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A Modern Gospel

What is a gospel? And why do I consider the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar to be one? Isn't a gospel by definition one of the books of the Bible? If so, then nothing written in recent centuries could be counted as a gospel. This is because the "canon" of scripture (the official table of contents) was settled back in the fourth century AD. Who settled the matter? Who decided what writings should be included, excluded? Various synods of bishops meeting here and there in North Africa and Constantinople. Who gave them the authority to make such a decision? Keep in mind that the Bible is a book many people have lived by and died for, believing the book to be the written Word of God. But no one ever claimed that the voice of God suddenly rang out and told the bishops which books to include. Being an editor of fiction anthologies myself, I know this would make the selection process a lot simpler. But, no, like me, the bishops made their own judgment calls. Did they make the right choices? Some religious leaders tell us that we must simply accept their ancient editorial decisions as if the bishops were just as divinely inspired as the original Bible writers themselves were supposed to have been. This is quite ironic, since on all other matters the same clergymen will warn us to listen only to the Bible, not to the words of mere mortals--and yet it was the opinions of mere mortals like ourselves who determined what was Bible and what wasn't. ¹

Today many people, including religious people, are beginning to realize we must think for ourselves in this as in all other matters. Religious questions are potentially too important to leave in anyone else's hands. This means that it is we who must choose what we will consider to be our "Bible." We might choose some other sacred text, like the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita, to replace the Bible, or to be added to it. Or we might take a second look at some of the books excluded from the official Bible long ago. Luckily, copies of several of them managed to survive the attempts of churchly inquisitors to burn all of them. To define the contents of what is going to be considered sacred scripture is to try to control people's beliefs in advance by eliminating other sources of ideas.

If you're thinking about choosing a new set of "biblical" writings for yourself, you might even decide to write your own. That is what the writers of the Bible did, after all. And that is what Tim Rice did, too.

But, someone may object, the ancient apostles and scribes had an advantage over us: they were infallibly directed by the Holy Spirit to write what they wrote. That's why it's so trustworthy. In fact, critical, scientific study of the Bible, begun back in the eighteenth century, has revealed that the Bible writers quite often contradicted themselves and each other. They regularly treated myth and legend as fact, just as credulous rumor-mongers do today. They took for granted superstitions and pre-scientific beliefs common in their day. They disagree with one another even on major theological issues. Whether the Bible is "divinely inspired" or not seems to be a moot point. Even if it is inspired, that hasn't protected it from the same sort of errors and corruptions that all human writings are liable to. So what the Bible writers did was apparently no different from what modern writers are doing, whether they are poets, philosophers, essayists, fiction writers, whatever. All these literary genres are present in the Bible. It is, as is often said, a library of books, not a single, unified composition.

Which one of these genres does a "gospel" belong to? Actually, several at the same time. A gospel is a writing about Jesus in which a writer expresses his faith about Jesus and perhaps seeks to awaken the same faith in the reader. The word "gospel" is an English word, a contraction of the Old English "good spell," i.e., good report, good news. It is a translation of the Greek word euangelion. This means something like "the big news." Literally it breaks down to "good news," but by the time of early Christianity, the prefix "eu-" had been overused, beaten to death (just like our words "marvelous," "awesome," etc.). It was used to refer to things like the announcement that the Emperor would be staying the night in your village on his way back to Rome. Now this might be good news, or it might not be. He might commandeer your food, your horses, use your home as a stable for his horses, leaving you to sleep on the street. Either way, it was certainly the "big news." And the early Christians' big news was Jesus. It might be good news or bad depending on your reaction to it: "This sounds great! What must I do to be saved?" (Acts 16:30). Or "What can this babbler be trying to say?" (Acts 17:18).

At first the message preached by evangelists ("Believe in Jesus and you will be saved!" Acts 16:31) was called the gospel. It didn't mean a book, as when we refer to the four gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This was a later stage, when some Christians decided they needed written documents to use as long-distance evangelistic tools. (Luke may have written his gospel and it's sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, in order to persuade his reader, a man named Theophilus, to accept the Christian faith, which Luke tried to make look as attractive as he could (Luke 1:1-4). John wrote with pretty much the same purpose in mind (John 20:30-31). Matthew rewrote and expanded the earlier Gospel of Mark to use as a catechetical manual for missionaries to use in teaching their converts (Matthew 28:19-20). Mark was probably an evangelistic tract (Mark 2:10; 13:10; 14:9).

If a gospel is a story of Jesus, does that mean a gospel is a history? It's not that simple. The New Testament gospels are mainly narrative, but the writers tend to treat the facts found in their source material (including previous gospels: Matthew and Luke both used most of Mark's text) with such freedom, changing the order of events, rewording what Jesus said, apparently attributing to him sayings of their own, in short, as if they were writing a piece of "historical fiction" like many novels and docudramas today. For instance, the Disney movie Pocahontas is certainly based on historical characters, but no adult thinks Pocahontas and John Smith spoke these words or did these things. Or think about Oliver Stone's movies about JFK and Nixon. Many scholars think that the gospels are ancient novels, largely fictionalizing the original events of the life of Jesus. A few even think that there was no historical Jesus in the first place, that he is a fictional character based on myths and legends of many Middle Eastern and Hellenistic gods and heroes.

The importance of these facts for our discussion is this: many viewers, readers, listeners of modern Jesus fictions like Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, Kahlil Gibran's Jesus the Son of Man, Webber and Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar are offended, even shocked at what they view as the blasphemy of a mere mortal rewriting the holy story of Jesus to suit their own tastes. And yet a close study of the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John makes it absolutely plain that this is precisely what they did! This is the major reason for there being four different ones. None of them are perfectly accurate accounts of what Jesus did and said. Nor were they trying to be. In this book I am going to be trying to demonstrate how the same techniques scholars apply to the New Testament gospels can help us to understand the riches of Tim Rice's lyrics. But for the moment, we should realize this: we will understand the four gospels better once we recognize they were doing essentially the same thing as Tim Rice.

But isn't Superstar a different sort of writing from the canonical gospels? It tells a story, but it is a musical libretto. But really this is not much of a difference. It has been known for a long time that the sayings of Jesus in the New Testament gospels, like those of the Old Testament prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, etc., are composed in verse. Modern translations try to indicate this by indenting the sayings like blank verse poetry. It doesn't rhyme very often (not even in the original Greek text of the gospels), but Hebrew and Aramaic (the languages Jesus would have spoken as a first century Palestinian Jew) usually didn't either. Instead, biblical poetry relied mainly on meter and parallelism (immediately paraphrasing an idea just stated, both versions put in poetic diction). The teachings of Jesus in the four gospels manifest just these characteristics. They read, in fact, very much like the lyrics of Jesus Christ Superstar.

What Language Shall I Borrow?

Another similarity is that of poetic diction. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have Jesus speak in common, simple language, the language of the peasants, simple but very powerful and beautiful in its effect. Any reading of, say, the Sermon on the Mount will verify this. Kahlil Gibran, in his gospel Jesus the Son of Man, follows this path faithfully, with the result that one often catches himself thinking that these words might actually be slipped into the New Testament without anybody knowing the difference. Nikos Kazantzakis (The Last Temptation of Christ) went in the opposite direction. There Jesus, like everyone else, speaks powerfully, strikingly, with colorful metaphors, but in plain speech, not overtly poetic, though Kazantzakis's writing as a whole certainly comes across as powerfully poetic. But Tim Rice settles down right in the middle. His characters, Jesus included, speak a strange prosy poetry, rhyming but mundane, somewhat the same effect of Rap lyrics, more clever than movingly poetic.

Many reviewers of the rock opera couldn't get past this and commented on the seeming dullness, even the silliness of Rice's lyrics. They felt the effect was not so much profane as trivializing. Clive Barnes concluded that Rice "does not have a very happy ear for the English language. There is a certain air of dogged doggerel about his phrases... His language is unforgivably pedestrian"² Catharine Hughs agreed: "There is a banality to Mr. Rice's lyrics, a persistent lack of originality in his relentlessly pursued rhymes, that even their eager courting of the vernacular does not excuse"³ "The lyrics are pedestrian and often absurd" (Harold Clurman). ⁴ Jack Kroll of Newsweek opined that "The lyrics, like those of most opera librettos..., often seem numb and dull," though he is ready to admit that "sometimes [they] are dulcetly melted or dramatically tempered in the flow of the music."⁵ Cheryl Forbes of Christianity Today (where, as in some of the Roman Catholic magazines just quoted, one sometimes feels that reviewers are striking the pose of the aesthete and finding piddling reasons to discourage readers from viewing films the reviewer really wants them to shun on dogmatic grounds, but dare not overtly say so since he knows no cultured despiser of Christian dogma would take that kind of warning seriously) disdains Rice's lyrics as "emptied of meaning,"⁶ while Martin Gottfried, reviewing for Women's Wear Daily, speaks of "Miserable lyrics."⁷

Others, pious Christians, as we have seen already, condemned Superstar for its departures from Holy Writ. But both criticisms amounted to the same thing. Those who blame Superstar for not being the Bible were much like "superfans" of Stephen King or Tolkien who are guaranteed to despise any film adaptation of their favorite author's work. One feels that nothing would satisfy these people short of a movie in which someone simply sits there and reads the written text. If a fundamentalist Christian picketed the theater in outrage at Superstar, their indignation was essentially that of the fan, a kindred breed of "true believers."

But the drama and music critics, ostensibly not theologically motivated, were not too far removed from the same sort of pedantry. They had their own Procrustean bed into which all literary works must fit by hook or by crook. Allowing no variation on a theme, they operated on the basis of certain customary genre conventions, insisting that an epic theme must be expressed in an elevated and dignified manner. They displayed the bean-counting narrowness of the dried up schoolmarm, to whom the greatest sin is to, God forbid, end a sentence with a preposition. God save us from splitting an infinitive. The irony here is that Jesus Christ Superstar is not such an innovation even on these grounds. We already had modern, hip versions of great classics. And critics applauded West Side Story (which set Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in the midst of urban street gangdom) and Archibald McLeish's JB (a ghetto version of the biblical book of Job) for essentially the same thing others panned Superstar for. (Uh-oh: I ended a sentence with a preposition.)

But there were a few reviewers who saw a glimmer of Rice's technique and its effect. An anonymous Time reviewer praised Rice's Muse with faint damnation, commenting that, "Tim Rice's lyrics occasionally turn mundane in their otherwise commendable effort to speak in contemporary terms, but his psychologically aware variations on the Gospels are often adroitly arresting." ⁸ Walter Kerr of The New York Times Theater Reviews recognized that it was not an either/or choice when it comes to mundane words and psychological acuity: "Lyricist Tim Rice has found for the rock musical a personal, and I think persuasive tone of voice. This tone of voice is not merely mod or pop or jauntily idiomatic in an opportunistic way. It sheathes an attitude. It speaks, over and over again, of the inadequate, though forgivable, responses ordinary men always do make when confronted by mystery. These are blunt, rude, pointed unlyrical lyrics... meant to... catch hold of thought processes-venal, obtuse, human. Delivered in the jargon we more or less live by, they become woefully and ironically recognizable." ⁹ Kerr was right on target, I believe, in seeing the importance of the lyrics' use of jargon as a kind of anti-poetic poetry and of irony to reinforce the element of ambiguity of human responses to mystery. I will develop these themes presently.

Gordon Clanton, writing for The Christian Century, described the lyrics as "generally [being] theologically provocative and laden with double meaning." Rice's version of the Words of Institution at the Last Supper Clanton calls "stunning." ¹⁰ George Melloan of The Wall Street Journal was on Rice's wavelength, or in New Testament terms, he "had ears to hear": "the words have an engaging simplicity and special poetic quality." ¹¹ How can reviewers differ so radically over the quality of the lyrics? As Stanley Fish shows (Is There a Text in This Class?) each reader or critic will draw different conclusions or make different evaluations of a text depending on the particular set of criteria or categories he brings to the text. If you think poems all ought to be sonnets, then maybe you're not the right reviewer for a book of blank verse.

Poetic diction is ever a mystery. Even if one can explain what makes it transcend mere prose, even if the critic manages to explain how poetic diction bewitches, the risk is that the critic will have to ruin the effect in order to explain it. J.B. Phillips, himself an extraordinary translator of the gospels into colloquial, yet poetic, prose, once observed that the danger is to kill the text and do an autopsy on it. You will then have discovered what made it tick, but you have stopped it from ticking. You can appreciate the beauty of a butterfly more closely if you kill it and pin it to a display board, but you have lost the most beautiful thing about the butterfly: its life. But let's take the risk.

Tim Rice has, as I see it, taken prosy slang, familiar if extravagant expressions ("you've backed the right horse," "he's top of the poll," "when John did his baptism thing"), and troped them. That is, Rice has used them slightly out of their ordinary context, turning them a bit, removing them an extra step from their usual references, making them metaphors for metaphors. He arrests our attention by maintaining the poetic structure one might expect in a gospel, and yet filling it with rough-hewn speech. Poetic diction is in many ways a creative use of words beyond their ordinary reference. A word may not usually be employed as a metaphorical comparison for some emotion or abstraction, and yet there is a basis for metaphorical use, perhaps some overlooked point of analogy or similarity. Traditional Christian poetry might speak of the wounds of Christ eloquently speaking of the savior's love. Come to think of it, though we usually wouldn't, wounds could be compared to open mouths. So if a wound is evidence of something that caused them, the wounds may metaphorically be said to speak of that cause.

The understandable yet unusual figure of speech serves to "defamiliarize" the subject described (As Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Tomaschevsky, two of the greatest Russian Formalist critics, say), so we see it as new. "After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it-hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception... And art exists that we may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."¹²

Tim Rice does the same thing. Only he uses the familiar and the prosaic as metaphoric tropes (figurative turns of phrase) for things we have sealed away behind stain glass. If poetry usually brings out the unnoticed sacred beauty in the ordinary, Rice has set himself the task of having to defamiliarize the extraordinary. For we take even the extraordinary for granted. Because the gospel events are extraordinary, superhuman, we have elevated them to the status of religious myth and dogma. And, ironically, these we take for granted! Once one has heard them embedded in dull sermons for years, clubbed to death by a decade of pedantic Sunday School teachers, the shocking mandates of the Sermon on the Mount come to seem as familiar as the words of a TV commercial. Thus it comes to be that tales of a crucified god rising from the dead seem as dull as reruns of Green Acres. And so, if the tale is to strike us again, it must be defamiliarized. And the only way to defamiliarize it is to make it sound mundane, profane. Once the cross, the ancient Roman device of execution by slow torture, has become a piece of gold jewelry, we may have to depict Jesus dying in the electric chair. It was a trope to make the splintery cross a golden throne. Now, to communicate afresh the original point, we may have to trope that throne into one of today's engines of brutality.

It is one thing to remind oneself that the Shakespearian eloquence of the Bible's Jesus must have been put forth in common speech for the original audience. But it is quite another thing to have it rendered directly in today's slang. While the new wording of Superstar is faithful in spirit to the original, the fact that Jesus and his disciples are made to speak our own vernacular, even our own slang, gives it all an arresting quality. Linguist Eugene Nida might call what Superstar does "dynamic equivalence" translation. That is what Bible versions like the Living Bible and the Good News Bible do. The same basic idea, but in familiar modern speech. But there are additional elements in Rice's version of the gospel drama.

If You'd Have Come Today

One of these is an intentional use of anachronism. Anachronism is placing something in a story of the past that didn't exist at the time. For instance, the rumor is that if you slow down the tape when you are watching Ben-Hur, you can spot one of the ancient Roman chariot drivers wearing a wrist watch. Or in The Shadow, one museum guard suggests to another that they order a pizza. But they couldn't have ordered one. The Shadow's adventures occur in the 1930's, but Americans only encountered pizza in Naples after World War Two. In Jesus Christ Superstar the crowd of gawkers dogging Jesus' footsteps while he is led, bound, to Caiaphas' palace suddenly become a crowd of pestering reporters. And one of them fires off the mock assurance, "You'll escape in the final reel!" Obviously this presupposes the audience knows about B-movies with last minute rescues. But movie theaters were scarce in first century Palestine, to say the least. A colossal anachronism in the movie version of Superstar occurs when Judas, writhing in self-reproach at conspiring with Jesus' enemies, is buzzed by warplanes. He has unleashed against Jesus the dogs of war, and the modern weaponry drives this home with a force that a Roman chariot with sword-bearing legionaries could never do.

What is the point of Rice's constant use of anachronism? We see it most clearly in the scene near the end where the glorified Judas descends from heaven confessing his continued bafflement. Though assumed into heaven in acknowledgement of his innocent complicity in God's dirty scheme, Judas is no more enlightened as to the point of it all than he was before his suicide. "Every time I think of you, I can't understand... If you'd have come today, you've reached a whole nation. Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication." Judas speaks from the still-baffled perspective of the twentieth century. That is the "today" of which he speaks. Judas, both here and elsewhere, serves as the reader's representative, the sympathetic but skeptical outsider. In our day, many would hasten to admit Jesus was among the most admirable figures in history. But they feel they can no longer share the religious worship of Jesus. They feel confused both at why Jesus should be given religious veneration ("He's not a king; he's just the same as anyone I know."), and at their own sense that there is something important about him that they are missing ("I don't know how to love him." "Neither you, Simon, nor the fifty thousand...nor Judas… understand").

The most obvious, as well as the most important, piece of poetic anachronism in Superstar is the very title of the work. The term "superstar" comes from the modern entertainment industry, especially movies and rock music. Tim Rice has explained that his intent was to, as he has Judas say, "strip away the myth from the man." He wanted to portray Jesus as a real human being, not a god in human guise. Theoretically, this should offend no one, no matter how theologically orthodox, since the official Christian claim has always been that, no matter how fully Jesus was God, he was also fully a human being. Now, on the human level, what would it have meant for Jesus to be such an object of popular adulation? And how would he and others have perceived the sudden abandonment of Jesus by the fickle crowds? Surely the best equivalent is the figure of a superstar, a celebrity who exercises potent charisma on the crowds, and yet is dependent on their adulation as the source of the charisma he wields over them. When the cheering stops, when the ratings drop, the helium leaks swiftly from the balloon, and it soars no more.

One must at the same time pity and admire the celebrity actors and singers whose heyday was the 40's through the 60's, the icons of the old musicals and night clubs. Many of them realize they are lampooned as grotesque caricatures by the baby boomers who had to sit through their appearances on The Hollywood Palace show because their parents controlled the TV set. So they make the best of it and appear on David Letterman and MTV as living parodies of themselves. When Robert Goulet shows up on Letterman singing the theme song for the "Supermarket Finds" segment, and glad to get the work--well, it's kind of pathetic. Like Bela Lugosi being directed by Ed Wood, or anybody sitting on Joe Franklin's splitting Naugahide couch.

Suddenly the fate of the martyr, or of young, dead showbiz icons venerated as if they were martyrs (James Dean, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe), starts to look pretty good. For a former superstar, fading quietly away must be an even more agonizing way to go. Is it possible Dr. King would have sunk to the annoying has-been status of his surviving colleague Ralph Abernathy, had King not perished at the height of his fame? This is what the Superstar Jesus begins to realize in Gethsemane when he demands to know from God, whose advice he will grudgingly follow as if God were his agent, "Why, why, why must I die? Would I be more noticed than I ever was before? Would the things I've said and done matter any more?" You bet they would, and it is perhaps because Jesus himself begins to realize this that he is willing to see the whole thing through. Better a short life with an immortality of fame than a long life followed by historical oblivion for its sequel. At the last supper, after all, his principle fear is long-term historical insignificance: "I must be mad thinking I'll be remembered; I must be out of my head! Look at your blank faces! My name will mean nothing ten minutes after I'm dead!" But the cross remains his best hope of remaining at the "top of the poll." His strategy is "to conquer death, you only have to die."

So anachronism is a means of forcing the story into the present, and forcing the audience into the narrative world in which the opera takes place. We are practically on stage. Strangely, the idea is not unlike the Roman Catholic idea of transubstantiation, the miracle of the mass, whereby the past event of Jesus is drawn forward into the present, so that the communicant is brought to stand at the foot of Calvary.

I am not trying to attribute some kind of religious motive to Tim Rice, much less to suggest that Jesus Christ Superstar is a sacramental ritual. No, the point is just the reverse: the similarity between the rock opera and a sacramental ritual points up the fact, long known to anthropologists and liturgical theologians alike, that the effectiveness of rituals is in their character of theater, drama. This is not the place for it, but I am prepared to argue that the only "faith" necessary for religion to work for you is what Coleridge called the "poetic faith," the "temporary willing suspense of disbelief" we experience whenever we find ourselves drawn into a movie or a play. If it gets especially suspenseful, romantically tragic, or frightening, we have to remind ourselves that "it's only a play." As long as you become drawn into the drama of religion during the weekly service, it does the trick; you hardly have to bother trying to believe in the supernatural for the rest of the week!

Don't Crowd Me--Heal Yourselves!

Anachronism is not only a device for defamiliarizing the gospel story so it can speak to us anew. It also helps create the element of ironic distance which permeates Superstar. Irony usually suggests satire and parody, if not even outright mockery. I do not mean to suggest that Superstar subjects Jesus to mockery. To the contrary, the scene in which Jesus is made sport of by Herod Antipas strikes many listeners either as sadly poignant or, on the other hand, as doubly ironic since the joke seems ultimately to be on Herod himself who is too dull-witted to see what counts as real Messianic glory. It has little to do with walking across swimming pools, much to do with the cross.

Ironic distance is something else. Irony is used by the author in this case as a technique for pulling the reader back from a complete and comfortable absorption in the story. You begin to see a gap opening between what the characters think is going on and what the narrator thinks is going on. He is inviting you to share his privileged, extra-textual standpoint. Usually authors try to get you to agree to that "temporary willing suspense of disbelief" Coleridge talked about. Usually this works well in a movie of a book. It has worked very well indeed when we find ourselves crying at the sad events in a fictional drama. Or when we are as scared as the victims in a horror movie. In fact, our anxiety may grow so great that we try to get hold of ourselves and say, "Hey, calm down! It's only a movie for Pete's sake!" Ironic distance is the same sort of reminder. The author is telling the reader: "Wait just a minute! What's wrong with this picture?" To take an extreme example, I see the cartoon The Simpsons and the sitcom Married with Children as being based entirely on the device of ironic distancing. Unlike the old sitcoms like Father Knows Best, where you were to identify with the characters so as to share vicariously in their trials and triumphs, the presupposition behind every minute of Married with Children is "What a bunch of jerks!" One does not sympathize with Al Bundy's disasters for a split second, since they were the predictable results of his own shifty schemes. The Bundy family are one and all bad role models, so the show does not urge us to identify with them; on the contrary, it forbids us to empathize with them.

It is worth noting that narrative irony, ironic distancing is not alien even to the four canonical gospels. Robert C. Tannehill has demonstrated how Mark's Gospel first depicts the twelve disciples of Jesus in an enviable and admirable role, confidants and colleagues of Jesus. They are privy to Jesus' plans and privileged to hear more of his teaching than anyone else. The reader is led to think, "If only I could be like them!" But gradually, as Mark's story unfolds, a rift opens up between the reader and the disciples. Mark writes with irony, winking to the reader who soon comes to realize that he understands Jesus better than the disciples did! It becomes apparent that the disciples never seem to get the point of any of the parables; they ignore Jesus' predictions of his death and resurrection; it never sinks in that he can do miracles to get them out of a jam, even though they have seen him do enough of them. The author is in the know; so is the reader. It is the thick-headed disciples who are lost in confusion. "Mark shapes a story which encourages the reader to associate himself with the disciples... However, the relation between the disciples and the Christian reader does not remain simple as the portrait of the disciples becomes clearly negative, the tendency to identify is countered by the necessity of negative evaluation. A tension develops between these two attitudes, with the reader caught in the middle... [And] as the inadequacies of the disciples' response to Jesus become increasingly clear, the reader must distance himself from the disciples and begin to seek another way." ¹³ What is Mark's point? It is hard to be sure, but we may venture a guess or two. It may be that Mark sides with the Apostle Paul and wanted to make Paul's rivals, the Twelve, look inept, unworthy of the faith many Christians had placed in them and their teaching. Or it might be that he is warning the reader: see where the Twelve strayed off the path? Is it can happen to them, it can happen to you. Watch your step! Tannehill opts for the latter.

So much for Mark. Why does Tim Rice employ ironic distance throughout his gospel, Jesus Christ Superstar? A moment ago I tried to explain how modernizing gospel language helps make the story of Jesus available to us freshly in the present. But at the same time, as paradoxical as it may seem, the anachronisms, as well as the slang language, keep us aware that we are in our own time looking back to the time of Jesus. Unlike the old TV show, Rice is not telling us, "All is as it was then, only YOU ARE THERE!" No, we are here. If Superstar sometimes sounds almost parodic ("You'll escape in the final reel"), it is trying to remind us that we are outsiders, no matter how much we might wish to be insiders. Otherwise the temptation will be too great to do what people do when they read the four gospels: to identify so closely with the text, imagining that we are part of it, that we begin subtly to rewrite the text even as we read it, filtering it through the grid of our beliefs and expectations. It is from such a too-comfortable acquaintance with the gospels that we need to be disengaged if they are to have any power to speak anew to us, to surprise and amaze us, as Jesus is shown amazing and affronting his disciples.

Thus it is Judas Iscariot, not Jesus, nor even Peter, whose viewpoint we share. "Basically, the idea of our whole opera was to have Christ seen through the eyes of Judas."¹⁴ Like Judas, we are interested in Jesus, admiring of him, yet eternally puzzled. No serious reader of the gospels can easily satisfy his curiosity. There is no obvious solution to the mystery hymned by the chorus, "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Who are you? What have you sacrificed?" Legions of theologians as well as simple believers have pondered these same questions throughout the Christian centuries. There was a whole series of debates among theologians and bishops in the fourth and fifth centuries over these questions. Was Jesus simply a great man? Was he an incarnation of God? Was his human aspect merely a sham? Was he a man who "channeled" the voice of God? Was he something like an angel come to earth? The early Christian thinkers handled these great questions gingerly, as if they were handling explosives. Salvation seemed to depend on arriving at the proper orthodox conclusions. Little room remained for error. At stake was not whose theory would win acceptance, as when philosophers or scientists debate today. At the end of the series of Ecumenical Councils, the bishops had adopted the dogmas enshrined in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Chalcedonian Creeds.

Essentially the punch line was that Jesus Christ was one person possessing (or partaking of) two natures, divine and human. He was fully human as well as fully divine. But his identity, his personhood came from the divine side: there would never been a man known as Jesus of Nazareth had God not planned to incarnate himself as a man. So Jesus is a divine person with a divine nature and a human nature. And that divine person is one of three divine persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who share divine nature and are one single God.

Did any of this make any sense? Even the framers of this theology had to say both yes and no. On the one hand, they made quite clear that if you didn't hold these beliefs about Jesus, you were cursed of God and damned to hell. But on the other hand, they implicitly admitted that there was nothing positive to believe here. In other words, they admitted they hadn't really explained anything. What they had done was to eliminate various false ideas about Jesus. The dogmas were really boundary markers beyond which lay mystery, before which one might only bow in humble faith. The result of this double bind was a situation in which one need only have "implicit faith;" i.e., one could not understand what precisely it was that one was required to believe, so all one had to do was to believe that whatever theologians understood these beliefs to mean--must be true. Rather like holding a sealed envelope and saying "Whatever it says in here is true! I know it, even though I have no idea what is written in here!" Incomprehensible creeds do not tell the believer anything in the long run except to tell him that he'd best not question the party line, or there'll be hell to pay. As Pontius Pilate says, "But what is truth? Is truth unchanging law?" Theologian Don Cupitt makes this point well: "From early times there has been a tendency to treat doctrines defined by official gatherings of the hierarchy as something like laws, and deviations from them or failure to uphold them as something like a crime."¹⁵ In other words, "thought crime," as George Orwell called it in 1984.

When you are a "law-abiding" believer in this sense, you have "lost something kind of crucial" (as the Jesus of Godspell would say), namely the felt need to search for truth. Somebody has told you that you already have all the truth you could need, and to question that truth is blasphemy. What a result: religion telling you not to bother seeking the truth. Spiritual and intellectual complacency is the result. The soul and the mind become "comfortably numb." And religion starts badmouthing the intellect. Job is blamed for daring to question God. Paul condemns the wisdom of philosophers and intellectuals as the merest foolishness in the eyes of God. No, God prefers the ignorant and has made them his chosen people (1 Corinthians 1:26-29). We are congratulated insofar as we can manage to believe without sufficient evidence (John 20:29). We are told it is a woeful lack of faith to see any plan as unrealistic. We are told to become childlike; otherwise we will be excluded from the kingdom (Matthew 18:3).

And it is such religiously reinforced childishness that made many pious people protest Superstar as blasphemy when it first appeared. Some reproached the libretto for not keeping literally to the words of the gospels, for adding new ones, for sketching in the details of the vague gospel characters. Bob Larson (famous nowadays for his radio talk show, then for his rock record burning rallies) even went so far as to claim that Tim Rice was literally inspired by a demon who dictated the lyrics to him!¹⁶ Larson "knew” this because he later had occasion, he reported, to exorcise the same spook from a teenage rock listener, and the demon confessed the whole thing. There you have it, right from the Pale Horse's mouth, I guess.

I suggest that this outrage on the part of the faithful was much the same as the indignation of the little child who wants the bedtime story told in the very same words each and every night. If the parent wants to skip a part for time's sake, or begins to summarize, embroider, paraphrase, the child will sternly bring him or her back to the letter of the text. You see, it is the familiarly formulaic drone of sameness which helps the child go to sleep, and likewise, it is the slavish adherence to biblical literalism that is required for the true believer to keep his intellect snoozing peacefully. Changes, especially like those we see in Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ sound like an alarm clock, jolting one suddenly awake from one's "dogmatic slumber" (Kant).

Strange Thing Mystifying

A creed full of affirmations can be put under one's pillow to make one sleep tight. But a creed that is more like a set of questions will keep you awake, prodding and needling you, a constant irritant. And this is what the religious person needs, lest the frostbite of spiritual complacency steal over him. In his book Lost Christianity, Jacob Needleman argues that we must be shoved into a state of disorientation, knocked off balance, before the Spirit can breach our defenses. This explains why Zen masters try to jolt their novices into Satori (enlightenment) by unexpected jokes, slaps, non sequiturs, even blasphemies! There is a spirituality of blasphemy. Accordingly, in Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ Jesus retorts to the High Priest Annas: "Didn't they tell you? I'm Saint Blasphemer!"

Once you think you've got the truth wrapped up in a creed, the danger is smugness, bigotry, the assumption that one need not listen to anyone else's viewpoint. Absolute Truth corrupts absolutely. Just look at the people who are pretty sure they've got it. Gotthold Lessing, one of the great religious Rationalists of the 18th Century, saw this and once wrote, "If God held all truth in his right hand and in his left the everlasting striving after truth, so that I should always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me, 'Choose,' with humility I would pick on the left hand and say, 'Father, grant me that. Absolute truth is for thee alone.'"¹⁷ When mere human beings think they have the truth all wrapped up, you get religious wars, book burnings, etc.

What does all this philosophizing have to do with the way Jesus Christ Superstar is written? As Paul would say, "Much in every way" (Romans 3:2). Tim Rice has used anachronism and irony to keep us close enough to be involved in the saga of Jesus yet at enough of a distance that we remain haunted with our Twentieth-Century doubts and questions about Jesus. Accordingly, he never brings the saga to a genuine resolution. He leaves the listener suspended between faith and doubt, between heaven and earth, just like Judas, who, again, is our representative, who voices our own sincere confusions, who shares Jesus' plaint: "I look for truth and find that I get damned!" And the medium is the message. Some literary techniques accomplish this, where others would impede it. Rice wants to leave us with a sense of wonder (the crucial ingredient of worship, in my humble opinion).

If Superstar had come to a pious and "safe" conclusion (like, for instance Franco Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth TV miniseries did, thanks to Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ who advised Zefferelli not to end with the mysterious empty tomb as he had planned but rather to have a flesh-and-blood risen Christ on hand!), one satisfying to Bob Larson and his affronted brethren, it would have dead-ended in pious, stale certainties, lulling the listener back into a peaceful narcotic dogmatic slumber ("Sleep and I shall soothe you..."). But Superstar aims to disturb, just as Jesus himself did ("He scares me so!"). This is why I think reviewer Henry Hewes, who made several insightful observations at other points, veered off the track at this one. He judges Jesus Christ Superstar to be "the life of Jesus as seen by modern agnostics, who don't seem to want to take a discernible position on the crucial question of Christ's divinity. Such equivocality is undramatic."¹⁸

This was in the days before the currency of Reader Response criticism. Since then it has become clear through the writings of Roman Ingarden (The Literary Work of Art), Wolfgang Iser (The Act of Reading; The Implied Reader), Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in This Class?), Umberto Eco (The Open Text), and others that the open-ended, open-textured character of literary texts compels the reader/viewer/hearer to fill in certain "zones of indeterminacy" left open by the author so that the reader becomes an active collaborator in producing the text as the reader experiences it. We could almost go so far as to say that if the text, the drama, were completely univocal, if there were a single intended definitive meaning visible to every reader/viewer, then the literary work would be merely a dead stone. There would be no real role for the reader save for passive reception, and this is not really reception at all. Good luck trying to get the catharsis of pity and terror (as Aristotle said) from a drama that is just dumped in front of you as a fait accompli.

Or think of a detective mystery. The whole point of this genre is to involve the reader as a silent rival of the investigator: the reader eagerly assembles a hypothesis using every fresh piece of evidence tossed him by the author, trying to figure out the ending in advance: "‘whodunit?" If the mystery writer cannot place the reader in this kind of suspense, the story has already crashed before it could take off. So the case of a mystery story well illustrates the crucial importance of indeterminacy precisely in order to make the story dramatic. And this much Hewes would probably not deny. He would rightly point out that any and every detective mystery story resolves itself. Sooner or later we discover the identity of the guilty party; the mystery is solved, and we can breathe freely again.

But the drama of Superstar is not of this kind, and a "dramatic" resolution of its suspense will destroy its (aesthetic or religious) effect. For the mystery of religion, the mystery of the gospel, is not like the mystery of a mystery story. The latter is just a problem, an empty blank that Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe will eventually fill in with the correct answer. Paul Tillich explains that the religious mystery, what Rudolf Otto¹⁹ called the "Mysterium Tremendum," is something altogether different: "Whatever is essentially mysterious cannot lose its mysteriousness even when it is revealed. Otherwise something which only seemed to be mysterious would be revealed, and not that which is essentially mysterious... Nothing which can be discovered by a methodological cognitive approach should be called a 'mystery.' What is not known today, but which might possibly be known tomorrow, is not a mystery."²⁰

In Very Many Ways He's Just One More

Tillich speaks of the religious reality per se, but one can apply the same principle to Jesus and religious evaluations of him, as Carl Michaelson does: "When the early church wanted to talk about Jesus of Nazareth, what did it do? It borrowed myths from everywhere. That was a big mistake."²¹ Why? Because to say Jesus is the "son of God" is to put him in the same general classification as Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Pythagoras. To make him the "Messiah" is to make him merely one more candidate for the job of nationalistic deliverer of Judea; to say he is a dying and rising savior is just to build him a shrine alongside those of Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, and Osiris. There was no dearth of supposed sons of God, messiahs ("You Jews produce messiahs by the sackful!"), and dying saviors in the Greco-Roman world. Whatever uniqueness Jesus may have had was not highlighted but rather obscured by defining him in terms of these ancient religious categories. You hear him described with one of these categories and you say, "Oh, another one of those. Right, gotcha." What happened to any idea that Jesus had anything distinctive to say?

The early Christians tried to safeguard the uniqueness of Jesus by saying all the other sons of God, messiahs, and dying gods were fakes, Satanic counterfeits, and that Jesus was the only real one. Just like a commercial I heard on TV tonight while searching for one of the books I have quoted: "Don't believe any of those phony bunko psychic hotlines you see advertised on TV. There's only one genuine one--ours!" Hey, I've got news for you: if you shut down all the other psychic 900 numbers, you've still got nothing left but fakes. What the early Christians did not see was that even if they eliminated all the competing name brand sons of God, messiahs and saviors, if they cornered the religious market, as they eventually did, they had still reduced Jesus to the conventional stereotypes represented by all these categories they had applied to Jesus. The categories defined Jesus; Jesus had no chance of redefining them, or religion in general. And Jesus of Nazareth was lost, absorbed in familiar mythic-religious categories one could easily take for granted. And pious Christians are still taking him for granted, like a comfortable teddy bear, like a convenient ventriloquist dummy to mouth their own opinions in a King James accent. Jesus has become habitualized. We can no longer see him, because we think we have him all figured out. I don't need to stop and try to figure out how to tie my shoes. I can do it automatically by now. John the Baptizer said he was unworthy to tie Jesus' shoelaces. We have made Jesus as predictable and ignorable as tying our own laces.

These considerations, Michaelson said (and as Dietrich Bonhoeffer had already pointed out some two decades earlier in a letter written in a Nazi death row cell), explain why Rudolf Bultmann thought it necessary for us to "demythologize" the gospels to get at the distinctive element of Jesus ("If you strip away the myth from the man, you will see..."). And this is precisely why the common believer takes such umbrage at theologians and Bible scholars like Bultmann and like today's Jesus Seminar who do try to strip away the myths (at least to interpret them in modern terms).

Why is it important to strip away the myths? Theologically, it is to take away a grand excuse Christians have given themselves to ignore the perilous, radical ethical demands of Jesus. Turn the other cheek? Give your riches to the poor? Not me, pal! It is quite convenient, as Max Scheler pointed out,²² to say that such things are impossible for mere human beings, that Jesus was able to live like this only because he was really God. And because he did it, and then died to save us from the penalty of our miserable, mediocre existences, we can sit back and breathe a sigh of relief. Not only did he take away our sin, but he took away our responsibility too. As Bonhoeffer called it,²³ that's "cheap grace."

For these or other reasons, orthodox Christianity has always given lip service to the notion of Jesus' genuine and full humanity while silently putting the thumb on the divine side of the scales. They wanted Jesus to be basically, primarily God. Thus the official creed which makes Jesus a divine person with a human nature. The humanity turns out to be a sham. It is to stop playing these evasive and logic-twisting games that many theologians and historians, both within and without the churches, have tried to "strip away the myth from the man." They wanted to take an unflinching look at Jesus and his demands. They suggested trying to redo "Christology from below," that is, to reformulate our views of Jesus from the standpoint (insofar as we may be able to imagine it) occupied by Jesus' contemporaries, both followers and opponents.

In this attempt to get a fresh look at Jesus, Jesus' humanity must be given priority, not his supposed divinity. Why? Because Jesus must have been perceived as man, albeit a remarkable one, not as a haloed demigod striding the earth. If Peter, Andrew, James, John and the others came to faith in Jesus, they must have initially had faith in one they deemed a man. Only gradually, after much hindsight reflection, could they have come to deem him God. John's Gospel makes this quite clear (John 2:22; 16:12-13; 20:9). Otherwise it is senseless to speak of a gradual coming to faith, such as the gospels describe. If Jesus had been something like Superman or Hercules, what room could there be for a single instant's doubt? And, by the same token, how could anyone not have believed in him? There remained sufficient of ambiguity, plenty of it, for faith in Jesus to be a real risk, a leap of faith. There is no faith where you have pat and evident certainty about something.

Just the Same as Anyone I Know

We can draw two inferences from all this. First, you have to do what Tim Rice admitted he did: to look at Jesus as a man, not as God. You're going to have to choose between the superhuman and therefore inhuman Jesus (well played, i.e., robotically, by Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told) or the human Jesus. In the former case, you explain Jesus and what he did simply appealing to the sovereign will of God. Jesus did not have to think over his priorities, his beliefs, his strategies. He just went to the cross in the same way an equation reaches its sum, impassively, thoughtlessly, inevitably. In the latter case, Jesus would have been motivated by fears and ideals, would have struggled over important decisions, been the sort of person we can all identify with. His sacrifice, like that of Gandhi or Dr. King, would be all the more noble and poignant because it would have been genuine and costly and avoidable though not avoided.

Martin Kähler, in a book called The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, rejected any attempt to make Jesus understandable in human psychological or historical terms. He said that such an explicable and accountable Jesus was simply not the Jesus Christ of Christian faith who was the Son of God and did nothing but the will of God. In short, he opted for the myth, not the man. Rice, like today's revisionist historians and theologians, has chosen the man. And yet it is possible to start from the New Testament gospel texts and reach either conclusion, since the gospels are mixtures of history and myth. Most of the time, I think, we see the mythic Jesus, the son of God, messiah, rising god Jesus (the one Kähler wanted) in the pages of the gospels, but occasionally we see an echo of something else, of someone else: a human Jesus. And these passages are the ones Tim Rice has chosen as his starting point. These are the places where Jesus is shown speaking or acting with uncertainty, ignorance, irritability, or petulance. There are five important passages.

The first is the scene of the anointing of Jesus in Bethany, where Mary the sister of the resurrected Lazarus pours expensive balm on Jesus to show him special honor and Judas raises a ruckus over this extravagance, while Jesus defends her action in seemingly self-serving terms (John 12:1-8). The second is the unsuccessful visit of Jesus to his home town Nazareth; he gets a distinctly chilly reception and is astonished at their lack of faith, which inhibits his ability to heal any of them. It occurs first in Mark 6:1-6. The later gospel writers found this portrayal disturbing enough to rewrite the story in various ways, omitting both the element of Jesus being taken by surprise and that of his being rendered incapable of healing (see Matthew 26:6-13; Luke 7:36-50; John 12:1-8). This, by the way, is a good example of redaction criticism, a method I will be using to interpret the Superstar libretto throughout this book. More on that soon.

The third key text for the characterization of Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar is Mark's conclusion to the "Little Apocalypse" on the Mount of Olives: "But of that day and that hour no man knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32). The fourth major passage is the Garden of Gethsemane scene (Mark 14:32-42), in which Jesus' resolve to follow the redemptive plan seems to falter momentarily and he pleads with God to let him skip the whole thing. Why not? After all, God is all-wise: surely he must be able to think of some other way to accomplish his purpose. The fifth is Mark 15:34, the Cry of Dereliction, part of the crucifixion story, when Jesus laments, in the words of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Here is another text that Luke and John (though this time not Matthew) have rewritten because they found it unworthy of the more-than-human Jesus they had come to believe in. Jesus? Reproaching his heavenly Father for abandoning him? None of these passages portray Jesus in a manner that emerging orthodoxy was coming to brand as heresy, i.e., thought crime.

When critics like Bob Larson and other fundamentalists upbraid Tim Rice for depicting Jesus in an unworthy manner they seem not to notice that they are upholding a Jesus who is more biblical than the Bible. I suppose that generations of gospel readers have managed to ignore the same passages that later gospel writers tried to editorially de-fuse.

Leighton Ford, an evangelistic colleague of Billy Graham, wrote in a leaflet called Jesus Christ Superstar-Or Son of God?, "The rock opera, 'Jesus Christ Superstar,' leaves us with a haunting question: 'Who are you? Who are you?' The New Testament leaves us with a triumphant affirmation. He is not 'Superstar.' He is the Son of God. He is not dead. He is alive, forever more." On the whole, of course, Ford is quite correct: the gospels and epistles are full of theological affirmations about Jesus, but, as we have just seen, there are a few lingering traces of an earlier stage where such certainties had not yet solidified. And he is equally correct in saying that Rice's Superstar leaves us with a haunting question. I have been trying to suggest that, even religiously speaking, haunting uncertainty is not a bad thing. Paul Tillich even said that "faith" should not be understood as unwavering acceptance of a prescribed set of beliefs, but rather as an ultimate concern with a set of issues or questions. Faith is not the antithesis of doubt; rather, faith includes doubt. In some ways doubt is even constitutive of faith, since without an element of uncertainty we would not speak of "faith" at all, but of knowledge. Uncertainty, doubt, "haunting questions" keep the nerve endings sensitized; certainties make them comfortably numb.

From the standpoint of secular literary theory, Tzvetan Todorov makes exactly the same point in his discussion of what he calls "the fantastic," what Lovecraft tended to call "the weird tale." In other words, a tale of the unexpected, the eerie, the tale that raises uneasy suspicions, fears and dreads, not so much fears of a concrete known danger, but rather of what awesome thing may be awaiting. It is the element of uncertainty that keeps the adrenalin pumping, the chills running down the spine. Todorov distinguishes the fantastic tale from the tale of the uncanny on the one hand and that of the marvelous on the other. The uncanny tale is one which begins with unsettling and alarming possibilities of ghosts or the supernatural but ends with a rational, naturalistic explanation, as in Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" or Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. The tale of the marvelous, by contrast, also resolves itself, only in the opposite direction. The reader learns that the ghost or vampire is real. Todorov regards both the marvelous and the uncanny (defined in these specific senses) as less effective than the tale of the fantastic in which the suspense, the dramatic tension is never resolved. One is left with the frightening feeling, "Suppose it was a vampire?" Shiver. But if the detective proves it was all an elaborate ruse, the suspense leaks away. We feel a sense of relief even though the ending is anticlimactic, disappointing. We like this because we want not to be disturbed. We don't like haunting ambiguity. We want to know one way or the other.

If the vampire turns out to be real, the dramatic tension drains away, too. Instantly the terms of the story change. As van Helsing pursues Dracula, we still have an exciting movie, but the supernaturalism is no longer so fearful, having come out into the light of day. Now the vampire is just a dangerous opponent in a world in which the supernatural has been reclassified as mundane. We take it for granted, and all we have left for thrills is to hope the hero has the speed to avoid the deadly fangs and the strength to plunge in the stake. Really just an action-adventure film (or story). The wonder and the breathe-holding awe are dissipated. But the author of the "fantastic" tale refuses to let you off the hook. The tension, the mystery, is sustained. "The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently [but possibly not genuinely] supernatural event.” ²⁴ One leaves the theater or puts down the book, but it's still not over. You look over your shoulder as you head for your bed.

Tim Rice is on record (no pun intended!) as saying, "We've just tried to tell a story. It's a fantastic story."²⁵ It is even "fantastic" in Todorov's specific sense. Rice knew that a resolution of the tale either way (Jesus was just a self-important media idol, now fallen--or Jesus was the redeemer Son of God) would dissipate the crucial mystery: "our intention was to take no religious stand on the subject, but rather to ask questions." ²⁶ We could dismiss Jesus in the same terms Pilate does ("Yes, he's misguided, thinks he's important...") or we could become one of Eric Hoffer's "true believers" ("Jesus, I am with you! Did you see? I waved! I believe in you and God, so tell me that I'm saved!"). Those options, that question, were open in the days of Jesus. They remain open now, as Judas still knows at the end of the opera, from the perspective of 2,000 years later. Leighton Ford is glad that the canonical gospels resolve the story of Jesus into a tale of the marvelous, but then it is simply one more drifting dream in our dogmatic slumber. Judas wants to be done with the whole thing, and he will be if he can only reduce the story of a once-mysterious Jesus to a tale of the uncanny, of a "jaded mandarin" who has to be turned in "like a common criminal." But he knows better: he knows that he does not know, can never know for sure. His hell is to be ever tormented with the question "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, who are you? What have you sacrificed? Don't you get me wrong--I only want to know!" That, Tillich would say, is faith, the wrestling with one's ultimate concern. "He scares me so... Does he love me, too? Does he care for me?"

Then When We Retire We Can Write the Gospels

One reviewer dismissed Jesus Christ Superstar as "A sorry redaction, in short, of one of the greatest books we possess" (Brendan Gill). ²⁷ What is a redaction? It is, quite simply, and edited and/or revised version of a prior document. It may have been redacted by the original writer, trimming it of what now seems superfluous verbiage or erroneous notions. Or it may have been redacted by a later author. In the latter case, the original writer may himself have submitted his manuscript to an editor believing the latter has a more objective judgment. Or it may be that a much later editor/redactor has taken it upon himself to update, revise, improve an older work.

The gospels of the New Testament all represent works of redaction. None of them seem to have been written up from whole cloth, like a novel or an original biography. None seems to have been eye-witness reportage either. Mark, apparently the oldest of the official four, seems to have been working with various traditional individual sayings attributed to Jesus as well as stories of various types about him. These had filtered down over some decades by word-of-mouth transmission--yes, like a game of "Telephone." There is no telling how much of it really goes back to Jesus at all, much less in its extant form. But at any rate, Mark must have edited these various bits and pieces. How much flexibility, how much creative freedom did he allow himself? Opinions differ. It is beginning to look as if the wording is pretty much all his, i.e., he preserved very little of the wording as he had heard it but felt free to put everything into his own distinctive idiom. (See Frans Neiyrinck, Duality in Mark; Robert Fowler, Let the Reader Understand). A modern parallel would be one of those celebrity "autobiographies" that credit authorship this way: "By Charles W. Kingsfield [and in fine print:] with Michael de Leeuw."

Other scholars think he preserved a good bit of the wording in the sayings and anecdotes as he received them, but that he combined the bits and pieces in new ways with little regard for their original context (which he was in no position to know anyway, though often we can surmise it). This seems to be what the writer of John's Gospel did with the various pieces of Jesus tradition available to him. He may have taken individual striking sentences and combined them into wholly different meaning-units than we find in the other three gospels. It almost looks like someone had thrown into the air a collection of words scissored out of a newspaper, and then did their best to make what sense they could of the snippets, trying to recombine them.

A couple of intriguing ancient manuscript fragments, The Secret Gospel of Mark and the Egerton Papyrus are even better examples. One reads them with a sense of deja vue: the individual sentences are all familiar from the gospels, but they never appear in the gospels in precisely these combinations. The puzzle has been put together a different way. Mark may have followed this "jigsaw puzzle" method in assembling his gospel.

On the other hand, his narrative moves so fast, spending virtually no time on scenery, characterization, description, that it reads almost like an abridgement of some earlier, more fulsome document now lost. There's probably no way to tell for sure. We have the same problem with An Ephesian Tale, a second century C.E. (= A.D.) novel written by Xenophon of Ephesus. Scholars still debate whether Xenophon was just a hasty, sketchy writer, or whether he had for some reason condensed a longer original into a sort of Reader's Digest version.

Matthew and Luke both independently made their own redacted versions of Mark, preserving by far most of his original verbatim, cutting superfluous, confusing, or embarrassing bits here and there. Matthew and Luke each had on hand another document that must have been as popular and well-known as Mark's Gospel, and that one, now lost, scholars call simply "Q," for Quelle, German for "source" [it was German scholars who first figured all this out]. It was a lengthy compilation of sayings of Jesus, with only a few short pieces of narrative. There was no crucifixion or resurrection in Q. The Gospel of Thomas, one of the great number excluded from the official list of the churches, is very much like Q in these respects: mainly sayings with no narrative context, no cross, no resurrection. A lot like the Book of Proverbs, actually.

How do we know there was such a thing as the Q Gospel? It seems a safe bet, since there is quite a bit of material, a number of sayings, that both Matthew and Luke have in their gospels which they couldn't have gotten from Mark, since Mark doesn't have it. When we look carefully at the differences between Matthew, Luke, and Mark in those places where all three overlap, we soon get an idea of the ways, stylistically and theologically, that both later gospel writers made changes in their common source-document Mark. Then when we take a look at how Matthew and Luke differ in their wording of non-Markan sayings they share in common, we can hardly escape the impression that here, too, Matthew and Luke were working on a prior document, one independent of Mark. And this is what we dub "Q" for want of any information of whatever title it may actually once have had.

Matthew and Luke each have a good deal of "extra" material of their own, i.e., stories or sayings not to be found in Mark or in Q. Where did Matthew and Mark come by this material? There are several possibilities. Each may have had access to traditional orally transmitted sayings or stories (such material continues, in fact, to surface, quoted by various Christian writers through the next couple of centuries) that the other had never heard of. Of some of it may have been included in Q but picked out for use by only either one of the evangelists (= gospel writer). Or Matthew and Luke may have separately made up various new stories and sayings and attributed them to Jesus. This sort of thing was quite common in early Christian gospels including the Pistis Sophia, The Dialogue of the Savior, The Apocryphon of James, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, etc. I think that very much of the uniquely Matthean and Lukan material is their own invention. Usually their style and their theology have left fingerprints all over the text at these points.

A comprehensive comparison of the gospels suggests to most New Testament scholars that it is possible to draw up a profile of each evangelist based on the tendency or pattern of changes he made in the earlier gospels he used in producing his own redacted version. By seeing what Matthew added to Mark or omitted from Mark, or what he tried to "clarify" (really, to correct) in Mark's text so that Matthew's own readers might not be left with the "wrong" idea. You can catch the drift of Luke's changes to Mark (or Q) in the same way, and it turns out that Matthew and Luke's beliefs and agendas differed from one another as much as either differed from Mark. Of course there must have been more agreement than disagreement, or Matthew would never have used Mark in the first place. Not enough of it would have suited him. So with Luke. And Matthew and Luke cannot have been drastically different, or they never would have used the same sources.

John, on the other hand, must have found himself a lot less satisfied with Mark (or the other two, all of which he may had in front of him as he wrote) since he did pretty much a wholesale rewrite. The Fourth Gospel is so radically different from the other three in events, order of events, the type of teaching attributed to Jesus, etc., that one does not at first notice that they have much specific in common at all. A closer scrutiny does, however, imply that John knew Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He never simply reproduces their wording, as Matthew and Luke often reproduce Mark's. Sometimes John seems to have been acquainted with another version of a story or a saying and preferred it to Mark's or Luke's. Sometimes he seems to have been freely creating out of his own head (or, as he put it in John 16:14, from the inspiration of the Parakletos of Jesus). Other times he actually seems to be referring to an earlier gospel's version but only by way of refutation.

An illustrative example might be appropriate at this point. Both will be instances of later evangelists smoothing out Christological "rough spots" in their sources. In other words, places where the earlier gospel did not presuppose such an exalted and superhuman understanding as the later writers themselves held.

Let's take the baptism of Jesus at the Jordan River by John the Baptizer. As we read the story in Mark 1:2-11, the scene presents several elements that made later orthodoxy cringe. For one thing, what's he doing there in the first place? It's a baptism of repentance, for Pete's sake! Jesus? Repenting? That's pretty much like going forward at a Billy Graham rally. Mark apparently had no problem with the idea. He had as yet no dogma of Jesus' absolute sinless perfection to worry him. Similarly, in Mark 10:17-22, an inquirer approaches Jesus with polite flattery, "Good rabbi, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" With the nit-picking correctness of the holy man ever on guard against pride, Jesus prefaces his answer with this humble disclaimer: "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone."

Matthew distinctly did not like what he read here. For Jesus shares the perfect goodness of God, so he rewrites the same scene (Matthew 19:16-22) so as to circumvent Jesus' denial of having Godlike goodness. Now the inquirer asks him, "Rabbi, what good thing must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus' reply? "Why do you--ask me about what is good?" There's nobody here either affirming or denying the goodness of Jesus. Problem solved! And this is a consistent pattern with Matthew. When he comes to certain points in Mark he flinches and gets out the white-out.

So how would we expect Matthew to handle the baptism of Jesus? We would expect some kind of abrupt, even clumsy alteration to allay his readers' fear of heresy. And that's exactly what we do in fact find. As Jesus is about to be baptized, "John tried to prevent him, saying. 'It is I who need to be baptized by you! And you come to me?' Jesus reassured him, 'Let it be so, for we must fulfill all the obligations of righteousness.'" The reasoning attributed to Jesus here seems a bit vague, but one thing is clear: whatever the reason Jesus was there to be baptized, it wasn't because he was a sinner pledging to change his ways! And that's the only point Matthew wished to make.

Another sticking point with the Markan baptism story was the mere fact that Jesus had come to receive spiritual service from John, implying he viewed John as a guru superior to himself. As we just saw, Matthew took care of that one, too. Not only does Matthew's John the Baptizer tell Jesus that Jesus doesn't need his baptism; he says that he himself stands in need of Jesus' spiritual empowerment. Luke had the same problem, and his way of dealing with it is scarcely more felicitous than Matthew's crowbar approach. He relates the facts about John's baptizing ministry (Luke 3:1-18), then concludes it with John's arrest by the minions of Herod Antipas (3:19-20), which brings the Baptizer's public activities to an end. Only then does Luke get around to telling the reader about Jesus' baptism, and that in a brief analepsis (or flashback) squeezed into a subordinate clause: "Now when all the people were baptized, and Jesus, also having been baptized, was praying, the heaven was opened..." (verse 21). John's name does not even appear in the sentence. Luke seems to be trying to draw as little attention as possible to John's role in the matter.

John's Gospel (i.e., the fourth one, the one traditionally but gratuitously ascribed to John son of Zebedee) is the boldest of all. He cuts the Gordian Knot in one decisive blow by omitting the baptism of Jesus completely. We read about John the Baptizer immersing people, and about Jesus being in the vicinity, and about the Spirit having descended upon Jesus at some recent time, but what we never read in this gospel is that John the Baptizer baptized Jesus.

I imagine these examples are sufficient to show how one can trace patterns and tendencies of redaction, or editorial alteration, in a single gospel writer or from one to another. One can surmise with some degree of confidence what was in a redactor's mind when he made this or that change by seeing it in the context of the general pattern and direction of his changes. This whole way of studying the gospels is called "redaction criticism." It presupposes the hypothetical division of each gospel into the primary units of oral tradition, the individual anecdotes and sayings, and the many sub-types of each. This preliminary process is called "form criticism," or the history and classification of the smallest self-contained units of the Jesus tradition. The sniffing out of the relationships between the various gospels, which used which, etc., is called "source criticism."

Allow me a brief parenthetical comment here. The whole edifice I have tried to describe here implies something scholars often do not seem to notice. Doesn't it imply a surprisingly limited range of available information about Jesus even in the early days of Christianity? If Jesus had indeed been so widely known and spectacular a figure as the gospels portray, mightn't we expect to see evidence about him coming to the gospel writers from all manner of sources? Would we expect the canonical four to be so incestuously interlocked and overlapping as they patently are? In fact it is their redundancy and interdependence more than anything else that rules out the old tradition that they were separate memoirs of eye-witness disciples. If that were the case, there is just no way they would have to rely on earlier texts for their information. And they would have more different, distinctive stories to tell. Instead the impression we receive is that there were only two basic sources of information for Luke and Matthew to use when they wanted to produce new and definitive versions of the story of Jesus. There two were, as we have seen, Mark and Q, and only the former is a story. The second is a collection of wise sayings with no definite narrative context implied.

To make matters worse, you only have to examine Mark's own passion narrative to suspect that he really had no prior historical information to work from, even on the crucial point of the crucifixion itself. This is because his whole crucifixion account in chapter 15 seems rather too close to the text of Psalm 22, though Mark does not necessarily want his reader to notice this, since he nowhere says that Psalm 22 was a messianic prophecy or that Jesus' crucifixion was a fulfillment of it. So Mark may be suspected of having created the very first version of the passion story, and that not from historical sources but rather from literary ones. And this, in turn, was all Matthew and Luke had to work with. Where they give more "information," they, too, seem to have created it.

You Hold Every Card

In this book, I am going to be using redaction criticism more than any other method. Little need be said about form-critical matters (though a little bit will be said at appropriate points), but, as in the study of the New Testament gospels, redaction criticism presupposes source criticism. We have to know, or we must try to find out, what was the source of what. When two versions of the story differ, who changed which?

What were Tim Rice's sources for his gospel, Jesus Christ Superstar? Ostensibly, the rock opera is an adaptation (a redaction) of the passion narrative of John's Gospel. A passion narrative is the sequence of episodes leading up to and including the crucifixion of Jesus. But it immediately becomes apparent that Rice has made creative and eclectic use of all four gospels. That is, he has treated them as mines of sayings and incidents that he felt free to recombine like tiny colored stones into a significantly new mosaic. The result is very much his own, but he has not simply rewritten the story. Rather he has chosen carefully and does fine-tuned micro-surgery on the bits he has chosen. Rice has never been given adequate credit for his creative and exegetical achievement.

Fundamentalist critics had only to notice a departure from the letter of the original texts to start howling heresy. For their purposes, they needed read no further. A thorough scrutiny was the last thing they wanted to waste their time on. By contrast, mainstream reviewers tended not to look closely enough to either the New Testament or Rice's libretto to notice the importance of either the differences or the similarities between Superstar and the gospels. Richard Watts, reviewing the opera for The New York Post, reported that "The narrative... is dutifully faithful to the New Testament accounts."²⁸ Hubert Saal of Newsweek saw the play "staying well within limits prescribed by the Gospels."²⁹ One hates to say it, but such bland assessments only confirm the fears of the Time reviewer who commented, "Is it depressing to imagine what certainly is the case, that too many Americans, whether religious or not, will know no more of the Gospels and the Passion than Superstar represents."³⁰ No reviewer seems to have taken a close enough look at either the gospels or the libretto to catch the subtle and dialectical relationship between them. It is no mere question of Superstar being "accurate" or "inaccurate."

In what follows, I aim to compare each line of Tim Rice's lyrics with its source in the four gospels, showing why Rice made what changes, major or minor, that he did, as well how the Jesus story is reinterpreted in the process. I hope that the application of the methods of biblical criticism will help us more fully to appreciate Jesus Christ Superstar. And I suspect that once we have a deeper insight into Rice's creative methods, we will find ourselves also having a deeper understanding of the gospels and the differences between them.

Finally, we must draw one more instructive parallel between the composition of Superstar and that of the canonical gospels. Just as Matthew, Mark, and Luke represent three different redactions of the same original work, even the libretto of Superstar has now come to circulate in at least three different redactions, all from the hand of Tim Rice. The shortest and earliest, thus corresponding to Mark, is the studio version of the rock opera. The stage adaptation of the album added more text to existing songs and even added a whole new song. This one might be compared to Matthew, who essentially padded out Mark. Finally, the film version added still more transitional material, including another song. Certain words appearing in the first two, have been changed in the retelling. This might be Rice's "Luke." We may even find hints of Superstar's influence on the film version of The Last Temptation of Christ. And this implies, correctly, that one might profitably undertake similar redactional studies of all the various Jesus movies and gospel novelizations. It would be quite revealing as to the theological tastes of the various writers and redactors, as well as of the publics for whom they wrote. But all that is beyond our scope this time out.