting so see this other potential threat here (and, of course, there are the Romans too). Conversely, Rosh is overjoyed that Dana is now "clean", but he also knows that it is a risk for him to be seen fraternising with Jesus' followers which creates quite an interesting dynamic.

The other major element that comes in this episode is that we get to find out a little bit more about the Hellenist widows. In Acts the demands of serving them is so high that seven leaders are appointed to focus just on that, including Stephen. This is where Stephen is first named in the text so obviously as we already know Stephen he acts as our way into the story of these women.

This is an aspect of the text that's rarely been portrayed well in Acts adaptation -- it's perhaps not as exciting to most filmmakers as all the preaching, persecution and miracles -- but here it's made into quite a moving scene. We're introduced to a new female character among the core followers. Initially, she seems a little bit mean, but this is more or less due to her being a little bit too bound to the rules, failing to understand and empathise and therefore missing the spirit of what the movement following Jesus is supposed to be about. There's quite a nice scene where she suddenly realises the full extent of the situation which is able to be resolved allowing the character to redeem herself. It was a satisfying little sequence, a complete little story on the periphereries of the main text, shedding light on elements of the story that are often missed.  

As per Luke's text, the followers ultimately have a vote to determine who the seven assigned to this task are going to be. It's the first thing in this series that feels a little overly macho, despite the presence of these twelve male apostles. I think this because Peter is quite quietly spoken, and has quite a gentle manner, Indeed, even the physically bigger characters like James have a gentle nature. Yet suddenly this process feels quite male -- there's quite a lot of loud cheering and yelping, and it's suddenly very apparent how absent the women are in this process. Mary Magdalene isn't even there. Susanna, who has been such a key part of the early movement in many ways, is not even in the running for one of these roles. What is her role exactly, and where does that fit in? So the series picks seven men (again), in addition to twelve disciples.

Given the modern context, this is a choice. It's a choice to stick very literally to the idea of seven men, where that could easily have included women without rocking the boat, particularly given many of those who are chosen in the text have names are not at all familiar to us. They could have been female. Indeed, some of the disciples could have been female. This is a modernisation after all. Perhaps some may say that that very idea of equality and the importance of women relative to men is only with us because of Christianity, but if so, I'm not so convinced by that. In the case of sexual equality, things have progressed and Christianity has sometimes been involved in the mix, but sometimes the church has pulled against it as well. If the filmmakers are advocating for a certain way of doing church, do they picture leadership as still just the preserve of men? 

There are a couple of interesting visuals in this episode. As mentioned above, just the anti-spectacle appearance of the angel is strong visual choice. There's also a scene (pictured at the top of this post) where the Sanhedrin are watching the disciples preaching to a crowd in the court. It's raining, and so we see them all with umbrellas, which makes for a really interesting shot, partly because of the composition (and the lowish camera angle) but mainly because we've not really seen umbrellas in biblical films much before. It makes for a very British scene in some ways, but it's quite good, because it breaks some of the standard ways of looking at these things, and really brings home that sense of the modern world that's at the heart of this adaptation. I like the series' commitment to this sort-of British context. It'll be interesting to see how this develops as the movement starts to spread more widely geographically.