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
