FROM the soaring heights of Wicked, to gritty and grounded performances in The Color Purple, Cynthia Erivo has, in recent years, gained prominence as a respected musical artist of stage and screen. She has recently hit the headlines, however, for being cast as Jesus in the Hollywood Bowl production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s and Tim Rice’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which is due to be performed in August.
Discussions in the media and online about this “controversy” ask, rather specifically, why Jesus is not being played by a man. The imperative question here is why alternative images of Jesus — beyond the confines of maleness and masculinity — make some people uncomfortable, perhaps even upset. Is it a matter of history, theology, or artistic imagination? These are the strands that need unpicking.
The post-Enlightenment “quest” for the historical Jesus has occupied much scholarly attention in New Testament studies and beyond, but it has never fully decided on all aspects of Jesus’s personhood and portrait.
Yet many of the artistic depictions that surround us, from children’s books to stained-glass windows, offer us an ahistorical Jesus, usually racialised as white to symbolise purity and power. This has been projected on Jesuses throughout history, from colonial projects of mission to cinematic retellings of Christ’s Passion and death. Where is the anger with these ahistorical representations?
Of course, Jesus Christ Superstar is a 20th-century musical. It does not claim to be an account of history, or scripturally accurate. Instead, it is a piece of creative and artistic expression, not seeking to relay events exactly as they have been told or remembered. If that were the case, then at the least the music itself would need to be removed: I am pretty sure that Jesus did not sing at length (in English!) during his ministry and Passion.
SO, IF the problem is not historical, is it theological? Contextual theologies have unpicked normative understandings of Jesus for decades. White, masculinised imaginings of Jesus have emerged from patriarchal, colonial societies around the world and dominated the Church, invading the ways in which theology is done.
But feminist scholarship over the past half a century demonstrates how little Jesus’s biological state and his gendered performance has to do with salvation and redemption. The theological significance of Jesus is that he was the fullest incarnation of Godself, born in flesh — not that he was sexed particularly as male or otherwise.
The models of Jesus that have been inherited are shaped by the privileged, powerful majority. Other theologians, driven by a concern for social justice and contextuality, have especially sought to find Jesus in the marginalised, in line with his mission and ministry in the Gospels. Kelly Brown Douglas’s The Black Christ, James H. Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Marcella Althaus-Reid’s The Queer God, and Elizabeth Johnson’s She Who Is are among the books to show that social locations, various experiences, and diverse bodies can be used as a reflective mirror. If God became our flesh, surely our flesh can help us in this Christological case? How might understanding Christ among us all reveal more about the incarnation?
While, in many ways, Jesus’s race, gender, or sexuality should not matter to our theological constructions, they absolutely do. If bodies shape how theology is done and how God is seen, then they affect how we imagine the Christ who redeems each one of us. Seeing Christ in one another’s faces, in the breadth and diversity of human experiences, helps us to more fully understand the beautiful imago Dei. Maybe seeing Jesus played by a queer Black woman might help us to dig even deeper into the depths of the mystery of God’s incarnation among us.
I DO not doubt that the historical Jesus was a man. But Christ’s work on this earth, which continues through the Holy Spirit, pushes through our binaries and boundaries, expounding the image of God in all of creation. The incarnation was not an attempt at boxing God in, but of breaking God out. If Jesus was found among those pushed out of society, the systematically marginalised, and the most unexpected, why should they not look like Jesus, and Jesus like them?
Musicals will never be a report of history. They are, in their very nature, creative — and, in this instance, theological — interpretative resources. Jesus Christ Superstar, then, should welcome a Jesus who shakes up our expectations and makes us think about the incarnation of Jesus and the Passion in a different way.
Might this fresh, expansive work of artistic and musical theology actually reveal something new about the character of Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit in today’s generation? We must wait to see — but I won’t turn my back on it yet.
The Revd Will Rose-Moore is Assistant Curate of St John the Baptist, Loughton, in Chelmsford diocese, and is studying for a Ph.D. in Theology at Westcott House in the Cambridge Theological Federation and Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of Boys Will Be Boys, and Other Myths: Unravelling biblical masculinities (SCM Press, 2022), and he contributed a chapter to Behold the Men: An introduction to critical theologies of masculinities (SCM Press, 2025).
