Christine Hoff Kraemer, Boston University, Boston, MA

Abstract

Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ presents an unorthodox, nonhierarchical dualism. This dualism has often been negatively interpreted by critics, leading them to condemn the film for misogyny, among other sins. Following Scorsese’s intentions for the film, this essay offers an alternative interpretation of Last Temptation’s conflict as one between competing virtues. In addition, it also positively evaluates the creators’ attempt to lift the story of Jesus out of traditional Christianity in order to offer it to a wider audience.

[1] If we consider religion as a storytelling enterprise, the canonized sacred text becomes problematic even as it establishes a stable centre for a tradition. In the case of Christianity, the Gospels provide some of the best-known stories of Western culture, stories that are cherished by believers, but are also an essential part of being culturally literate for non-believers. Yet the endless repetition of the text in both sacred and secular contexts has a tendency to move some hearers from a position of engagement to one of numbness and detachment. Particularly in cases where the antiquated, if beautiful, language of the King James Bible is used, readers and hearers of the Bible may feel alienated from the meaning of the text by their sense that it is the product of a wholly other time and place, written in a language that is not their own. For others, antiquated language may not represent a barrier, but sheer overfamiliarity with the same stories told year after year in the same words may create the same kind of distance. In some cases, this distance from the meaning of the text is institutionalized, as in communities where the words themselves are understood to hold sacred power, and the scriptures are recited as a ritual rather than examined for their meaning. Even as a fixed text provides continuity for a tradition, its sheer repetition can produce spiritual apathy, particularly when a text can only be interpreted within a limited system of orthodox doctrine.

[2] It is exactly this kind of spiritual deadness in Christians’ relationship to the story of Jesus that Martin Scorsese sought to dispel when he decided to film The Last Temptation of Christ. Last Temptation is only one of the most recent in a long line of Jesus films, but it is remarkable both for its portrayal of a radically human Jesus and for the liberties it takes with the biblical narrative, even as it takes scripture very seriously. Adapted from the book by Nikos Kazantzakis, the Last Temptation film presents itself not as being primarily based on the gospels, but instead on “this fictional representation of the eternal spiritual conflict,” which Kazantzakis saw as “the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh” (quoted from the film’s opening sequence).

[3] In “Jesus Christ Movie Star,” William R. Telford traces the development of the Jesus film from the early part of the twentieth century. Up until the middle of the century, Jesus was portrayed as an objectively divine being, often with halo-like lighting effects and dramatic poses. By the 1960s, a growing historical consciousness led directors to emphasize the political situation of Jesus’ day,1 but only in the 1970s did truly heterodox films begin to appear: in 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar dared to suggest a romantic connection between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, while Godspell played up the celebratory side of Jesus’ ministry. Scorsese is the first filmmaker to attack the problem of Jesus’ simultaneous divinity and humanity head-on, giving us a saviour who longs for the love of a woman, a family, and the simple, quiet life of an ordinary man. As Telford notes, Scorsese also follows Marxist director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 The Gospel According to St. Matthew in attempting to recover Jesus from the influence of centuries of religious orthodoxy, which both directors perceive as distorting. Finally, the Last Temptation film represents a response to the orthodox Biblical epics of Scorsese’s childhood, which he confesses he loves at the same time as he feels they present a distant and unapproachable Jesus.2

[4] As Scorsese said in a 1989 interview, his goal was “to make the life of Jesus immediate and accessible to people who haven’t really thought about God in a long time.”3 In pursuit of this goal, the Last Temptation film combines daring interpretations of scriptural material with images and dialogue that are entirely the products of the creators’ imaginations. Unsurprisingly, the three major contributors to the film are all unorthodox examples of their respective religious traditions. Kazantzakis, the author of the 1955 book, was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church and was arraigned for heresy by its hierarchs after Last Temptation’s publication;4 Paul Schrader is a Dutch Reformed Calvinist turned Hollywood screenwriter; and Scorsese, as is well-known, is a liberal Italian-American Catholic. The film represents the end product of multiple steps of retelling and translation, with each artist attempting to preserve what they see as the story’s spirit while allowing the artistic imagination to breathe new life into the narrative. If one of the primary ways that human beings make meaning is through religious storytelling, the Last Temptation film represents a provocative and highly controversial attempt to tell the Jesus story in a way that makes it freshly meaningful to contemporary Americans.

[5] The plot of the Last Temptation film revolves primarily around three characters, Jesus (Willem Dafoe), Judas (Harvey Keitel), and Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey), all of whom are engaged in the struggle between the spiritual and material. Judas’ role in relation to Jesus is complex. He is both a loyal friend and a voice of challenge, the disciple that, as a nationalist, most opposes Jesus, and the only one who seems to really understand his message. As the film opens, we find Jesus racked by painful experiences of God, making crosses in the hopes that God will reject him. Jesus is riddled with guilt for what he considers his terrible sins, including his belief that his refusal to marry Mary Magdalene has driven her to prostitution. Condemned by Judas for assisting the Romans in their executions, Jesus makes the decision to stop avoiding God and go to a monastery in the desert.

[6] There Jesus receives a call to ministry, and with a dubious Judas at his side, returns to civilization. Not knowing what his message will be, he opens his mouth and finds himself preaching love and forgiveness, and the blessedness of the weak and marginalized. A crowd of disciples grows around Jesus, but Judas still challenges him; Judas believes that the path of true revolution is to free the body first, and then to free the soul, while Jesus insists that to free the body without freeing the spirit is to allow the same cycle of violence and oppression to begin anew. After an encounter with John the Baptist, who believes Jesus may be the messiah, Jesus goes into the desert to encounter God. There he is tempted–first with domesticity, by a snake using Magdalene’s voice; second with power, by a lion using the voice of Judas. Satan also appears before him, and then at last the dying spirit of John the Baptist, who with Old Testament prophetic fervor urges Jesus to take up the ax and cut out society’s corruption at the root.

[7] Thus Jesus enters into a new phase of his ministry, characterized by dramatic miracles, a rhetoric of apocalyptic violence, and increasing emphasis on himself as the messiah. The word “I” begins to appear in Jesus’ preaching in a way it did not when he spoke of love. Judas, naturally, is thrilled–Jesus’ new focus fits well with his desire to liberate their people from the Romans. But in the midst of this triumphant ministry, Jesus receives a vision from God that suggests he must die on a cross in order to atone for the world’s sins. Cringing from this terrible fate, Jesus pleads with God to let him have the axe instead; he leads what is essentially a mob to Jerusalem, but when called to give the signal to attack, God sends him a sign–blood running from his palms. Escaping with Judas, Jesus begs his friend to betray him so that he might be executed, knowing that Judas is the only disciple with the strength to do so. Jesus holds the Last Supper, prays at Gethsemane, and is taken by the Romans, tortured, and crucified.

[8] Yet as he hangs from the cross, Jesus faces his last temptation–Satan comes in the guise of a beautiful angel, tells him that God has spared him, and gives him the dream of a pleasant, domestic life, first with Magdalene, then with Mary, Martha, and many children. Only at the moment of his natural death does the reappearance of Judas stir him to action–he begs God to take him back like the prodigal son from the parable, to let him be crucified for the sake of the world. Instantly he finds himself back on the cross, the last temptation conquered. Smiling, he cries, “It is accomplished!”

[9] Scorsese’s aim is consciously to freshen the Jesus story and make it more accessible to American viewers, a task that also requires him to bend the Kazantzakis’ very Greek novel to an American context. The director uses a number of techniques to accomplish this, not the least of which is the vibrant, multicultural setting which serves as the story’s backdrop and echoes our contemporary celebration of American pluralism. Jesus’ Israel pulses with cosmopolitanism; men of many races pass each other on the street and wait their turn with Magdalene, and the wedding festival which Jesus attends shows elements of cultural syncretism in both music and dress. The setting of the story is Israel, but it is an Israel that consists of more than just Jews and Romans–it has permeable borders and is part of a thriving Middle Eastern culture. This rich, exotic backdrop is emphasized by Peter Gabriel’s memorable score, which includes musicians and instruments from all over the Middle East and Africa. The desert monoculture familiar from Sunday School is swept away in an onslaught of exotic sounds and colours–a world of erotic beauty wholly suitable for tempting Jesus’ heart. The setting’s lush materiality is perhaps Last Temptation’s greatest strength as a film. The seductive splendour of earthly life is not merely described, but demonstrated. We see, as Jesus sees, that it is good; perhaps we are tempted, as Jesus also is, to value the material world that we can see over the spiritual world that we cannot.

[10] Kazantzakis wrote his novel in demotic Greek, the language of the Greek peasantry, both for reasons of aesthetic effect and as a way of championing what he saw as the imaginative soul of the common people.5 Although English lacks some of the poetic flexibility of this form of Greek, screenwriter Paul Schrader follows a similar impulse in having Jesus speak in an easy American vernacular. Parables are retold and famous wisdom sayings reproduced in natural, twentieth-century American English, allowing the audience to focus on his meaning in a way that first-century listeners might have when listening to the Aramaic vernacular of their day. When Peter attacks the Roman soldier and Jesus stays his hand, we don’t hear the awkward, third-person statement of the KJV’s Matthew, “[F]or all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,” but instead–as he dramatically wrests the knife from Peter’s hand and it falls to the ground–“You live by this, you die by it.” From his challenge to the crowd at Magdalene’s stoning, “Who here has never sinned?” to his gentle command to his disciples at the Last Supper, “Do this to remember me,” Jesus’ words are made natural and newly relevant to the contemporary viewer.

[11] Moreover, as Scorsese explains in his commentary on the Last Temptation DVD, his casting choices and use of a variety of American accents were made to emphasize that this is a story of ordinary people, taking place on ordinary streets–a move that connects the film to others in Scorsese’s oeuvre at the same time as it adds an urban element not present in Kazantzakis’ novel. As screenwriter Jay Cocks remarks, “It was a way of achieving a certain kind of immediacy, trying to take the mystification out of religion, make it something that could have happened on the street. Which is, in fact, where it did happen. The fact that the streets were covered with sand is sort of irrelevant.”6 Willem Dafoe, explains Scorsese, was chosen because the director had admired the physicality of his performance in Platoon, and desired that quality for his very human Jesus. The casting of Harvey Keitel as Judas is also interestingly appropriate, recalling as he does Scorsese’s gangster films. The Last Temptation film’s Judas is essentially a member of an organized street gang or terrorist organization, a revolutionary group that seeks to overthrow the standing political order through covert acts of violence. Scorsese’s knowledge of rough New York neighborhoods and the camaraderie between men comes through in the relationship between Jesus and Judas, even as this relationship is complicated by Jesus’ developing philosophy of nonviolence, which Judas describes as something only an angel or a dog could practice. Scorsese reflects that this is a tension that comes directly from his own life: “I grew up trying to place the proper balance [between] Christian teaching and the law of the street. I think it’s very hard to do, to say the least.”7

[12] The reactions of some critics, however, suggest that despite Scorsese’s efforts, many viewers of Last Temptation saw the film in terms of the same orthodox themes and assumptions that Scorsese wished to ignore. Critics Margaret Miles and W. Barnes Tatum both emphasize the association of women with flesh and temptation and condemn the film for its misogyny and sexism. Similarly, although Telford is more sympathetic, he still asserts that “What makes [Jesus] the Christ–for Scorsese, for Kazantzakis and arguably for the Gospels also–is his victory in this struggle of spirit over flesh, mind over matter, good over evil.”8 Although the film is unabashedly dualistic and can be criticized for dichotomizing men and women, this understanding of its dualism is a vast oversimplification of the film’s message. The common Western assumption has long been that where there is a dichotomy, one side must triumph over the other; one side must be associated with good while the other is associated with evil. Yet Scorsese’s delicate handling of the life of Jesus demonstrates that this is not so–and this is probably this aspect of the film that follows the novel most closely. Spirit and flesh may be at war, but as the Christ, Jesus affirms both to be good. Though his destiny is to take a path of nearly pure spirit, he is tempted by the beauty of material creation because it too is of God. As Kazantzakis explains in his prologue, regarding his own struggle:

The anguish has been intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish; I loved my soul and did not want it to decay. I have fought to reconcile these two primordial forces which are so contrary to each other, to make them realize that they are not enemies but, rather, fellow workers, so that they might rejoice in their harmony–and so that I might rejoice with them.9

For Jesus, the consequences of the dualistic world he lives in is the profound pain of having to choose between two sources of good. For Scorsese, the consequences of presenting an unorthodox dualistic world view in the Last Temptation film is to have the critics endlessly condemn it for orthodox dualistic sins it does not commit.

[13] One of the primary contrasts the viewer encounters in the Last Temptation film is that between the God of the desert, who is honored most directly by the monks and by John the Baptist, and the God of the home, who is honored by the women in their knowledge that the everyday is sacred. Though these two conceptions of God suggest radically different theologies, they are threads that are found in both the Jewish and Christian traditions, and Jesus honours and struggles with them at different points in his ministry. Mary Magdalene is a primary representative of the God of the home. It is possible to read her first encounter with Jesus as a pure temptation to sin–naked and dirty from her day’s work as a prostitute, she places his hand on her womb, saying, “If you want to save my soul, this is where you’ll find it. . . . Here’s my body. Save it.” For Magdalene, body and soul are one; Jesus can still redeem her by making love to her and marrying her, rescuing her from her fallen state. Yet Jesus is called to save more than the soul of just one woman. To live a good life may be salvific for a single man and woman, but it will not transform humanity. Yet Jesus sees the beauty and goodness of the domestic life, which is why it tempts him so harshly. When he returns from the desert and is taken in by Mary and Martha, he tells them, “I want to say that you’re both blessed. . . .You took me in, fed me, restored me, and God came down and went into my heart.” Similarly, the pleasure that Jesus takes in eating, drinking, and celebrating is obvious. One of the only miracles that he works that is not a healing is to change water into wine for a wedding feast, and in the same scene, we see him dancing happily with the crowd. God’s creation delights Jesus, and it is notable that the same women who scold him for half-killing himself in the desert instead of taking a wife are among his most beloved disciples, appearing (in direct contrast with orthodox tradition) even at the Last Supper. His pain at having to turn away from the goodness of the everyday comes to a head at Gethsemane, when he prays, “The world You created that we can see is beautiful. But the world You created that we can’t see is beautiful too. I don’t know–I’m sorry, Father–which is more beautiful.” Scooping up a bit of earth, he murmurs that it too is his body, and he is loath to leave it behind so soon.

[14] The Last Temptation film makes the spirit-flesh conflict even more problematic with its disturbing portrayal of the workings of God. Perhaps drawing on the traditions of the medieval mystics, Last Temptation’s Jesus experiences God as harsh and often confusing, his holy visions frightening and disturbing. Like Otto’s concept of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the God Jesus follows is radically Other, mysterious, and terrifying, suggesting that even if the God of the home is compatible with the best in human nature, the God of the desert is in direct conflict with it. After Jesus encounters the spirit of John the Baptist and enters the phase of the ax, we see him as wholly filled with the God of the prophets–he proclaims that he will baptize with fire, that he brings not peace, but a sword, and that the destruction of the Temple will be followed by the kingdom of God. At the same time, his miracles become numerous and central to his ministry–he performs healings, casts out demons, and raises Lazarus from the dead. Yet it is difficult for the viewer not to feel disquieted at the way in which Jesus’ experience in the desert has changed him. Orthodox thought tends to read Jesus’ claim not to know his mother Mary as an affirmation that he is the son of God and is no longer truly human. In the Last Temptation film, however, when Jesus encounters Mary he reacts with puzzlement–he seems to have genuinely forgotten who she is. When Mary’s friend reassures her, telling her there were armies of angels with Jesus, Mary replies bitterly, “There were? . . . I’d be happier if there weren’t.” Similarly, Jesus’ resurrection of Lazarus is not, as it is traditionally portrayed, an entirely joyful event. When the tomb is opened, the revolting smell of rotting flesh is signaled as all present, even those standing many yards away, cover their noses and mouths. The sequence is marked by a long, strained silence as Jesus calls Lazarus’ name over and over. Finally, a palpable shock ripples through the crowd as the dead man mechanically sticks out an arm with greyed, rotted-looking skin. In a moment of foreshadowing, Jesus is pulled halfway into the tomb as he tries to bring Lazarus out. Lazarus lives, but as becomes clear in his later appearance in the film, he has been transformed by his death; his movements are stiff and zombie-like, his eyes vague, his skin ashen.

[15] The presence of God seems, at times, to push Jesus’ humanity out. His rejection of his mother and the resurrection of Lazarus seem monstrous and unnatural, to the extent that Jesus, embraced by Lazarus, finds himself praying in horror, “Adonai . . . God, help me!” Clearly, to associate flesh with evil and spirit with good, or to understand “temptation” as the urge to commit acts that are evil in an absolute rather than a relative sense, is to vastly oversimplify the complex interaction of spirit and flesh in this film, in which the moral status of both remains ambiguous. As Jesus’ love of creation and the film’s explicit atonement theology indicate, to say that salvation requires that Jesus not live the life of a man is not to condemn domesticity, women, or material existence as evil, nor to deny that ordinary human life is also sacred.

[16] That Kazantzakis, like Scorsese, believed that both the ascetic life and the life of earthly experience were valid paths to God is further supported by Kazantzakis’ 1952 novel Zorba the Greek. Zorba is a tale of friendship between two men, one a wealthy intellectual continually buried in his books, and one an intense, extroverted hedonist who loves nothing better than good food, a lively song played on his stringed santuri, and a soft bed with a willing woman in it. Zorba, who represents the life of intense experience, is also a genuine mystic to whom the world appears perpetually new. Although he has committed crimes of violence in the past, particularly during wartime, Zorba’s long life has taught him compassion, and he risks his life to save others several times in the book while the nameless narrator stands by helplessly. Through Zorba’s example, the narrator comes to believe that his years of abstract spiritual exploration are empty compared to the rich, earthy life that Zorba has led. Overall, the book is a celebration of the daily miracle of transubstantiation, in which meat, bread, and wine are transformed into the human mind.10 Zorba’s hedonistic path, then, is ultimately a spiritual one. At least in this novel, Kazantzakis seems to have come down firmly on the side of the flesh as the preferred path to the divine, though in Last Temptation his Jesus must ultimately choose asceticism.

[17] The painful choice that Jesus must make between two compelling sources of good also resonates well with the feminist theology of Kathleen M. Sands. In her book Escape from Paradise, Sands deconstructs the notion of a singular source of absolute Good. Instead, she describes our world as plural and conflicted, one in which many different sources of good are mutually exclusive and incompatible. In a world such as this, she argues, moral and religious choices have profoundly tragic consequences; to choose one source of good, one way of living and acting, is to sacrifice another. Sands advocates the rejection of notions of transcendent perfection and absolute good, and instead embraces tragedy as a more realistic mode of knowing, one that allows us to be compassionate to those who hold models of belief and behaviour that we reject. These other systems of belief, she suggests, are alternate sources of different goods, a fact we must acknowledge even as we affirm our own conflicting point of view. “Compassion,” she writes, “is opposition that is not benumbed to the enemy, negation that dares to understand.”11 In this sentence it is easy to hear the echo of both Kazantzakis’ and Scorsese’s Jesus and his terrible choice. If by the nature of his mission the flesh must become his enemy, it is clear that in his opposition, he not only understands, but loves.

[18] The Last Temptation film allows us to see that to be the Christ is to be a tragic figure. Being God’s only son means being denied those good and beautiful things that are the birthright of every human being, for the messiah must be more than human. As the final temptation demonstrates, if Jesus is to fulfill his salvific role, liberating all people to live their human lives in spiritual freedom, he cannot live the life of a man–and that, perhaps, is a sacrifice far more profound than the simple fact of his death. Crucifixion is a terrible way to die, yet Jesus’ greatest pain comes from the sacrifice of the happy life he could have had with Magdalene. As Jay Cocks remarks in the DVD commentary, “Of course that’s what scandalized people so deeply . . . The fact that Jesus, who could have and do anything, wanted the one thing in the world that everyone takes for granted. Simple humanity. Love. Family. The most blessed things there are.”12

[19] Conservative critics have often accused the Last Temptation film of being a deliberate assault on their faith. As recently as 2003, Robin Riley has claimed in a book on the Last Temptation controversy that it “victimizes” traditional Christianity by replacing conventional associations with nonconforming ones,13 and suggests that the film is an attempt to remove the Jesus story from a religious context. These accusations, however, are belied both by the creators’ vocal piety and the seriousness which with the film treats the gospels, despite its claim not to be directly based on them. In fact, the eccentricities shared by the narratives of both the novel and the film–Jesus’ change in focus from love, to the axe, to the cross; the portrayal of Judas as Jesus’ stalwart friend–show obvious signs of Kazantzakis’ intense struggle with the gospels, and his attempts to imagine human motivations behind Jesus’ sometimes puzzling actions.

[20] It is difficult for any engaged reader of the gospels to reconcile the contradictions between Jesus’ advocacy of nonviolence and his apocalyptic rhetoric which brings “not peace, but the sword.” In Kazantzakis’ story every element in the narrative, however contradictory, plays a role in bringing Jesus to the cross. It is exactly his vacillation between love and the axe, so disturbing to many Christian viewers, that leads him to his execution, exactly where God intends him to be (clearly indicated, for once, by means of Jesus’ bleeding palms). Similarly, both the novel and film versions of Last Temptation provocatively answer the question, “Why would Judas have betrayed his master?” by positing motivations of love rather than anger. In order to be arrested with a minimum of violence, Jesus requires an informant. Judas, then, becomes essential to the process of redemption, the one with the most difficult job of all. In the film, when Jesus asks Judas to betray him, Judas, is shocked and asks, “If you were me, could you betray your master?” Jesus replies simply, “No. That’s why God gave me the easier job . . . to be crucified.” In a sense, love and the axe are made one in Judas’ “betrayal” as he offers up his friend to be sacrificed for the good of the world. The novel and film attempt to knit these problematic gospel elements into a coherent storyline, emphasizing subjectivity, change, and human struggle. Through these creative retellings, the hope is that the audience will experience–perhaps for the first time–the pain and tragedy of this ancient story, a story that is so often sanitized beyond recognition by orthodox religious traditions, reduced to dogma so familiar it no longer inspires.

[21] The Last Temptation film also contains a call for religious people to consider whether the Christian Church represents a fulfillment of Jesus’ life and message or a betrayal. Both the novel and film portray Paul as a showman, a preacher with a P.T. Barnum-like sense of spectacle. In the film, when Jesus encounters him in the dream of his last temptation, Paul is entirely unconcerned with the facts of Jesus’ life, preaching the story of Jesus’ resurrection with no reference to his wisdom sayings, and throwing in a virgin birth seemingly for extra flair and interest. Much like the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, he wants to ease human suffering by offering the people comforting stories rather than calling them to either physical or spiritual liberation. His reaction to meeting the “real” Jesus who has escaped crucifixion is predictable: “I’m glad I met you, because now I can forget all about you.” With the thoroughly dislikable character of Paul, the Last Temptation film criticizes the church as an institution that breaks with the spirit of Jesus’ message of liberation in favour of an agenda of sedation and control.

[22] An alternate and more sympathetic interpretation of the film’s Paul, however, might consider him merely to be cognizant of the salvific power of the resurrection story. Paul’s dialogue with Jesus echoes the earlier sentiment of one of the apostles, that a story being told about John the Baptist is important “because people believe [it].” Whether Jesus died on the cross or not, Paul argues, it is the story that gives people hope, inspires them to reform, improves their quality of life. The dialogue also implicitly brings up the question of the importance of the historical existence of Jesus–if Jesus never existed, or never died on the cross, or never rose again, is Christianity any less legitimate a religion? Although the film leaves the question open to discussion, Jesus’ embrace of his own death suggests that as important and spiritually effective a story alone may be, to live the story is yet a higher good. Perhaps the film follows the early church father Athanasius in suggesting that “the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” A story may help to save our souls, but the reality of a human being becoming fully divine demonstrates a much more profound, yet-unrealized human potential–the potential for human beings fully to embody the love of a compassionate God on earth.

[23] Despite its controversial nature, The Last Temptation of Christ film is a deeply pious and spiritual work–or, perhaps, it is because of its intense and authentic religiosity that is it so controversial. Last Temptation calls its audience to make a direct and personal connection to the Jesus story. The film challenges us to imagine a truly human Jesus, one who became more than human despite having every human failing. In contrast to Godspell, where Jesus’ kitschy Superman t-shirt inadvertently implies that for the Son of God, sinlessness and self-sacrifice by crucifixion are easy, Last Temptation’s Jesus suffers profoundly, making the enormity of his sacrifice all the more meaningful. Yet the film also reaches beyond merely offering us a new understanding of Jesus. As Paul Schrader explains in the DVD commentary, the filmmakers understood the character of Jesus in Last Temptation as a metaphor for humanity’s struggle to become divine. Although perhaps the right path for many of us involves the domestic life which Jesus longed to enjoy and could not, the example of a fully human Jesus also provides a template for all heroism, all self-sacrifice, all acts of beauty and power that work to transform and liberate humanity. For the contemporary viewer, the Last Temptation film may well hold the key to empowering believers and non-believers alike to follow Jesus, not as an unreachable ideal or as the emblem of a rigid religious orthodoxy, but as an example of how a human being might become the vessel of divinity.

Notes

1 William R. Telford, “Jesus Christ Movie Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema,” Explorations in Theology and Film, ed. Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997), 129.

2 The Last Temptation of Christ, DVD, directed by Martin Scorsese (1988; The Criterion Collection: Universal Home Video, 2000).

3 Martin Scorsese, Scorsese on Scorsese, e/ David Thompson and Ian Christie (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 124.

4 Lee Congdon, “Ascent: The Spiritual Trajectory of Nikos Kazantzakis,” The World & I, http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2004/march/writerspub.asp (accessed March 30, 2004).

5 P.A. Bien, “A Note on the Author and His Use of Language,” The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis, trans. P.A. Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 501.

6 Last Temptation of Christ, DVD.

7 Last Temptation, DVD.

8 Telford, “Jesus Christ Movie Star,” 137.

9 Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, trans. P.A. Bien (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960) 1.

10 Daniel A. Dombrowski, Kazantzakis and God, SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 47 .

11 Kathleen M. Sands, Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 168.

12 Last Temptation, DVD.

13 Robin Riley, Film, Faith, and Cultural Conflict: The Case of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), 49.

References

Congdon, Lee. “Ascent: The Spiritual Trajectory of Nikos Kazantzakis” [online]. The World & I [cited 30 March 2004]. Available from World Wide Web: (http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2004/march/writerspub.asp).

Dombrowski, Daniel A. Kazantzakis and God. SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

The Last Temptation of Christ. Dir. Martin Scorsese, 1988. DVD. The Criterion Collection: Universal Home Video, 2000.

“The Last Temptation of Christ” [online]. Internet Movie Database [cited 13 March 2003]. Available from World Wide Web: (http://us.imdb.com/Details?0095497).

Miles, Margaret. Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Riley, Robin. Film, Faith, and Cultural Conflict: The Case of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2003.

Sands, Kathleen M. Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.

Scorsese, Martin. Scorsese on Scorsese. Ed. David Thompson & Ian Christie. London: Faber & Faber, 1989.

Tatum, W. Barnes. Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1997.

Telford, William R. “Jesus Christ Movie Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema.” Explorations in Theology and Film. Ed. Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997.