Jesus Christ Superstar: 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 C.E. Who settled the matter? Who decided what writings should be included, excluded? Various synods of bishops meeting here and there in North Africa and Rome. 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.
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 decide what is going to be sacred scripture is 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 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, or 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 its 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 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 used earlier source material, including previous gospels: Matthew and Luke both used most of Mark’s text. They tend to treat their material with creative license, changing the order of events, rewording what Jesus said, apparently attributing to him sayings of their own. In short, they are quite close to writing “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 gospels in the first place. None of them is a perfectly accurate account 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. 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.
Another similarity is that of poetic diction. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have Jesus speak in common idiom, 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 “secular” 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,” while Martin Gottfried, reviewing for Women’s Wear Daily, speaks of “miserable lyrics.”
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 blamed 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, his 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, for 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.” 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.” 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 that accompanies the human response 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.” 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.” How can reviewers differ so radically over the quality of the lyrics? 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 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.
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 stained glass. If poetry usually brings out the unnoticed sacred beauty in the ordinary, Rice has set himself the task of defamiliarizing 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 an army of 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. Linguists 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.
This essay is excerpted from Holy Fable Volume IV: A Critical Study of Modern Scriptures, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Robert M. Price is the author of numerous books and founder and editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism.