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
