Movie: The last temptation of Christ?

[mikekle]

Someone let me borrow this movie, it is by Martin Scorsese, Im just wondering if its any good and/or if its accurate. Thanks!

 

[Tim_D]

You obviously know nothing about this movie.

 

[ChurchSoldier]

Not worth the time to watch.

 

[claymcdermott]

I don’t think that Scorsese really intended the film to be about Jesus at all, just because the acting is so non-naturalistic (I believe intentionally so) and the plot so divergent from anything historical or Biblical, that I think he really meant to use the Gospel narrative as a loose scaffolding for a story about the inner frailty and reluctance and uncertainty of heroes, and what people really want from the hero.

Kinda like how Jesus Christ Superstar used it for a story about what you do when your movement seems to be at an end.

Now, I liked Jesus Christ Super Star. Didn’t like Last Temptation of Christ. As a motion picture, I didn’t like it. It didn’t scandalize me. Just failed to resonate with me and was a little long on moderate Christian/ pseudo-intellectual and highly improbable clichés, which sometimes manifest as improbable plot events (which are gonna have you going, “But that isn’t what happened,” and “What?” whether you concede the first paragraph’s point or not). Also, ironically, in their attempt to humanize Jesus, they end up making him even less relatable than a lotta more ethereal film Jesuses.

Bizarrely, the one really cool thing about the film is David Bowie as Pontius Pilate.

 

[JB_Brother_4446]

You obviously know nothing about this movie.

It reeks of heresy.

 

[StudentMI]

Bizarrely, the one really cool thing about the film is David Bowie as Pontius Pilate.

I disagree. Peter Gabriel’s score is amazing.

Theologically it’s a mess, immoral. But even from a cinematic stand it’s pretty bad. Aside from great locations and cinematography, the acting is bad. Like, it ruins the movie bad. Still, that score is stellar.

 

[claymcdermott]

Oh, right! How could I forget?

Okay, that score was pretty cool.

 

[Tim_D]

Peter Gabriel’s score is amazing.

My friend Gary used to say that if you wanted to clear a room, put on the soundtrack to the Last Temptation of Christ!

 

[Michael_Mayo]

Authored by Nikos Kazantzakis (18 February 1883 – 26 October 1957) a Greek writer, celebrated for his novels which include Zorba the Greek (published 1946 as Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas), Christ Recrucified (1948), Captain Michalis (1950, translated 'Freedom or Death), and The Last Temptation of Christ (1955). He also wrote plays, travel books, memoirs and philosophical essays such as The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises.

His fame was further spread in the English speaking world by cinematic adaptations of Zorba the Greek (1964) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis

 

[patrick457]

I disagree. Peter Gabriel’s score is amazing.

Exactly. I think it actually started the fad of using Middle-Eastern music for Jesus movies.

As for the movie itself: let’s just say that well, Martin Scorsese didn’t do a very good job of adapting the book. (Yes, I’ve read the book and I’ve seen the movie.) He cut and changed a lot of stuff, sometimes for the worse. Granted, the novel itself is in ways problematic theologically (although to be fair to it, it never claims to be a theological treatise but a sort of ‘what-if’ reflection on Nikos Kazantzakis’ part), but the movie just made the ‘bad’ parts worse.

 

[patrick457]

It reeks of heresy.

The movie with its neurotic, emo Jesus does , but the novel I think is more ‘heterodox’ than outright ‘heretical’ (though it does threaten to veer into the latter at times, I’ll admit). It doesn’t really outright subvert orthodox beliefs about Jesus, but it does approach them in a rather unconventional way.

Kazantzakis connects Jesus’ human and divine natures with the struggle between ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ that all humans experience (“The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”). In fact, the main theme of the novel is a ‘what-if’: Jesus, due to His unique relationship with God, must have experienced this battle in a much greater intensity than the rest of humanity. The fact that He never gave in to temptation and won this internal battle makes Him a role model for all humanity - not just Christians - to follow.

The film weakens this main theme of the novel - and makes it more problematic than it already is - by making the ‘last temptation’ scene more ambiguous. Whereas the novel makes it clear repeatedly that the ‘last temptation’ was just an illusion sent by Satan to fool Jesus while He was on the cross and that He never gave in to it, the movie makes it unclear whether everything was just happening in Jesus’ head or whether it really happened.

 

[patrick457]

I don’t think that Scorsese really intended the film to be about Jesus at all, just because the acting is so non-naturalistic (I believe intentionally so)

The problem here IMHO was that Martin Scorsese tried to make TLT into a ‘regular’ Jesus movie. The tone of the novel is actually more introspective (I think that’s a trademark of Kazantzakis) and sort of fantasy-like. There’s a lot of similes /metaphors and vivid imagery and descriptions. While Kazantzakis did try to root his novel in the known accounts and in the geography of the Holy Land, there’s obvious anachronisms and references to later Christian belief and legend added for effect - John the Baptist for example baptizes Jesus with the Eastern baptismal formula minus the Trinity: “The servant of God, N. is baptized…”, there’s a continual reference to lemons (a nod to his native Crete), the folk legend about gypsies forging the nails used in Jesus’ crucifixion is referenced - and supernatural beings such as Satan (in the form of a green-winged angel with the morning star - ‘Lucifer’ - on his brow) or various angels make an appearance.

Scorsese however shot the film in the ‘naturalistic’, purely ‘historically-accurate’ way that’s currently in vogue among recent biblical films (a la Jesus of Nazareth) where anything that reeks of the otherworldly or supernatural is either cut out entirely or depicted in a muted kind of way. I think that sort of robbed something from the spirit of the book.

and the plot so divergent from anything historical or Biblical,

It’s actually the fault of the source material. Kazantzakis based his novel not so much on the gospels themselves, but on Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus. (The progression of Jesus’ ministry in Renan and Kazantzakis is actually almost exactly the same, not to mention that Kazantzakis lifts ideas straight out of Renan.) In a way, The Last Temptation is actually sort of Vie de Jésus with mystic and introspective stuff tacked in.

that I think he really meant to use the Gospel narrative as a loose scaffolding for a story about the inner frailty and reluctance and uncertainty of heroes, and what people really want from the hero.

The main theme of the novel, as I’ve mentioned, is: all human beings experience a struggle within themselves: “the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.” Jesus is a prime example of this struggle.

THE DUAL SUBSTANCE of Christ—the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain to God or, more exactly, to return to God and identify himself with him—has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. This nostalgia for God, at once so mysterious and so real, has opened in me large wounds and also large flowing springs.
My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.
Within me are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and prehuman; within me too are the luminous forces, human and pre-human, of God—and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
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.

Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

…] In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. That is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we share it, and why his final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world: he is fighting at our side.

…] This book was written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation or death—because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered. Christ suffered pain, and since then pain has been sanctified. Temptation fought until the very last moment to lead him astray, and Temptation was defeated. Christ died on the Cross, and at that instant death was vanquished forever.
Every obstacle in his journey became a milestone, an occasion for further triumph. We have a model in front of us now, a model who blazes our trail and gives us strength.

Bizarrely, the one really cool thing about the film is David Bowie as Pontius Pilate.

That was actually one of those weird moments of the movie. Though yeah, he didn’t do a bad job there.

 

[claymcdermott]

yeah, but that is kinda the weird thing about it, no? The acting is not naturalistic but the direction is.

 

[patrick457]

yeah, but that is kinda the weird thing about it, no? The acting is not naturalistic but the direction is.

That is exactly it. Scorsese seem to have tried to have it both ways.

 

[patrick457]

yeah, but that is kinda the weird thing about it, no? The acting is not naturalistic but the direction is.

I’m replying to your post again.

Yeah, there’s definitely those bizarre moments in the film, for example this scene where Jesus plucks His own heart out of His chest and it turns into an ax (a scene that’s not in the book, I might add). The fact that Scorsese gave the film a naturalistic feel just makes these kind of scenes jarring and sort of out-of-place.

Where this naturalistic approach fails the most especially is during the actual ‘last temptation’ sequence. In the book, it is very obvious that the ‘temptation’ is not real, because a lot of surreal, reality-bending stuff happens through and through: Jesus wakes up to find Himself in an idyllic paradise, a mob appears to stone Mary Magdalene to death, Jesus’ appearance turning into Lazarus. In fact, this fantasy world steadily deteriorates with heavy hints that what is happening isn’t real: for example, Pilate somehow ends up being crucified (!)

Just to give you a feel of how the book reads, here’s the novel’s version of the crucifixion of Jesus. Simon of Cyrene (a minor character that’s cut out of the film) has a vision of angels crucifying Jesus:

Two soldiers grabbed him by the shoulders. “Get up, Your Majesty,” they shouted at him. “Mount your throne!”
They undressed him, revealing his thin body. It was covered with blood.
The heat was intense. The people, tired of shouting themselves hoarse, watched mutely.
“Let him drink some wine to gain strength,” a soldier suggested.
But Jesus pushed away the cup and extended his arms to the cross. “Father,” he murmured, “your will be done.”
The blind, the leprous and the maimed now began to howl. “Liar! Cheat! Deceiver of the people!”
“Where is the kingdom of heaven, where are the ovens with the loaves?” howled the ragamuffins, and they barraged him with lemon peels and stones.
Jesus spread wide his arms and opened his mouth to cry, Brothers! but the soldiers seized him and hoisted him up onto the cross. Then they called the gypsies with the nails, but as the hammers were lifted and the first blow was heard, the sun hid its face; as the second was heard, the sky darkened and the stars appeared: not stars, but large tears which dripped onto the soil.
The crowd was overcome with fright. The horses on which the Romans were mounted became ferocious. Rearing, they began to gallop furiously and trample the Jewry. Then earth, sky and air suddenly grew mute, as at the beginning of an earthquake.
Simon the Cyrenian fell prone onto the stones. The world had shaken many times under his feet, and he was terrified. “Alas! now the earth will open up and swallow us all,” he murmured.
He lifted his head and looked around him. The world seemed to have fainted. Deathly pale, it was now just barely visible in the bluish darkness. The heads of the people had vanished and only their eyes—black holes—bored through the air. A thick flock of crows which had scented the blood and rushed to Golgotha now fled in terror. A feeble gasp of complaint descended from the cross, and the Cyrenian, tying his heart into a knot so that he would not weep, lifted his eyes and looked. Suddenly he uttered a cry. Jesus was not being nailed to the cross by gypsies! No, a multitude of angels had come down from heaven, holding hammers and nails in their hands. They flew around Jesus, swung the hammers happily and nailed the hands and feet; some tightly bound the victim’s body with stout cord so that he would not fall; and a small angel with rosy cheeks and golden curls held a lance and pierced Jesus’ heart.
“What is this?” murmured the Cyrenian, trembling. “God himself, God himself is crucifying him!”

Personally, I think this has the feel of a Cecil B. DeMille movie.

 

[patrick457]

If I’m going to sum up the main problems I saw with The Last Temptation (the book), it would be:

• Kazantzakis seems to have this semi-gnostic mentality that physical things are bad - or at least base and depraved - and that only the spiritual is good. One must shun physical matter and the earth and ascend to higher, spiritual thingsd. In fact, Jesus here seems to undergo a journey of ‘dematerialization’, where He eventually forsakes the ‘flesh’ and embraces - becomes - the ‘spirit’. It’s very telling that Satan’s ‘last temptation’ is for Jesus to live a mundane, peaceful, earth-bound life.
• Kazantzakis portrays Jesus as grasping His mission only at stages - or to put it better, he seems to portray as if God is only telling Jesus bits and pieces of what He must do, only revealing more as He progresses further. At the beginning of the novel, Jesus sort of knows (as is many of the people around Him) that He is chosen by God to do something, but He still does not know exactly what. There are three distinct stages in Jesus’ ministry in the novel: first Jesus feels that God calls Him to preach love, then later He preaches fiery judgment (‘the ax’), and then He finally realizes that He must die to save the world.

(For the record, this is one of the things Kazantzakis cribbed out straight of Ernest Renan. Renan also divided Jesus’ ministry into three stages: in its beginning, Renan thought that Jesus’ early ministry was marked by a happy optimism and simplicity, contributed by His upbringing in rural Galilee. Midway through it, Jesus becomes more aggressive and apocalyptic. By the end of His life, Jesus becomes world-weary and longs for death - or rather, is aware that He had entered a path where the only way He can come out is dead.)

• Another seeming influence Renan had on Kazantzakis is his sort of caricature of Jews and Judaism. Renan, like many early modern historical Jesus scholars, held on to the idea that Jesus must have broke away from or transcended Judaism and/or His Jewish identity, which they pretty much saw as a backward tribal superstition with an odd fixation for hard legalism and fiery apocalyptic judgment. They could not imagine that a teacher of high moral truths like Jesus could have been influenced or even had His origin from such a legalistic religion. (In a way, this seems to have had its origin from the Protestant idea of pitting ‘the Law’ versus ‘the gospel’.)

The only way they explained that is that Jesus must have somehow repudiated Judaism at some point in His life, or that He or His associates were actually on the fringes of Judaism. This explains all those stories about Jesus going to places like India or Jesus learning from Greek philosophers or the Essenes (who are portrayed as being in cahoots with Jesus or controlling Him from behind the scenes) being a sort of enlightened, ‘un-Jewish’ Jewish sect.

The book is actually quite anti-Jewish, even at times anti-Semitic in tone: Caiaphas is for example outright portrayed as a sleazy, ugly villain (“a blubbery notable, with clothes of silk, golden rings and a face greasy with easy living” … “so fat that globs of blubber formed cocoons around his eyes”), and so are the Jewish elders (“a mass of beards, sly, malformed eyes, toothless mouths and evil tongues”). Jews - even people like Judas or John the Baptist - are generally portrayed as being fixated on apocalyptic judgment and revenge (a manifestation of the old Christian stereotype of Jews expecting a militaristic messiah who’ll boot the Romans out), which is why many could not accept Jesus’ initial message of forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. Judaism is also portrayed as a crushing burden of a religion, riddled with rules.

THE FOUNDATIONS of the world were shaken because man’s heart was shaken, crushed under the stones which men called Jerusalem, under the prophecies, the Second Comings, the anathemas, under the Pharisees and Sadducees, the rich who ate, the poor who were hungry, and under the Lord Jehovah, from whose beard and mustaches the blood of mankind had been running for centuries upon centuries into the abyss. No matter where you touched this God, he bellowed. If you said a kind word to him he lifted his fist and shouted, “I want meat.” If you offered a lamb or your firstborn son as a sacrifice, he screamed, “I don’t want meat. Do not rend your clothes; rend your hearts. Turn your flesh into spirit, your spirit into prayer, and scatter it to the winds!”

Man’s heart was crushed under the six hundred thirteen written commandments of the Hebrew Law, plus the thousands of unwritten ones—yet it did not stir; under Genesis, Leviticus, Numbers, judges and Kings—yet it did not stir. And then suddenly at the most unexpected moment a light breeze blew, not from heaven, but from below, on earth, and all the chambers of man’s heart were shaken. Straightway Judges, Kings, the prophecies, anathemas, Pharisees, Sadducees and the stones which men call Jerusalem cracked, tottered and began to tumble down—at first within the heart, then in the mind and finally upon the earth itself. Haughty Jehovah once again tied on his leather master craftsman’s apron, once again took up his level and rule, went down to earth and personally began to help demolish the past and build the future along with men.

…] It was now two months since Jesus’ arrival from Capernaum. Each day he went and stood in front of the Temple and looked at it; each day he seemed to see it for the first time. It was as though each morning he expected to find it crumbled to the ground and to be able to trample over it from end to end. He had no desire to see it any longer, nor did he fear it. In his heart it had already been destroyed.

Admittedly, this is one of those elements of the book that I’m praising the film for cutting out.​

 

[Mark121359]

No offense to anyone here who posted that they watched and enjoyed this movie…but I’m glad I never watched a single second of that filthy film. Here’s what one future, and one possible future saint said about the film at the time;

Mother Teresa of Calcutta said through a spokesman, Robert Ziener, national chairman of Rosaries for Peace, that “If they will implore the power of God through increased resitation of the Holy Rosary…then, Our Blessed Mother (Mary) will see that this film is removed from your land.”

Mother Angelica, founder-head of the Eternal Word Television Network in Birmingham, Ala., told the news conference that anyone who goes to watch this “sacrilegious” film will be committing “a deliberate act of blasphemy” and thereby choosing “between heaven and hell.” She also predicted that America will come under heavenly “chastisement.”
“Every Christian ought to be incensed about this blasphemous film,” she said. “It attributes lust to the Son of God and makes him a wimp as a character.” She warns that people would “sin against the Holy Spirit even by watching it.”

Peace, Mark

 

[patrick457]

No offense to anyone here who posted that they watched and enjoyed this movie…but I’m glad I never watched a single second of that filthy film. Here’s what one future, and one possible future saint said about the film at the time;

Peace, Mark

I don’t think anybody here has said that (yet). Liking certain elements of the movie (the music score, etc.) is not the same as supporting its theme or message.

 

[patrick457]

I should add:

I didn’t really like the film as a whole (it was too bizarre and the way it handled the source material made it even more theologically-problematic), but at the same time, looking back at all the furore it caused, perhaps it was better if concerned Christians just let the film be cast into obscurity than give it the public attention it did not deserve at all. (But then again, since such a distinguished director as Martin Scorsese lent his name to the project, I guess that was inevitable.)

There was another controversial Jesus film made twelve years before TLT: The Passover Plot. It was based on (although it does not completely follow) this 1965 book by the scholar Hugh J. Schonfield, which proposes that the historical Jesus was a charismatic young Jew with a big messianic complex, who as part of His plan to make Himself the messiah even tried to fake His own death on the cross (which did not succeed).

Personally, I think The Passover Plot is actually more damaging and dangerous to the faith than The Last Temptation is. At least, The Last Temptation, for all its faults, is based on a novel that just one novelist’s fictional retelling of the Jesus story: it never makes a claim to be ‘what really happened’. The Passover Plot, however, is based on a scholarly book that explicitly presents a ‘this is what (might have) really happened’ scenario. In fact, at least The Last Temptation, for all its unorthodox take on Jesus, still in a way affirms (or at least does not deny) traditional Christian beliefs about Him being the Christ and Son of God. The Passover Plot’s Jesus however, is clearly not the messiah - He’s just someone with delusions of grandeur who said some nice things and got killed when His plan went awry.

The good thing about the The Passover Plot is that while it also attracted criticism when it was released, it eventually fell into obscurity: seriously, copies were hard to come by - for a long while it was only available on VHS apparently. IMHO The Last Temptation (the movie) should have underwent the same treatment.

 

[patrick457]

I should add:

I do appreciate a few things about the film: Peter Gabriel’s music, and the way a few scenes are handled, such as the Sermon on the Mount, the wedding at Cana, the crucifixion - which to its credit has much more grittiness and historical verisimilitude than the way crucifixion is depicted in more conventional Jesus films* (yes, that includes The Passion of the Christ).

• This actually made me wish Scorsese made a ‘straight’ Jesus film instead. Which was actually his intention originally.

That being said, I didn’t like the film as a whole. It was too bizarre, it dragged too long, and the way it adapted and changed the source material made it even more theologically-problematic. It was a total mess, yes. Not even just theologically-speaking, but also artistically-speaking.

At the same time, looking back at all the furore it caused, perhaps it was better if concerned Christians just let the film be cast into obscurity than give it the public attention it did not deserve at all. (But then again, since such a distinguished director as Martin Scorsese lent his name to the project, I guess that was inevitable.)

There was another controversial Jesus film made twelve years before TLT: The Passover Plot. It was based on (although it does not completely follow) this 1965 book by the scholar Hugh J. Schonfield, which proposes that the historical Jesus was a charismatic young Jew with a big messianic complex, who as part of His plan to make Himself the messiah even tried to fake His own death on the cross (which did not succeed).

Personally, I think The Passover Plot is actually more damaging and dangerous to the faith than The Last Temptation is. At least, The Last Temptation, for all its faults, is based on a novel that just one novelist’s fictional retelling of the Jesus story: it, by its author’s own admission, never makes a claim to be a “biography” depicting ‘what really happened’. The Passover Plot, however, is based on a scholarly book that explicitly presents a ‘this is what (might have) really happened’ scenario. It makes a claim to historicity that The Last Temptation does not.

Also, at least The Last Temptation, for all its unorthodox take on Jesus, still in a way eventually affirms (or at least does not deny) Christian beliefs about Him being the Christ and Son of God. The Passover Plot’s Jesus however, is clearly not the messiah - He’s just someone with delusions of grandeur who said some nice things and got killed when His plan went awry.

The good thing about The Passover Plot is that while it also attracted criticism when it was released, it eventually fell into obscurity: seriously, copies were hard to come by - for a long while it was only available on VHS apparently. IMHO The Last Temptation (the movie) should have underwent the same treatment. I’m not saying that people - including eminent figures such as Mother Teresa or Mother Angelica or Cardinal Basil Hume - were wrong to condemn it, but I do wish that people cut back on overly-public gestures like picketing in front of movie theaters - or ramming a school bus through a theater that was showing the film (yeah, one guy actually did this). I know how these protesters felt, but their confrontational tactics were counter-productive in the long run: it just gave the film undeserved publicity as a side effect.