The Last Temptation of Christ: The OG Controversial Jesus Movie
Fifth Friday of Lent
This week we come to what is pretty much the uncontested most controversial Jesus movie ever made. It singlehandedly managed to get banned in multiple countries, trigger protests and demonstrations, and inspire its opponents to commit arson, knife attacks, and tear gas bombings. I mean, that’s intense.
Martin Scorsese probably had an idea of the hornet’s nest he was stirring up, so the film has two short opening texts — one a quote from the author of the source material and one a disclaimer — scrolling up the screen before the film itself actually starts.
“The dual substance of Christ — the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God … has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh … and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.” — Nikos Kazantzakis, author of The Last Temptation of Christ
This film is not based upon the Gospels but upon this fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict.
Neither the original novel nor the film are meant to be held up as biblically-accurate companions to the Gospels. They are both explorations of spiritualities, of mysteries, of human nature, of divine nature. We all know what it’s like to be human — with a human soul, spirit, psyche — but Kazantzakis (and later Scorsese and Willem Dafoe) explore what it might have been like to be totally human but combined in some way with divinity. Whatever that might look like, play out, or mean in reality. And as it turns out, that can get pretty controversial.
I was only five years old when The Last Temptation of Christ was initially released, so I don’t remember the controversy around it at all. Zero recollection. I don’t even think I saw a movie in an actual cinema until The Little Mermaid came out in 1989. Much more the kind of fare I was into at that age. (Although I guess The Little Mermaid had its own bit of controversy too.)
I got around to watching The Last Temptation of Christ back in the summer of 2004 right in the midst of my first (very intense) deconstruction. I was home on a five-month summer vacation and had in my possession a laptop computer, headphones, and a new Netflix subscription. I had both the time and the means to explore all the kinds of films that I hadn’t been allowed to watch as a teenager and that I surmised my parents might not have been super thrilled about me watching even as a 20-something. This was one of them. Most young adults back then (and now) were probably trying to sneak porn; I was sneaking movies of an entirely different genre.
I knew a bit about what had fuelled the film’s controversy. I knew Scorsese had received death threats. Various American cities (not to mention entire countries) had banned the film, and Blockbuster Video decided not to add copies to its rental library when the VHS was released the following year. A far-right Catholic group affiliated with the Front National (now the Rassemblement National) attacked a Parisian cinema which had been showing the film with an incendiary device. Thirteen people were injured in what can only be described as a religiously-motivated terrorist attack. I had been a student in Paris during the autumn of 2003 and actually lived right in the Saint-Michel district where the cinema was located. I had walked past it almost daily for four months and had no idea.
So yeah, I didn’t really know what I was in for when I popped that DVD into my SONY laptop and clicked play. But I braced myself for the wildest shit I could possibly imagine. About three hours later when the film wrapped up, I was thoroughly underwhelmed. Not by the film itself. I was only 21 at the time, and there were a lot of deeper themes within the story that I wasn’t really able to grasp just yet. But even so, I could tell it was a truly great film. My only complaint then (and now) was how unbelievably white all of the actors were who had been cast in a film set in the Middle East. Apart from that though, the script, story, plot, dialogue, acting, music, and everything else were all brilliant. I figured out pretty quickly what was controversial in the storyline, but I didn’t find it offensive at all. It works with the plot. With the exploration. There’s a reason it’s there, and it isn’t just to piss people off. It’s meant to make you think.
One of the earliest Christian heresies back in the day taught that Christ wasn’t actually a human being at all; he only seemed to be. Like he was pretending to be human for the benefit of those around him. Tricking everyone into thinking he was flesh-and-blood when he really wasn’t. Whatever seemed to be human about him was just a phantom or some kind of hologram. Pretty wild stuff. Very sci-fi. While Docetism has been deemed a heresy for centuries and mostly fallen out of favor and even common knowledge, there are elements of neo-Docetism in some modern Christian subcultures. Jesus might have a real human body in this version, but all of his human experiences are not really that difficult. The temptations aren’t really all that tempting. Turn stones into bread? Pfft. Jump off the temple and be caught by angels? No thanks. Bow down to the devil? Piss off. Easy peasy. A mere walk in the park. But if temptations aren’t actually tempting, then are they really temptations? Isn’t it just pretending to be tempted?
I think one of the things that made a lot of Very Religious People™ so supremely angry with this movie was that the temptations in the film are actually very tempting. And not just the three classic ones in the wilderness that are supposed to be kind of a struggle to beat, but all the rest of them too. Especially the last one. It’s what the entire movie hinges on. Jesus is straight up not having a good time for most of the film. He pretty much hates himself at the beginning. He’s called a coward and a collaborator. He constructs crosses for the Romans in the hopes that he can get God to hate him. Most of his Jewish community definitely hate him for this. He’s afraid of a lot of different things. He’s confused. He doesn’t want to be the Messiah. When he finally gets to the desert after being baptized, the three temptations are genuinely harrowing. They come across as very realistic. They have a real psychological impact. But it’s the temptation from which the film gets its name — The LAST Temptation of Christ — where a lot of more conservative Christians of all stripes got very offended. Maybe because it’s the one that made Jesus most human. He almost fails. Any neo-Docetist theology is violently stripped away. We are left either with a God who is actually in reality fully human with no supernatural powers except for love OR just a man with only a human nature and nothing else. For a lot of modern Christians, that might have been a step too far.
In a lot of depictions of the Gospels — film, television, novels, devotional books, sermons, etc. — Jesus going out into the desert is portrayed as being a test of Satan. The devil tries to get him to sin or doubt himself or doubt God or diverge from his mission or something else along those lines. While that is an element in this film too, it isn’t the driving force. Jesus wants to know who he is. “Just speak to me in human words,” he asks God. Until these moments in the film, Jesus has struggled with being human. Like everyone does. He doesn’t know who or what he is. He is afraid. He doesn’t understand a lot of stuff. He feels like he has fucked up a lot. He wants reassurance. He wants guidance. He wants direction for whatever it is God wants from him. He genuinely doesn’t understand, and he wants to.
God doesn’t show up first though. Satan does. A serpent tempting him with the voice of Mary Magdalene. “The world doesn’t need to be saved. Save yourself.” He is then tempted with worldly power and finally with the opportunity to ally himself with Satan to control the world, the cosmos, the universe. Drawing on its source material of modern Greek literature, it is a very cerebral, psychological depiction of the mind of Christ. Just as in the Gospels, Jesus succeeds in shutting down these temptations. But it hasn’t been easy. As the presence of evil fades away, its voice leaves a final, threatening message. “We’ll see each other again.” Whether a threat or a promise, their next encounter will be even more harrowing.
Again comes at the end of Jesus’ life, and this is where most of the controversy surrounding the film can be found. As Jesus is suffering on the cross, everything goes silent. It’s still happening, but reality seems to be momentarily stalled. He looks around and sees a young girl who is also affected by this pause in the time-space continuum. She identifies herself as the angel who guards him. “You’ve done enough,” she tells him, explaining that God has seen his faith and is rescuing him just as God had rescued Isaac. If God had saved Abraham’s son, wouldn’t he want to save his own? “Let him die in a dream, but let him live his life.” He’s going to get the chance to live. The angel gently pulls the nails from his wrists and feet, helping him down off the cross. They walk through the beautiful landscape of this paradise toward a wedding. His wedding. To Mary Magdalene.
What follows is a vision of his life if he were normal. The regular life most humans all throughout history have wanted: getting married, having kids, dealing with the deaths of loved ones, working for a living, getting old. All of the regular day-to-day human stuff that we all have to deal with throughout our lives. It’s what Jesus wanted at the beginning of the film. To be normal. Just a regular guy and not the Messiah. The (married) sex scene with Mary Magdalene was the centerpiece of the religious outrage, but it’s really the entire sequence that probably scandalized people. What if Jesus didn’t know exactly what or who he was or would be? It isn’t inconceivable that he might have wanted to live a normal life just like everyone else. What happened during all those years when he was a teenager and young adult? He must have had crushes. He must have at least thought about getting married. To have kids. To live a typical human life to some extent. Maybe that was a deep desire, a temptation, for him too that he had to give up. This isn’t a train of thought often explored in modern Christianity. I don’t think I ever heard a single evangelical sermon or Catholic homily even touching on it.
In this sort of vision/alternate reality, Jesus finally figures out that the “angel who guards you” isn’t actually his guardian angel at all. She never has been. She’s Satan, disguising herself as an angel of light. This little girl has been toying with Jesus’ emotions the entire time. This elderly Jesus crawls out of his death bed back toward Golgotha. His last temptation was to give up being the Messiah and lead the normal life he had always desired. He chooses not to. Like the main characters in his parable of the Prodigal Son, he pleads with God to take him back, to let him be the Messiah he was meant to be. Whatever that might mean in reality. He wakes up back on the cross, never having actually left it. Whatever has transpired for these several decades seems to have been all in his head and taken no time at all. He then speaks the same closing line as in the Gospels. “It is accomplished.” What’s accomplished? The temptations he has defeated. His mission as the Messiah. His human life. The struggles he has overcome. It’s over. He can die in peace. It’s an extremely human moment; there is no discernible divinity. The cross has been a real sacrifice beyond what most other films depict. Not in the violence and gore. There are definitely worse movies than this one in that respect. But in what Jesus the human had to surrender. Whatever he wanted for himself out of life that he would never have the opportunity to get.
After being baptized by John, Jesus had disagreed with him about the use of anger and violence. John favors it, but Jesus doesn’t. John is portrayed as something like what we could call “an old school fire-and-brimstone Bible thumper.” A prophet. An eccentric living in the wilderness. He wasn’t soft. Jesus believes in love. He doesn’t want the ax that John offers him. He wants something other than vengeance. “Tell me your secret,” Judas asks him. “Pity. Pity for all men.” The depth of his compassion for all men, even Romans, isn’t what the freedom fighters or even average Judeans and Galileans had expected or even wanted. “You want freedom for Israel?” Judas asks him. “No, I want freedom for the soul.”
All throughout the film, Jesus is moving from narrow understandings of God to wider ones. “God’s world is big enough for everybody!” he says while confronting the religious leaders in Jerusalem. There is room for everyone and everything. Nothing and no one need be excluded. He is challenged at a wedding that he is standing against the Law. “Then the Law is against me heart,” Jesus responds. While not an actual quote from the Gospels themselves — remember this film is based on a novel — I never found them to be controversial statements. The universalist strand of Christianity is the oldest and was the most prevalent in the ancient world. Everyone gets saved. There is room for everyone. God isn’t against anyone. There is always room at the wedding feast.
“Has God changed his mind about the old Law?” one of the priests asks him in Jerusalem. “No, he just thinks our hearts are ready to hold more, that’s all.” Like when you learn basic grammar rules in elementary school. Don’t start a sentence with a conjunction, for example. But then later on, when your writing becomes more sophisticated, you learn that you actually can start a sentence with a conjunction. Having taught ESL for almost 14 years now, I can tell you that there are so many grammar and writing rules that I have to teach at the lower levels that eventually get thrown out the window at the higher levels. You have to learn the structure first, but then you can let the structure go in order to advance. I think it’s a similar dynamic here.
Jesus then asks them, “You think God belongs only to you?” If there’s only one God, then They belong to everyone. Whatever the creative energy in the universe actually is, it’s expanding. Not contracting. It is always including more, not less. “God is not an Israelite!” he yells at them. We could easily express something similar today: God is not a Catholic! God is not a Protestant! God is not an evangelical! God is not a Muslim! God is not a Hindu! God is not a Buddhist! God is not a Republican! God is not a Democrat! God is not an Israeli! God is not a Palestinian! But then comes my favorite line of the entire film. When the priests accuse Jesus of blasphemy, he retorts with, “I’M THE SAINT OF BLASPHEMY!” While also not verbatim from the Bible, this quote fits with the sentiment in the Gospels too. Jesus is constantly accused of blasphemy. Speaking sacrilegiously about sacred things. But then a saint is a holy or virtuous person. It’s an oxymoron. He’s basically saying that he’s a holy figure pushing the envelope of what is holy. Of what can be considered holy. Sort of like this entire film overall. It’s the story of a holy figure — Jesus — entertaining the prospect of living a profane (secular) life to illustrate a deeper point. And that made a lot of people in 1988 Big Mad.
Earlier in the desert, in another sort of vision, John the Baptist had handed him an ax. He didn’t use it to cut down the Romans but rather to cut down a tree. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A tree full of poisonous fruit. A tree offered by Satan. When Jesus rejoins the disciples after his desert experience, he tells them, “I’m inviting you to a war.” He doesn’t intend to cut down the Romans with a physical ax; he intends to cut down Satan with a metaphorical one. He then reaches into his chest, pulling out his own living heart and offering it to the disciples. The only parallel that sprung to mind with this imagery was the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Catholic devotion symbolizing the endless love of God for humanity. Jesus wants to use the weakness of his humanity to defeat the devil and expand who is included within the community of God. He wants to change how people think, feel, act, and relate with one another.
Pilate later recognizes this desire in Jesus to turn the world upside down and sentences him to death for it.
PILATE: You know it’s one thing to want to change the way that people live, but you want to change how they think and how they feel.
JESUS: All I’m saying is that change will happen with love. Not with killing.
PILATE: Either way, it’s dangerous. It’s against Rome. It’s against the way the world is. And killing or loving, it’s all the same. It simply doesn’t matter how you want to change things. We don’t want them changed.
It doesn’t matter to him that Jesus wants to change people through love rather than violence. Pilate doesn’t want things changed. Rome doesn’t want things changed. The status quo doesn’t want things changed. They all want things to stay the same, and anything that goes against that is dangerous. Even if it’s for the better, it’s dangerous.
This entire film felt like an extended, oftentimes secular, sometimes spiritual, practice in lectio divina. Lectio divina (Latin for sacred/divine reading) is an ancient Christian practice of encountering the Scriptures firsthand. Putting yourself into the text, into the story, into the experience. So that it becomes a part of you. You can relate to it in some personal, universal way. It’s not a Bible Study. It’s an interaction in spirituality. I was never taught this tool in organized religion. Neither in the various evangelical churches I frequented nor in the one Catholic parish I attended. I learned about it on my own. The Last Temptation of Christ feels like a sort of exercise in an alternative format of lectio divina. Experiencing well-known stories in a completely different way. Which can come across as somewhat threatening to people who like things as they are. It can upset the status quo. It can be dangerous. Maybe even a little bit blasphemous. But if we’re with the Saint of Blasphemy, I think we’re in good company.
