The rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar combined emotionally wrenching music and lyrics employing contemporary idiom to speak to the post-hippie 1970’s generation in a radically new form that brought the story of Jesus alive for an idealistic, young, but largely secular and agnostic generation. Librettist Tim Rice and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber daringly presented the story of Jesus’ final days in contemporary terms, raising doubt about a number of Christian assumptions.

The first of these is the divine nature of Jesus. Jesus’ divinity is questioned at several points, but the most powerful doubt is presented in the title song. Sung by Judas after that disciple returns from the dead, the song asks, sarcastically and with some vitriol, if Christ is really what he thinks he is, and, if he is the Son of God, why he let things “get so out of hand.” When asked by Pilate if he is what his followers claim, Jesus answers that he is what they say he is. All is doubt, but Jesus’ prophecies about who will betray him and who will deny him do come true. Obversely, though Judas is resurrected, the opera ends short of the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, Christ cries from the cross as a suffering human, calling out that he is thirsty and pleading for his mother.

The question of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is raised throughout: Mary is seen comforting and caressing Jesus, but especially when she sings the powerful song “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” while Jesus lies sleeping in her arms. Some three decades after the Webber and Rice opera, the issue of sexual relations between Mary Magdalene and Christ was again explored in Dan Brown’s popular novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), as it was earlier in a serious scholarly work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1983), by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln.

A final issue is the matter of the character of Judas, who is really the costar of the opera. Often portrayed as a greedy coward who betrayed his friend, Judas here appears as a sympathetic victim of events, a sensible man with reasonable doubts who attempts to address the dangerous conditions being created by Christ’s followers.

In many ways, then, Jesus Christ Superstar can be interpreted as the story of Jesus the man—not Christ the Son of God. Certainly this emphasis on the humanity of Jesus—highlighted by the “hip” music, lyrics, and political themes that resonated with the opera’s first audiences—called traditional Christianity into question and thus created much controversy when the musical first appeared in the 1970’s. Such controversy has greeted other portrayals of Jesus’ humanity, from Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1960) to The Da Vinci Code. At the same time, however, Jesus Christ Superstar is a powerful dramatization of the real emotional, political, and social turmoil faced by Jesus, filling audiences with a sense of the dilemmas, struggles, pain, and finally betrayal and death endured by a man who gave his life to be true to God—and the very human responses to Jesus’ insistence on that truth.

Jesus explores the concept of religious doubt deeply. While his disciples either accept his divine nature without question or, like Judas and the Priests, fear the political consequences of his influence while ignoring his mission, Jesus alone truly grasps the significance and gravity of his purpose. He is destined to undergo the ultimate test of faith by willingly accepting his own death—an outcome he seems to overlook until it looms near. In this respect, he mirrors anyone who...