A Review of the Last Temptation of Christ

It has been said that the various ‘lives’ of Jesus written or filmed over the last couple of hundred years have tended to tell us more about the author or director than about the actual person of Jesus. Even outside of Christianity, Jesus has resonated in a powerful way in the hearts and minds of those who encounter him. The difficulty arises in that we do not know what to do with him He is a personality which we do not have models of understanding with which to compare, and who we find familiar, but not very much like ourselves. In response to this, some have sought understanding by remaking Jesus in their own image, giving him the inner struggles, temptations, and other oddities which they themselves are dealing with, and in doing so possibly hope to universalize this man which we can almost, but not quite, understand. Martin Scorcese’s film, The Last Temptation of Christ, is a somewhat contemporary attempt at doing this. [1] In this brief paper, I will first look at this interpretation, seeking to find the questions this movie raises and I will then analyze how this compares with my own, and others, interpretations.

The Last Temptation of Christ is a movie about struggle, namely the internal struggle of trying to balance our spiritual selves with our physical selves, the “incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.” [2] From the very beginning there is conflict, both external in the Palestine of the Roman era, and internal in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This dual struggle is thrown at us in the first scene when we see Jesus the carpenter making crosses for the crucifixion of fellow Jews. Jesus is clearly a man overwhelmed by this conflict. He is driven by fear, fear of the Romans and fear of what he feels God is doing inside of him. This conflict drives a wedge between him and those around him, driving him to seek consolation and answers away from his home and in the wilderness.

He is attracted first to a society of ascetics (Essenes?), where he begins to realize the role which he is to fulfill. Gathering together a band of men as followers, he seeks to distribute his understanding of God to those around him. Still unsure of who he is, or what God seems to be driving him towards, he listens to the advice of John the Baptist and heads out into the desert, drawing a circle around himself and waiting for an answer to his difficulties, both resentful and weary of who he seems to be. He cannot stand what God is doing in his mind and soul, yet cannot resist what is going on. Rather than a clear answer from God, Jesus is visited by the Great Tempter. His force of will allows him to overcome these first temptations, which then give him the confidence to return to his disciples, this time with Messianic aspirations.

His understanding of himself as Messiah results in continued conflict, this time with other Jews, but also with himself. At first he feels that he must physical lead people to fight the corrupting powers of the day, but realizes that it will take his death to really impact the situation. With Judas as his advisor and confidante he pushes himself into being arrested by the authorities, and is eventually crucified. Yet, while on the cross, Jesus lapses into a dream, his last temptation. He yearns to both please God and be a content human, and is tempted by the thought of his sacrifice of reaching the cross to be enough and that he is let down to live a life of a whole person, free from inner conflict, knowing that he had served God. It becomes clear that this is truly a temptation seeking to derail his sacrifice at the very end, making it a meaningless gesture. He thus decides to sacrifice his whole self for the sake of God.

Within the first five minutes of watching this film I realized that I would have a difficult time dialoguing with this movie about the person of Jesus. This is not because it shocked me, or was in any way frustrating, rather I realized that this movie was not even about Jesus. In an almost Arthurian way, the main cast of characters, some essential framework of events, and a taste of an approximate locale were reformed into a story all its own, not even meaning to point us to a further understanding of Jesus the man. Rather, as the introduction stated, this is a movie, not about Jesus, but about the author, and about those in history who have struggled incessantly with their inner spirit. I feel I gained some insight into the mind of Nikos Kazantzakis, possibly Martin Scorcese, and maybe most of all the Messianic pretenders who abounded during the 2^nd Temple Period and have arisen now and again even to our day (i.e. David Koresh), but not necessarily about Jesus.

One of the most interesting questions that does arise in this movie concerns the self-awareness of Jesus. The Jesus of the movie is at first visibly unable to cope with life. His inner struggle has reached a breaking point and drives him to further knowledge and understanding. It is during his quest that he discovers who he is, God and Messiah, and with this newfound knowledge seeks to engage the world, though not quite sure of the best method for doing so. It is the common struggle of trying to understand how God is leading in life, and dealing with the sacrifices that this sometimes entails. Although the answer the movie provides seems more representative of the story of Joan of Arc more than Jesus, this is an interesting question, and essentially one which we are not privy to the real answer of when Jesus became aware (if he was not always aware) of his divinity. In the movie this struggle is represented as being analogous to our own battle to understand our duel nature. Yet I do feel that the inner life of Jesus was in fact vitally different than our own. From my reading of the Jesus narratives what is striking is not his inner struggle, but rather his inner unity. Rather than being an archetype for the struggle we all deal with, Jesus is a model of what a person is like when their physical and spiritual selves are truly united. Scorcese tries to show us a man who is truly human, but rather misses the mark and shows us one more example of what it is to be less than human.

Yancey, on the other hand, seems to realize this fact. Jesus is not a model of what we are, but what we should be. The Jesus he portrays is not one who is seemingly out of place in this world, unable to connect with anyone including himself, but in many ways the only one who is truly in place. He is a man who is rooted not only in God and eternity, but also distinctly in the culture of his own day, so knowledgeable of the law and prophets that he can debate the greatest scholars. He was able to not only preach and philosophize, but to really “hang out” with people of all levels of society. One of the goals of the movie was to seek to portray Jesus as a man, emphasizing the universal qualities of his humanity. In this it failed. The Jesus of the movie was not a real person, in a real era, speaking real words. He was an example of what some people feel a religious person should be, and in this way was very reminiscent of the Infancy Gospels, and other apocryphal tales of the life of Jesus which have been produced since his days on earth. Indeed, the movie showed a real lack of true engagement with who Jesus was and is.

Once one moves behind the elements which were intentionally meant to be shocking and controversial, one realizes how vacuous the story and characters were. This was in fact just a plain bad movie, that should have been dismissed not protested. The Jesus of the movie was not God, nor was he even really human, but rather a grotesque attempt at both. It followed the trend of seeking to bring a hero down to our level rather than portraying the truly heroic. My thought to the end was that this was a Jesus who needed to get to know the true Jesus, and hear the full Gospel message. He was a character that evoked pity rather than the awe and reverence which would characterize a leader who had the effect on the world that Jesus did in fact have. The Jesus of the Gospels was a man to whom we aspire to be like, a man who could have truly led a conquest of the Roman Empire had that been a goal. He was a leader par excellence, whose glory was in that he did not yield to who humanity wanted him to be, but rather called humanity to where he knew they needed to be. The Last Temptation of Christ is an example of what happens when someone just plain misses the point, not only about Christ, but also about himself and all humanity.

[1] I say somewhat because there are many elements of the movie which seem, in my opinion, to reflect a 1960s or 1970s point of view rather than a perspective of today.

[2] From the introduction of The Last Temptation of Christ, quoting the book of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis.