Jesus Christ Superstar/Headscratchers

• I've never understood why everyone's all "Oh my gosh, Jesus knew that Judas was going to betray him!!! How did he know???" It's not like Judas had been running around for the entire musical up to that point talking about how dangerous what Jesus is doing is, and how it's gotta stop now before the Romans get mad, and dude someone's gotta stop Jesus...
  • I think they're surprise was more of just being shocked that he was capable of stabbing his friend in the back.
  • This troper has managed to avoid the films, but in the stage productions I've seen, they're typically depicted as the best of friends, and it's not so much "someone's gotta stop Jesus" as it is "Dude, you're in way over your head!"
• Two things I've never gotten... First, Mary Magdalene saying to Peter: "It's what he told us you would do/ I wonder how he knew" when she wasn't present for his prediction that Peter would deny him thrice. Second, Judas making numerous references to how badly they have beaten Jesus before they actually hurt him.
  • I'm pretty sure by the time we see Judas in that scene Jesus is already lying in his cell looking pretty battered up. Though that might only be in the 2000 version
  • Some productions correct this by featuring her at the last supper (in itself a headscratcher, I'd argue), and the priests' lyrics hint at a conveniently off screen pre-beating beating.
• Why does Judas say "If you'd come today you could have reached the whole nation/Israel in 4 B.C. had no mass communication"? B.C. literally means Before Christ, so this story, about Jesus Christ, obviously took place after 4 B.C.
  • Because the song refers, not to the moment when Christ died, but when he was born and arrived on Earth. The authors have Shown Their Work, because most scholars agree that Jesus Christ was born at some point between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C. (if the Biblical narrative is to make sense, given that, according to our chronology, Herod the Great -he of the massacre of the innocents- died in the year 4 B.C. Matthew and Luke both wrote that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, which means that, in that case, Christ would have had to be born in the year 4 B.C. or before).
    • And remember that the modern calendar was divised in 525 AD/CE by a monk named Dionysius Exiguus, who didn't exactly have comprehensive historical records to work from when trying to figure out the year Christ was born. That he was only about five years off is a surprising achievement.