Fifty years after I first listened to Jesus Christ Superstar on a two-record wax album, its powerful evocation of Good Friday still both haunts and intrigues me.

This is a column not about the rock opera but about Good Friday, but (as I have written before, with differing emphases than I will today) the latter provides entree to the former.

It was in the spring of 1974 that the Rev. Rod Smith, the assistant principal of Trinity Episcopal School in New Orleans, played the Superstar album for my fourth grade class. For decades, I have relistened to it every single year on Good Friday, and I am listening to it now as I write this column. What struck me even as a fourth grader, and fascinates me now, is how Superstar so completely humanizes Jesus, making him so little godlike that he sometimes is almost unlikeable. Almost. Even humanized rather than deified, and even with Superstar’s story ending on Good Friday rather than proceeding to Easter, Jesus continues to mesmerize — and in a good way.

Part of this powerfully mesmerizing quality surely is due to the art of composers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, but a larger part comes from the person of Jesus himself. To their credit, Lloyd Webber and Rice hewed amazingly closely (in most ways) to the direct text of the Gospels, and the character of Jesus as presented in the Gospels, even on a purely human level, is inherently galvanizing.

Set aside as far as humanly possible, as Superstar does, Jesus’s actual Christhood, and set aside (for this column’s immediate purposes) our Easter faith. From a purely historical standpoint, Jesus of Nazareth’s story is astonishing.

What was astonishing was not that Jesus was crucified. Through the centuries, hundreds of thousands of people have been crucified by Assyrians, Babylonians, Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, and others. Pontius Pilate himself oversaw thousands of crucifixions. Romans crucified 6,000 people in one day in 71 A.D. in response to Spartacus’s rebellion.

What is astonishing is that anybody remembers this one particular crucifixion. Why, out of the hundreds of thousands, was this one, this execution on what we now call Good Friday, so memorialized? Jesus was no political leader. In his lifetime, his following probably never exceeded a few thousand, and his devoted followers numbered only in the few hundreds — none of them organized in an army or as political rebels or even as a pressure group. Almost none of them possessed any wealth or human power. His closest associates, his “disciples,” were fishermen and poor laborers with a tax collector thrown in. And they belonged to what by then was a very small minority religion, one completely dominated even in its own land by a series of foreign powers.

What made this crucifixion of this man at this time in this relative backwater memorable? And why would anybody give much credence to those followers of his, ill-educated and lacking societal status? This man was mocked and killed on a Friday, was put in a tomb that very day, and left no written record of his own to memorialize his words and teachings. Yet here we are, barely shy of 2,000 years later, with 2.4 billion people on planet Earth commemorating his death on a cross.

Without faith, without something extraordinarily and Earth-changingly powerful, there can be no rational historical explanation for this one death to be so remembered and commemorated. Without the spirit being greater than the flesh, this thirsty, gasping man on a cross surely would by now, indeed within a few years of his death, be unremembered.

A historian, looking at the fathomless difference between what ordinarily would be forgotten and what instead affects and enriches billions of lives 2,000 years later, would, in practical terms, be at a loss to understand it.

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This man, though, was inexplicably different. Inexplicable, that is, unless he was more than man. And, 2.4 billion of us believe, unless his death was merely prelude to more life.

Even the most jaded historian must be forced to say, well, maybe there’s something to all this. Maybe, indeed, there’s something, something very real, to believe.