Matthew: Autistic Gospel Writer - by Forrest
Today is short and sweet but in this week’s podcast episode, I talked about my relationship with my Christian faith as a spectrumite and how that has affected my mindset over the years. At one point, I talk about the way the TV series The Chosen depicted Matthew, one of Jesus’ disciples and one of the gospel writers. I talked last week about how I don’t care about heroes in media representing the autism spectrum as much as I care about them being what they’re supposed to be: heroes.
What if I could make an exception? In The Chosen, the disciple Matthew, played by Paras Patel, is depicted as someone who’s on the autism spectrum and yes, that was intentional by the showrunners. The show’s director, Dallas Jenkins, had this to say about Matthew:
When we created the character of Matthew, we decided that based on some of the characteristics we saw in the Gospels, that it was plausible—if not factual—but plausible that Matthew had Asperger’s Syndrome. I have personal experience with it on my side of the family, there’s a lot of people on the spectrum, I have a daughter who’s on the autism spectrum. And so it just made a lot of sense, and so once we decided that, writing into Matthew these characteristics that I know very well, I felt like we could do an accurate portrayal.
Matthew’s portrayal in the show is one that I appreciate, and I believe it was handled better than most other portrayals of characters on the spectrum I’ve seen. Matthew has a lot of traits and characteristics of a spectrumite without all those things ever feeling like too much or too much of a detriment to Matthew as a person. He’s intelligent with numbers (a key reason why he’s a tax collector when he first meets Jesus), he has OCD-like tendencies, rarely makes eye contact with others, his emotional range is strictly limited, and he’s socially awkward and takes things literally without understanding metaphors. The main reason why this portrayal means so much to me, however, is that it makes me as a spectrumite feel more welcome within the circle of the Christian faith. It meant so much to me to see Jesus in the show interacting with Matthew and communicating with him in a way that he would understand. To break it down simply, Jesus in the show was written in such a way that he was ‘getting down on Matthew’s level’. It reminded me that Jesus’ kingdom is not restricted to just neurotypical people or people that can just ‘get it’ right away. It assures me that there’s no need for me to ‘rise out of my autism’ in order to be a functioning member of Jesus’ family.
That’s what I believe is a need when it comes to representing autism in media. Don’t just make a character that is autistic without giving a narrative or character or even message driven reason for it. Making Matthew autistic in The Chosen wasn’t just a choice made for diversity or representation points. It was supposed to show the diversity in minds that Jesus is capable of reaching out to, and that includes someone like me.
See you all next week!
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