What's the Buzz? Jesus on Stage and at the Movies

This post is written for the Bloomsbury Online Group, July 2026.

I was a teenager when I first met Jesus Christ Superstar, and not in a theatre but on a cassette tape: the "original cast recording", played and rewound until the ribbon started to wear thin. I was captivated, and I was moved. Here was the story I'd grown up with, the story I thought I knew inside out, suddenly sounding urgent and raw and dangerous. I learned every word of every song, and if you catch me at a certain point in the evening I can probably still give you most of them. It did something to my faith that a hundred sermons hadn't managed: it made me ask questions. And it turned out that asking questions was not, as I'd half feared, the opposite of believing.

That's why I wanted us to spend an evening on this. We have a church trip coming up to see Sam Ryder in Superstar, and it seemed the perfect moment to sit with a bigger question. When artists put Jesus on a stage or a screen, what happens to him? What do their interpretations reveal, distort, or illuminate about the gospel story we carry? Every generation remakes Jesus in its own image, and watching how it does so tells us as much about us as it does about him. So here are four attempts, two on stage and two on screen, one reverent and one less reverent in each pair. I'd love you to watch the clips before we meet.

Superstar: the gospel according to Judas

What startled me most about Jesus Christ Superstar, and still does, is whose story it is. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's 1970 rock opera hands the microphone to Judas. It's Judas who opens the show, agonising that things have gone too far; it's Judas who, after his death, comes back to sing the title number and fling his questions at Jesus like stones. Why here? Why now? Did you know how this would end? Are you who they say you are? It's a betrayer's-eye view of the passion, and it's electrifying.

Watch: "Superstar" (Carl Anderson as Judas, 1973 film):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGcIvK7f77o

For a young Christian who was starting to have doubts he didn't dare voice in church, this was oxygen. Superstar takes Jesus' humanity with total seriousness. The Gethsemane number is one of the most honest depictions of fear and reluctance I know, with Jesus arguing with God, frightened, wanting the cup to pass. It refuses easy piety. And notice where it leaves us: at the cross. The show ends with the burial. There's no resurrection scene, no Easter morning, just a body taken down and an aching, unresolved silence.

Now, every instinct in me wants to insist that the story doesn't and mustn't stop at Good Friday. But there's something here that gives me pause, because Mark's gospel does something not so different. In its original ending, at 16.8, Mark breaks off at the tomb too. It's an empty tomb, granted, with a young man in white announcing that Jesus has been raised, but there's no risen Christ in sight, only the women fleeing in terror and saying nothing to anyone. The earliest manuscripts stop right there, and the familiar resurrection appearances were added later. A Jesus story that ends abruptly, in fear and unresolved silence, without Easter's reassurances, turns out to be not a modern innovation but arguably the oldest ending we have. Superstar holds us in the space of Holy Saturday, that terrible day when the disciples didn't yet know how it ended, when God seemed absent and the worst had happened. Most of us live a good deal of our lives in that Saturday space. A retelling that dares to sit there, and doesn't rush us to the happy ending, may be doing something more pastorally truthful than we first assume. It's a good question for us: does leaving out the resurrection distort the gospel, or does it hold up a mirror to how faith feels a lot of the time?

Godspell: the gospel as joy

If Superstar is anguish, Stephen Schwartz's Godspell (stage 1971, film 1973) is the opposite emotional key entirely. Same era, same countercultural energy, wildly different theology of tone. Where Superstar broods, Godspell plays. A ragtag troupe of clowns and hippies gather around a Jesus in a Superman t-shirt and face-paint, and act out the parables of Matthew's gospel as knockabout street theatre. It's silly, it's tender, and it's unashamedly full of joy.

Watch: "Day by Day" (Godspell, 1973 film):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekoHxB4idmg

Some Christians find Godspell too flippant, and I understand why. But I think it grasps something the church often forgets: that the good news is meant to be good, that Jesus gathered people and made a community, that discipleship might involve delight. It's built almost entirely on Matthew, and it stages the teaching not as a lecture but as play, as friendship, as belonging. Its ending is instructive too. The crucifixion comes, and then the company lifts the body and carries it out through the streets, still singing. There's no staged resurrection here either, but the community goes on, the song doesn't stop, the life continues. Resurrection as something a people carry rather than a moment we witness. Set it next to Superstar and you have two very different answers to the same question: is the heart of this story grief, or is it joy? (The gospel, of course, insists on both.)

Jesus of Nazareth: the reverent screen

To the movies. Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977) is the reverent Jesus film par excellence: lavish, painterly, epic, the Sunday-school picture Bible brought to luminous life. At its centre is Robert Powell, whose pale-eyed, barely-blinking Jesus became, for a whole generation, simply what Jesus looked like.

Watch: the Sermon on the Mount / Beatitudes (Jesus of Nazareth, 1977, Robert Powell):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBqk04eO-kM

There's real power in reverence done well, and Powell's stillness is deeply moving. But reverence carries its own risks. This Jesus is beautiful, serene, ever so slightly unearthly, and you might ask whether a Jesus this composed and this Northern-European can still surprise us, still offend us, still overturn the tables. The gospels' Jesus wept, lost his temper, got tired, was rude to at least one foreign woman before she out-argued him. Does the reverent tradition, with all its devotion, risk smoothing him into an icon we admire from a safe distance rather than a person who might disrupt our lives? Keep Powell's face in mind, because it matters for what comes next.

Life of Brian: the irreverent one, and the most profound

Which brings me to Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), and to a claim I will defend to the day I die: that this "blasphemous" comedy is the most theologically perceptive of the four. Brian, let's be clear, is not Jesus. He's an ordinary man born in the stable next door, mistaken for a messiah, and the film's satire is aimed squarely at us: at the crowds who follow blindly, the factions who'd rather fight each other than the empire (the People's Front of Judea versus the Judean People's Front), the human genius for turning a message about love into a squabble about a shoe.

Watch: the Sermon on the Mount scene (Life of Brian):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpkWT5voTSE

Watch that clip closely, because it does something I don't think the Pythons fully intended. The crowd at the back can't hear properly. "Blessed are the peacemakers" comes drifting down the hill as "blessed are the cheesemakers", and off they go, earnestly debating what's so special about dairy producers and whether it's meant to be taken literally. It's the funniest scene in the film. It's also an almost perfect dramatisation of one of Matthew's deepest anxieties.

Matthew is obsessed with hearing and not-hearing, seeing and not-perceiving. "Let anyone with ears listen," Jesus keeps saying. In chapter 13 he tells the parable of the sower and then quotes Isaiah on a people who will listen and listen but never understand. The whole gospel worries away at the gap between the word going out and the word landing, at how the same teaching produces disciples and misunderstanders side by side. And here are Python, entirely by accident (or was it?), staging exactly that: the truth is proclaimed, but distance and distraction and our own preconceptions garble it into nonsense, and we go to war over the garbling. There's a lovely detail the scholar Mark Goodacre has pointed out, which is that the distant Jesus figure in Brian was deliberately made to resemble Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth. The film is standing at the back of the reverent tradition, straining to hear, and telling us the truth about how badly we listen.

That's why I find Brian more profound than the pious films, not less. It knows that the problem was never Jesus. The problem is always the crowd. The problem is us.

Some questions to bring with you

Watch the four clips, and come ready to talk. A few things I'll want us to talk about:

• Which of these four Jesuses (or non-Jesus, in Brian's case) feels truest to you, and what does your answer reveal about the Jesus you already carry?
• Three of these retellings stop at the cross and leave the resurrection implied or absent. Is that a distortion of the gospel, or an honest reflection of how faith is really lived?
• Is there such a thing as too irreverent? Where's the line, and who gets to draw it?
• Superstar helped me question my way further into faith rather than out of it. Has a film, a song, a novel or a play ever done that for you?
• If our church were to put Jesus on stage tomorrow, what would he look like, and what would that tell us about ourselves?

See you at the Palladium. And blessed are the cheesemakers.