Judas in the Bible, and who wrote the Bible, anyway? Jesus Christ Superstar (1 of 5; Episode 24)

The year is 1525 and William Tyndale is doing what nobody has done before…he has translated the Bible from Latin to English.  This as not well received; the church condemned the book, and one Bishop Tunstall bought all available copies and publicly burned them.  Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic.  The English government had sent agents out for his arrest.

That did not end matters for Tyndale.  He roamed the continent staying where it was safe for 10 years, spending much time in Antwerp.  But then, in 1535, he was betrayed by Henry Phillips who turned him over to church authorities.  He could be put to death by the secular state if was a deemed a heretic, but he could be spared if he proved to the church that he was not.

He had no illusions.  The trial would be for show.  He spent 18 months in the Filford prison in Brussels, where he prepared his statements and continued to translate.  And what a process it was.  His prosecutor was the Roman Catholic inquisitor, Jacobus Latomus, gave him the opportunity to write a book stating his views; Latomus wrote a book in response to convince him of his errors; Tyndale wrote two in reply; Latomus wrote two further books in response to Tyndale. Latomus' three books were subsequently published as one volume: in these it can be seen that the discussion on heresy revolves around the contents of three other books Tyndale had written on topics like justification by faith, free will, the denial of the soul, and so on. See Latomus' report of Tyndale's beliefs below. Latomus makes no mention of Bible translation; indeed, it seems that in prison, Tyndale was allowed to continue making translations from the Hebrew.

He was not specifically accused of heresy for his translations; he did not recant or seriously contest the rest of the charges against him.  He was condemned.

In October of 1536 he was led to a town square where a circle of stakes surrounded the place of execution.  He was offered one more chance to recant.  His words were, instead, defiant: “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

He was burned at the stake, but not burned alive.  He was given the courtesy of being strangled to death before his body was lit on fire.

This ended the life of a Luthern, reformer, and first translator of the Bible to the English language.  Be careful when you mess with the ineffable word of God.  For hundred and fifty years later two other Englishman would be even more bold: they would take the Biblical story of the crucifixtion, put it to music, and open it on Broadway.  Nobody was going to strangle them, but the heart of the matter remained the same: Were mere mortals allowed to re-translate and re-interpret the Bible, outside the sanction of an official church?   To know what’s OK and what isn’t, don’t we need to know how the Bible get translated in the first place, and who decides what goes into it?  In the words of Barnett College Biblical scholar Indiana Jones, only the penitent man shall pass.  We humble ourselves in this episode of THM.

[References and bibliography for the Superstar series are in this episode]

Transcript

JCS, Episode 1

The year is 1525 and William Tyndale is doing what nobody has done before…he has translated the Bible from Latin to English.  This as not well received; the church condemned the book, and one Bishop Tunstall bought all available copies and publicly burned them.  Cardinal Wolsey condemned Tyndale as a heretic.  The English government had sent agents out for his arrest.

That did not end matters for Tyndale.  He roamed the continent staying where it was safe for 10 years, spending much time in Antwerp.  But then, in 1535, he was betrayed by Henry Phillips who turned him over to church authorities.  He could be put to death by the secular state if was a deemed a heretic, but he could be spared if he proved to the church that he was not.

He had no illusions.  The trial would be for show.  He spent 18 months in the Filford prison in Brussels, where he prepared his statements and continued to translate.  And what a process it was.  His prosecutor was the Roman Catholic inquisitor, Jacobus Latomus, gave him the opportunity to write a book stating his views; Latomus wrote a book in response to convince him of his errors; Tyndale wrote two in reply; Latomus wrote two further books in response to Tyndale. Latomus' three books were subsequently published as one volume: in these it can be seen that the discussion on heresy revolves around the contents of three other books Tyndale had written on topics like justification by faith, free will, the denial of the soul, and so on. See Latomus' report of Tyndale's beliefs below. Latomus makes no mention of Bible translation; indeed, it seems that in prison, Tyndale was allowed to continue making translations from the Hebrew.

He was not specifically accused of heresy for his translations; he did not recant or seriously contest the rest of the charges against him.  He was condemned.

In October of 1536 he was led to a town square where a circle of stakes surrounded the place of execution.  He was offered one more chance to recant.  His words were, instead, defiant: “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.”

He was burned at the stake, but not burned alive.  He was given the courtesy of being strangled to death before his body was lit on fire.

This ended the life of a Luthern, reformer, and first translator of the Bible to the English language.  Be careful when you mess with the ineffable word of God.  For hundred and fifty years later two other Englishman would be even more bold: they would take the Biblical story of the crucifixtion, put it to music, and open it on Broadway.  Nobody was going to strangle them, but the heart of the matter remained the same: Were mere mortals allowed to re-translate and re-interpret the Bible, outside the sanction of an official church?   To know what’s OK and what isn’t, don’t we need to know how the Bible get translated in the first place, and who decides what goes into it?  In the words of Barnett College Biblical scholar Indiana Jones, only the penitent man shall pass.  We humble ourselves in this episode of THM.

[Intro]

Welcome to our newest series, this on JCS.  If you missed the last episode, it was a one-off treatment of the Phantom of the Opera from the perspective of five very special fans. If you get a chance, go back and give that a listen.

As a big step back, we’ve covered The Man of La Mancha, The POA, Les Miserables, and Cats.  I have been trying to explain the vibe of this podcast and its been coming out in varying degrees of success – this is about taking a great musical and doing a deep dive on the backstory, the original source material, and trying to figure out what makes it work and the lessons the show has for theater and for life.

But just to give that a little more flavor, whenever I leave a show, it’s usually set in some place or time, based on some great book, or about some moment in history.  And whenever I see a show, that’s what I come away wanting to know more about.  So you might watch Les Mis and think – “Huh, the French Revolution.  That was kind of a big deal.  I know a little bit about it – wasn’t it after the American revolution?  Did they win?  Wait, was Napoleon before or after the French Revolution? Something about the terror…I really ought to know more about this.”  And as soon as you start picking away at the threads you discover there are entire shelves devoted to the French Revolution that are packed with absolutely fascinating events, people, tidbits, and always – always – amazing coincidences.  And the occasional ghost story.

So: You pick up Les Mis and there’s a lot to learn about the French Revolution.  You pick up Phantom and you realize there’s an early Sherlock Holmes-style book and a crazy story about the original silent film.  You pick up Cats and within 10 minutes you are knee-deep in the life of TS Eliot.  Read the Man from La Mancha, you quickly figure out that the author is Cervantes, and there is the immediate question of how they guy escaped from a medieval prison four times, which of course had to happen or he never would have written the book.

And so thus far we have been working our way through the mega-musicals, and if you like any of those shows and want to know a lot more about their origins and the historical moments they reference – be it dead bodies in the caves of the Paris opera house (yes there are caves, and yes there were dead bodies) OR the Spanish Inquisition – I can promise that you’ll find plenty of rich content and what I hope is a clear explanation of some very detailed and high quality academic work.

But so far, even though many of the shows have pretty religious themes and overtones, the books have been secular.  There are classic epics like Don Quixote and Les Miz – arguably the best Spanish and French novels of all time – TS Eliot’s children’s poems, which are mostly harmless but come from one of the greatest literary figures of the 1900s, or the POA, which was only ever a gothic mystery-slash-horror novel but an awesome silent film.  There are different interpretations, of course, but you won’t offend anyone’s religion by talking about the seances Victor Hugo held during the creation of Les Miz.  That’s right – seances.  This is getting trite if you’ve heard all the previous episodes but if not, doesn’t just hearing that Victor Hugo held hundreds and hundreds of seances, all of which are fully transcribed, with most of those transcriptions still around, make you want to know a little more?

Now you might not believe in seances, or you might have your own personal séance you attend a few times a week, so depending on how into the spirit world you are learning about Victor Hugo and his relationship to spiritualists might not fit exactly what you believe, but it won’t challenge core beliefs.

And today, we go deep into the source material for JCS, which is of course the Bible.  And that does get to some much touchier territory. I bring up the life of William Tyndale because it shows the extreme result that can happen when the question is taken very literally and very seriously.  We don’t really burn people at the stake any more, but there are plenty of folks who take these questions really, really seriously.  Depending on how you look at it, giving your own fictional version of a Bible story can be a big deal.

Just to give a flavor of what is a common belief among evangelicals, I’m going to quote from the Chicago statement published in the international evangelical journal Themelios:  “Holy Scripture, being God’s own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God’s instruction, in all that it affirms; obeyed, as God’s command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God’s pledge, in all that it promises.  The Holy Spirit, Scripture’s divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.”  So let’s call that the inerrancy view: Sure, the Bible was written by people, but they were divinely inspired, so every word is infallible and without error, about pretty much everything.

There’s a little more worth dwelling on.  Here’s Article X from the statement: “We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original.”  That’s a good point, which does raise the question of…what is the original.

And, they are in on the whole book.  Article VI: “We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration. We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole.”  This makes it sound like there’s a very good reason to believe that the book as is currently constituted came together in a fairly direct, divinely inspired way.

And that has some pretty found implications if you are writing a musical about Jesus.  There’s one divinely inspired, inerrant and presumably complete account that is in the gospels, so anything you try to add to that, or if you want to take an interpretation or imagine a scenario that isn’t something that’s directly in the Bible, you are on pretty thin theological ice.  Unless you too are divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit, you may be committing heresay, or even blasphemy, or at least you ought to kindly shut the hell up.  Emphasis on the hell.

That is the evangelical view, for sure, but not the only view.  So before we dive in, let me give you a little broader context about where I’m coming from.

My parents were party people – they met in San Francisco, my Dad was a casino card dealer in Reno, and they spent a lot of time hanging out in bars, seeing shows, drinking and dancing.  Well before I reached kindergarten they moved back to Utah, which is where my Dad’s family had originally settled when his grandfather – my great-grandfather – originally immigrated in the early 1900s.  My Dad’s Dad – my direct grandfather – owned a bar, and the rest of the family was more or less devout Mormon.  I’ll slow that down and repeat it for emphasis – my entire extended family, the lines of 4 different great-uncles, were Mormon.  Except for my grandfather, who owned a bar.  My grandfather was not afraid to follow his own path, even if nobody else was following him.

Then, in the middle 1970s, my parents converted to Christianity.  Now, this would probably today be called part of the evangelical movement, but it was years before Jerry Falwell would found the Moral Majority group in 1979, the church itself was called “southeast Christian” which is about as bland a descriptor as you can get – it was a Christian church, located in southeast salt lake city.

And my big moment came at a church camp I attended while I was in junior high.  SLC was so heavily Mormon at the time that to get a critical mass you had to combine all the other denominations to get enough kids to hold the camp, so we were a group of about 50 Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics, southeast Christians, and a hearty group that came from Dugway Utah who generally felt they needed religion because of their proximity to the nuclear weapons proving grounds.

And it hit for me.  There was a lot about it, but in particular there was one cabin leader who was a very intimidating Marine and very into his religion with a heavy emphasis on doing good in the world, not using religion to condemn anyone else.  Sure, there was a heavy dose of warning that the communists were coming to get us and take away our Bibles, but that was the 1970s for you, and they weren’t all wrong.  There really were nuclear weapons and if World War 3 was fought on land and the Soviets prevailed that regime would definitely have wiped camp Pinecliff off the map.  But, mostly and primarily, there was a heavy emphasis on doing good and standing up for others when they were being picked on.  Which happened, more than you would think, to the non-Mormon kids in SLC who didn’t have CTR rings.

So in the summer of 1980 I went to the mall and bought one t-shirt that said “Jesus saves” and one that said “God is love” and I wore them to high school.  I wasn’t really sure that the administration would let me – like, I thought they might tell me I had to go home and change or that I couldn’t wear stuff with religious messaging – but for whatever reason nobody ever said anything and it just kind of slid.  Brighton high school was a huge, Columbine-style affair with north of 2,000 students, and we passed each other in anonymous masses with the normal range of high school cliques, including jocks, nerds, drama kids, debaters, stoners, and the metal shop crowd.  And if you had asked anyone at that high school what my name was I’d guess about 10 people would have known, but if you’d said “the guy with the Jesus Saves” t-shirt everyone would have known who you were talking about.  Only in SLC, Utah, would wearing a Jesus Saves t-shirt have been considered radically counter-cultural, but simply being openly non-Mormon made an impression.

Like, if you had been at my 40-year high school reunion – which I wasn’t – and asked “Do you remember Jon Bruschke?” You would have gotten nothing but blank stars.  And if you’d said “the state debate champion?” you would have only sparked silence.  If you’d said: “C’mon, the guy who was the backup quarterback on the 1982 state champion football team, the ONLY state champion in Brighton High School history?” it would be not only quiet but start to get uncomfortable.  But if you merely muttered “Jesus Saves t-shirt” there would be an instant glow of recognition as everyone in earshot said “oh, that guy!”

And, in fairness to my Mormon classmates, they generally acknowledged and respected my dedication to my beliefs.  I was frequently asked to give the opening prayer at the ward house basketball games, and when one of the Mormon kids turned stoner and got into a raging blowout argument with his parents and loudly proclaimed his atheism, several of the Mormon students quietly asked me to have a talk with him.  And we were all cool with it; I was sort of flattered they’d ask me to speak on religion and they seemed happy to have someone else willing to openly advocate for God, even if it was someone who wasn’t Mormon.

When I got to Augustana College in Sioux Falls, SD, as a freshman, and someone approached me and said “are you one of those Jesus Freaks” I blandly said yes.  Wasn’t it obvious?  Anyway, the other guy was also a Jesus Freak, it was just some weird test.  AND I learned that Catholics and Lutherans disagreed about some things.  What was wrong with them?  Didn’t they know that they both weren’t Mormon, which gave them way more in common than any set of theses nailed to anything could divide?  I digress.

Here’s my point: I come to Biblical interpretation with a background of deep and very mainstream Christian belief.  I am not the high school sophomore wearing t-shirts anymore, and I never took to Jerry Falwell’s strain of thought.  I liked the Jesus who turned over the tables of the money changers and stood up to prostitutes, and that didn’t seem where the Christian Right was headed.  I was most comfortable playing keyboards for the church under the bridge band – which met, as you might guess, underneath a viaduct where the unhoused lived – and I never took a shine to the mega-church.

So I read the Bible very differently now than I did as a younger and more church-y person.  But I say all this to frame my discussion of the early Bible.  There are, I believe, core messages of the Bible, and I do believe in God and a Jesus who is God, and if I were to reduce my beliefs to one core idea its that you see Jesus in the face of each person that you meet, and being kind to the poor and disposed is where you are closest to God.

But it is also obvious to me that a whole lot of what is espoused as divine truth is really just the opinion of whoever is at the pulpit, and often its more than a little self-serving.  If you are hearing this and you are very sure that you have the correct interpretation of an absolutely true and unchanging word of God, I am not here to say you are wrong.  But it should be obvious that no matter how right you think you are there are millions who have read the same unalterable and absolute truth you have and come to radically different beliefs about it.  If there is one correct and inalienable interpretation of the Bible, there are also an awful lot of fallible human efforts to put it together and figure out what it means, and they bear the marks of very human limitations.

Thinking this, and studying how the Bible came to be, has not challenged or eroded my faith, but deepened it, and I seek no more from you.

And, all of this work is being done so we can understand the musical JCS and understand it’s take on the Jesus story, and how that contrasts with so many other possible interpretations of Judas, Jesus, and their relationship.  Not trying to change anyone’s beliefs, just trying to help us all understand what’s going on in that musical and how it fits in different versions of that Christian story.

So, as we take the journey to get to JCS, we need to pass the question of “what is the Judas story” and to get there, we need to ask, “what is the Bible, and how did it come exist as we know it today.”

Here, my main source is professor Stephen L. Harris, of Sacramento State, and his 1988 version of the textbook “The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction.”  One quick note: I’ll use the phrases old and new testament here because they have a common reference point.  But these are imprecise; the torah for the Jewish faith is a different book than the Christian old testament, and the status of some of the later books is in question.  The content of the new testament is less unclear, but there are several documents, texts, and books that were parts of some early collections that aren’t in the current ones.  Anyway – not going to dive into those technical details but just be aware that I’m using the terms old and new testament as shorthand and not because I’m trying to advance the common current versions as the only or correct ones.

The first thing to know is that there are not original manuscripts written by the reputed authors of the books.  Like, there is not a document that is called the book of Matthew, written by the apostle Matthew in his own hand or dictated by him, that still exists.  At least not one that anybody has found yet.  And, importantly, the texts and documents that do exist were not written in the language spoken by Jesus or the Apostles.  And, yes, that does immediately raise questions for the evangelicals who say “the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration.”  Maybe so, but since don’t actually have the original copy we don’t really know if we have the original words, and even if the words were divinely inspired most of what we have exists in the form of fragments and incomplete statements.

The oldest fragment of any sort that eventually works its way into what we commonly call the new testament is about 200 AD.  The first complete new testament as a full text isn’t until the 4th century, so the 300s.

So the very early church timeline goes something like this: Jesus dies in the early 30s CE.  The books of the new testament, and we’ll get to those in details, are mostly written between 50 and 150 CE, but those are not the only available texts at the time.  There are a lot of people writing lots of things about the life of Jesus.  

One group is called the gnostics, and they have a totally different origin story than exists in the book of Genesis.  They don’t believe that there was one God who created the universe, and they have a very elaborate version of the creation of the heavens and the spirit world.  Some scholars classify them as early Christians, but Simon Gathercole of Aberdeen university says that they didn’t really see themselves as part of a common movement.  A key leader was a guy named Marcion, who felt like Christians should ditch the old testament and only wanted the letters of Paul and the gospel of Luke.  He was expelled from the Christian church in 140 CE.

Another group is the original team of Apostles that is still largely active in Jerusalem.

A third group is that led by Paul.  Paul, you might know, actually wrote a serious chunk of what is now in the new testament, about a quarter of it.  It is important to remember that Paul never met Jesus, and famously was an early persecutor of the Christians before he had his revelation and became their biggest advocate and leader.  Whereas the original apostles were based in Jerusalem, Paul was based largely in Rome.

And fourth group is, of course, the Jews.  Jesus was, after all, a Jewish teacher, and there are certainly members of the Jewish faith that were thinking and writing about who Jesus was and what his story was all about.

But, let’s keep in mind that there are lots of different groups with lots of different beliefs, and they left behind a lot of texts, almost none of which we have originals for, and almost none of which are written in the language of the reputed authors.

The main book at the time was called the Septuagint version of what we now commonly call the old testament.  About 250 years before Christ a collection of about 70 scholars – that’s where the word Septuagint comes from – gathered a collection of the original Bible stories, which were of course in Hebrew, and put them together in a Greek version.  That was the state of the art.  But the original texts were in Hebrew, and the common version of them were in Greek.  Jesus was, of course, around in the time of the Roman empire, which is why Pilate has the final say on the fate of Jesus and he’s crucified by Roman soldiers, and Greek was the language most common to all the different parts of the very large and very diverse Roman empire.  Jesus personally also probably spoke at least some Hebrew, especially for religious ceremonies, and also maybe some Greek, but the common tongue he would have preached in is probably Aramaic.

All of the books in what we now call the new testament are primarily in Greek, following the Septuagint tradition – Greek was the language you used to write down religious texts, and for the very good reason that it was the language most likely to be read and understood across the Roman empire.

So as quick summary, in the earliest days following the death of Jesus, there are a lot of writings by a lot of different people.  There are schisms within Christianity, and they remain confusing enough that, for example, modern scholars will debate whether the gnostics were early Christians who’s views did not persist or whether there was something else entirely.  The entire Christianity movement is based on a translation of the old testament that was in Greek and not Hebrew, all we have of the earliest books are fragments, and by the time something is getting collected into what we now recognize as the new testament they are copies of copies written in a different language than the original speakers.

I mention this because it is really, really hard to provide direct, literal, or exact meanings across languages in any translations.  Often languages don’t have identical words, lots of meaning is conveyed in context, all words have denotative and connotative meanings.  Roughly denotative meanings are dictionary definitions and connotative meanings are individual or emotional meanings – think of the difference between the word “man” and the word “dude” – and this inherent feature of all languages makes direct translation difficult or impossible.  And, all languages encode cultural assumptions not just descriptions of reality, so famously some native languages have a large number words for snow while English only has one.  And even that research is fraught with error, fraud, and uncertainty, although it is undoubtedly true that different languages have different numbers of words for similar concepts.

This could be a two-hour lecture if I don’t stop myself.  In fact, it’s a 2-week lecture in my intercultural communication course, and an entire course in any decent languages department.  It is possible to get a decent translation – and possible even to get better and worse translations – but if you’re talking about getting an exact, single, inalienable and absolute translation, well, you are now talking about divine work and not something mere mortals are capable of.

So, even before we get to the original composition of a new testament in any form, there is a lot of space between the original religious ideas and documents and anything like a unified new testament.  The starting point is a Greek translation of a Hebrew old testament, a series of copies of documents written in Greek, about people who spoke Aramaic, with the most influential documents coming from the people like Paul who never met Jesus.  If you are scoring at home, even if there are no other issues with what texts are selected to become part of the bible, the best we have is a translation of a translation of a second-hand account.

But then, of course, the books do have to be collected into something that looks like our current Bible.  Professor Harris puts it this way: “At no time did a single churchperson or group of church leaders formally decide upon the context of the Christian testament.  A few leaders issued lists of writings their particular community considered authoritative, but such occasional lists reflect only the then-current usage in ta given geographical area.  The specific books accepted in to the canon achieved that recognition through a long-term and widespread general use in the life and worship of the internaitnal Christian community.  Canonization was a lengthy process of usage and habit, not the result of any act or decree of church officialdom.”

There are some key dates.  About 90 CE an unknown person searched the archives of the churches where Paul was central and gathered his writing in a single unit.  Later the gospels and other books were added.  Around 180 a Greek Bishop named Iranaus writes a book called “Against Heresy” that takes a hard line against the gnostics and starts to defend a solid canon of writings that believers should think of as divinely inspired, and a group of writing as heretical which believers are to shun.  He also asserts that there is a lineage of Popes, starting with Peter, that has each possessed secrets that they only passed to their direct successor.

In the 200s or early 300s a list called the Murtorian cannon was in widespread circulation, it included the gospels and Acts, but it is not the current list.  There was another list called the Codex Claromontanus, which included a bunch of books that didn’t make our contemporary new testament.

Things are going on in Rome.  Between 303-305 the emperor is Diocletian, who hates the Christians and actively persecutes them.  Importantly, he tried to destroy and burn all the Christian material, which is probably why there isn’t a lot of early Christian stuff from before his reign.  But from 306-337 it is Constantine, who openly embraces them.

A key writer at this time is Eusebius, an early church historian but also polemicist.  He, like Irenaeus, is writing as if there is a single and unbroken line of Christian thought and clear succession of leadership.  Frank Williams, a modern scholar writing in Vigiliae Christianae, which means “Christian Watch,” calls this view “specious.”  There appears to be an ongoing fight for what Christianity means and who makes decisions about it, and Irenaeus and Eusebius are trying to make it look more unified than it is.

It’s 30 years AFTER Constantine dies that the bishop of Alexandria, named Athanasius, wrote an easter letter that includes the first complete and exclusive list of the 27 books that are now the new testament.  But even he said that there were plenty of other sources that Christians should read and study.

The next major development was that in the late 300s Jerome completed what is called the Latin Vulgate – that was the 27 books on Athanasius’ list written in Latin.  Just to keep it all straight, Jesus preached in Aramaic, someone wrote down an account of that in Greek, those manuscripts were lost but other Greek copies were made, of the various lists of possible canonical works one was published in 367 and the complete works on that list were translated to Latin, about 350 years after the events happened.

There will be some dark ages and then things will pick up again once the printing press comes about, but it is here that Professor Harris stops to say that if you look at the earliest Christian writings, including those that Jerome had and all the things we have found since then, there are “no fewer than five thousand ancient manuscript copies of the New Testament, most in fragmentary form, [and] we have an abundance of texts from which to deduce a ‘standard text.’  The problem is that no two of these five thousands texts is identical.”  Not to beat a dead horse, but that does get us back to that thing about the original words being divinely inspired.  There’s just no getting around the issue that you have to decide which set of words you can come across are the original ones, and believing that the original words were divinely inspired doesn’t help you with that.

In 730 a Benedictine monk named the Venerable Bead – that’s with a capital V – translates part of the Greek bible to old English.  The first full English translation is made by John Wycliffe in 1384, and of course was condemned by the church in 1408 and future copies were forbade.  That didn’t work – you can still get a copy of the Wycliffe bible today if you really like reading in old English.

Gutenberg comes along and prints a bible in the year 1455, and he used Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.

Martin Luther nails his theses up in 1517.

Wycliffe had translated the Latin to English, but the Latin itself was a translation of the original Greek and Hebrew.  In 1525 William Tyndale undertook the massive and important undertaking of translating the original Greek and Hebrew to English, which he did, but because the official church was hostile to the idea he had to flee to Germany to finish the work, was subsequently betrayed, returned, tried and convicted of heresy, and burned at the stake.  But all subsequent versions of the Bible are hugely influenced by Tyndale.

The Catholic church had just burned Tyndale at the stake, but the Anglican church was printing the Coverdale Bible, printed originally in 1535 and then 1539, which it was heavily indebted to Tyndale and which the Roman church did not take issue with.  That 1539 version had a new translation of Matthew and got the really cool name “The Great Bible,” which was revised again in 1590 with the slightly less cool but still imposing title of the Bishop’s Bible.

Eventually, Mary Queen of Scots, most famous for being killed by Queen Elizabeth the first, had a son named James, and in 1611 he commissioned 54 scholars to revise the Bishop’s Bible for official use in the Anglican church.  That was the one that stood in sharp contrast to the Catholic church, and was formed by Henry the VIII, mostly so Henry could annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Bolyen, and that is an entirely different musical.  As documented in the musical SIX, things worked out better for Henry than Catherine or Anne.  Catherine would die at the age of 50, maybe from poisoning but probably from cancer.  Anne would get beheaded.  Or maybe it wasn’t all that much better for Henry, because he exploded in his coffin.  That’s probably an exaggeration, but one that seems eerily similar to a story about Judas, which is what this musical is all about.

Shakespeare also wrote a play about him.  And, of course, Shakespeare is directly quoted by TS Eliot, who wrote Cats, and visited Victor Hugo in a séance while Hugo was writing Les Mis.  Is it all connected?  Yes, it all seems connected.  

Anyway, the Catholic church in 1611 is definitely not the Anglican church, because of Henry’s decrees, and King James is going to do an in-your-face against the church of Rome by making what is undoubtedly the most popular and influential version of the Bible of all time.  James is also famous for giving the Malleus Malificarum, a manual about how to exorcise demons and witchcraft, a second life (so to speak), and writing his own treatise on the subject, called Daemonologie.  These books greatly influenced Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, who were both knee-deep in the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts where the first immigrant of the TS Eliot line served as an accuser, then a juror, and then a recanter.  Is it all connected?  Yes, it all seems connected.
 
 

There was then a revised version of King James issued in England between 1881 and 1885, and that was revised in the American Standard Revised edition in 1901, and now there are many available translations.

So, the unalterable, unalienable word of God interpretation of this book is stretching even further, with many currently interpretations and translations owing much to either Henry the VIII or James, who have pretty dubious moral credentials given the murder of wives and witches, or the Roman church, which at least at the advent of English language versions was burning people at the stake for attempting the translations.

So back to those modern – that sounds weird to say – and probably better translations that we have available.  I’m going to read the process of translation from my New International Version, the Bible I’ve had since I was 16 and that I carried with me to every single class I ever took in high school.

“The complete NIV Bible was first published in 1978. It was a completely new translation made by over a hundred scholars working directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts. The translators came from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, giving the translation an international scope. They were from many denominations and churches—including Anglican, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Brethren, Christian Reformed, Church of Christ, Evangelical Covenant, Evangelical Free, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Wesleyan and others. This breadth of denominational and theological perspective helped to safeguard the translation from sectarian bias. For these reasons, and by the grace of God, the NIV has gained a wide readership in all parts of the English-speaking world.

The work of translating the Bible is never finished. As good as they are, English translations must be regularly updated so that they will continue to communicate accurately the meaning of God's Word. Updates are needed in order to reflect the latest developments in our understanding of the biblical world and its languages and to keep pace with changes in English usage. “

And they conclude:

“The Committee has again been reminded that every human effort is flawed—including this revision of the NIV. We trust, however, that many will find in it an improved representation of the Word of God, through which they hear his call to faith in our Lord Jesus Christ and to service in his kingdom. We offer this version of the Bible to him in whose name and for whose glory it has been made.”

So…I guess this is where I have landed as a Christian and a scholar.  Like I said, I’m not here to change your mind if you believe that the Bible is the direct and literal word of God.  And nothing I’ve said so far is inconsistent with the idea that, of all the possible books that could have come together in the Bible the divine hand guided the process so that the ones that did were the right ones, the texts that survive were the right texts, and the Bible you have now, be it the new American Standard, the NIV, an old King James, or any of the 14 versions approved in the 1983 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as acceptable translations of Jerome’s Latin vulgate.  I note in passing the Catholic Bible Press prefers the New Revised Standard Version, based on the King James, originally an Anglican text.

But I don’t think you’re a heretic if you think – as most of the translators do – that there is some fallible, human work involved in translation.  You try your best, you incorporate new findings, you seek to improve.  For me, you focus on the big-picture themes and stories that resonate with how you ought to lead your life.  I don’t want to get hung up on specific interpretations of specific words to try to find absolute answers to important questions.  “Do unto others” gets me most of the way there, and diving in to the minutae of specific Biblical phrases leaves me thinking more about how translations of translations could hold an absolute truth.

And you don’t have to go there with me, but I’m spending all this time talking about it because this is the ground zero point for understanding what the heck is going on with Jesus Christ Superstar.  I am trying not to give away too many spoilers or recap an entire production, but there is no doubt that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber took on the task of re-telling the crucifixion story about Jesus from the perspective of Judas.

If there is a single, absolute, inerrant, and timeless truth about those events, this effort does indeed smack of heresy, maybe blasphemy, or maybe just enormous inflation of ego.  I have mentioned earlier that TV producer Scott Carter has found that Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy all took their bibles and made extensive edits to the parts they felt couldn’t be right.  Victor Hugo arrived at something similar.  But isn’t it a bit vainglorious to say – you know, here’s this Bible story, but I think I can do better.  Let me just retell this thing from a totally different perspective making up parts that I think are more interesting.  Herein lurks the spectre of L. Ron Hubbard.

So for me, when I hear that every word of the Bible – every word – is true, I start by asking which Bible.  The King James version?  The NIV?  The Good News version?  Are they all divinely inspired?  And if so, how come they all come out reading so different?  And – here’s my real question – how do you even know?  Do you, like me, have 5-6 Bibles lying around somewhere, and you don’t even know which version they are?  Well, if you really did believe that literally every word was true and “the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration” the question of which Bible you have and read from should matter an awful lot.  If it doesn’t, then I suspect that you and I already agree that every single word isn’t the product of direct and divine inspiration, and that maybe the task for believers and those who truly seek God is to interpret what’s there.

Here's one more thought experiment I’d like you to do.  Go and find your Bible, or really any Bible, right now, and look up Genesis chapter 1 and read the footnotes to see how many different possible interpretations of the original words there are.  In the Living Bible version there 10 footnotes, starting with verse 2, and it includes this explanation for different possible explanations for the language about God brooding over dark vapors: “There is not one correct way to translate these words.”  Now, that’s pretty early in the text for ambiguity in translation to come up if “the very words of the original were given by divine inspiration,” isn’t it?  

These are the reasons I am convinced that a view of Biblical absolutism, inerrancy, internal consistency, and infallibility takes the case too far.  No matter what the demogogues say, when people of good will and intelligence sit down to do their darndest to translate the Bible accurately and as completely as they can, even they realize that it’s an entirely human endeanvor.  I celebrate this as humans being the best that humans can be, and I applaud all those fully devout enough to try to use their human faculties to understand the Bible.

And this is the question at the heart of Jesus Christ, Superstar.  This is a musical about Jesus.  Sure, it’s through the eyes of Judas, but without Jesus there isn’t a whole lot for Judas to observe or even care about.  I know I’ve invested a lot of time in talking about the historical documents that make up the Bible, but I think this is really the groundwork that we need to cover to understand JCS.  If JCS is an alternate version of the Judas story, and that’s what gives it the power that it has, understanding the Bible’s version of the Judas story will matter a lot, and to understand that we have to know where the Bible came from in the first place.  So my starting point is this: the Bible is a book that, at least I believe, is divinely inspired, but it’s still a text that’s a translation of copies of an oral tradition, and as a rule I find it more productive to focus on the main themes than try to attach too much significance to individual words or phrases.

But that’s just me.

Did Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber go too far in suggesting their own version of the Judas story?  Did it run afoul of the Biblical story?  What exactly is the Biblical story of Judas, after all?  Get out your pen and quill, we’ll all light candles at the monastery in the next episode of THM.

All 14 versions

https://www.usccb.org/offices/new-american-bible/approved-translations-bible

The NRSV

https://www.catholicbiblepress.com/about-nrsv-catholic-edition/

Evangelical statement on inerrancy

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/the-chicago-statement-on-biblical-inerrancy/

Account of Tyndales death

https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/tyndales-betrayal-and-death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale#CITEREFEdwards1987

Bibliography

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Dart, J. (1973, July 15).  Superstar vs. the Book: Some mixed reactions.  Los Angeles Times (1923-1995); ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Los Angeles Times.  pg. P20

Frankfurter, D. (2007).  An historian’s view of the “Gospel of Judas.”  New Eastern Archeology, 70(3), 174-177.

Gathercole, S. (2007).  The gospel of Judas.  Expository Times,  118(5), 209-215.  DOI: 10.1177/0014524606075050

Goodacre, M. (1999). Do you think you’re what they say you are? Reflections on Jesus Christ superstar. Journal of Religion & Film, 3(2).  Doi: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.jrf.03.02.02

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Kochenash, M. (2020).  Cross-purposes in the Gospel of Judas: What Judas intended for evil, God, intended for good.  Journal of Early Christian Studies, 28(4), 481-500. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1353/earl.2020.0048

Maccoby, H. (1992).  Judas Iscariot and the myth of Jewish Evil.  New York: The Free Press.

Mills, I. (2023, October 27). Teaching with Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) after Fifty Years - April Online. April Online. https://www.aprilonline.org/teaching-with-jesus-christ-superstar-1973-at-fifty-years/

Post, K. (2021) ‘jesus christ superstar’: The controversial musical phenomenon turns 50, National Catholic Reporter. Available at: https://www.ncronline.org/news/culture/jesus-christ-superstar-controversial-musical-phenomenon-turns-50 (Accessed: 05 July 2025). 

Sternfeld, J. (2006).  The Megamusical.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Van der Bergh, R. (2011).  Review of the 13th Apostle: What the gospel of Judas really says (revised edition).  Neotestamentica, 25(2), 364-5.

Williams, F. (2008).  The gospel of Judas: it’s polemic, its exegesis, and it’s place in church history.  Vigiliae Christianae, 62(4), 371-403.