Notes on The Last Temptation of Christ (Patreon)

When conversations are had about Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, it seems like the film’s infamy overshadows its actual content. This seems like a victory for the Christofascistic factions who picketed the movie and launched terrorist attacks over it. In many ways, a truck hitting a movie theater is bigger news than what features that theater is playing, but the drama and Christology of Last Temptation have been largely overlooked in the conversation about it. While many have rightly defended the film against fundamentalist lambasting (which have roughly equivalent exegetical and critical value to the Shroud of Turin), occasions for legitimate critique of The Last Temptation of Christ have largely been passed up in favor of responding to intellectually vacuous assertions made by the movie’s right-wing critics. But hey, as long as we have to hear Twitter randos complaining about The Irishman, we may as well address the dramatic and political shortcomings of Scorsese’s most notorious gangster movie.

The Last Temptation of Christ should not be read as a film about Christ, but as a treatise on Christology. The film’s anachronisms hardly stop at Harvey Keitel’s Brooklyn accent (or just how white everyone is). Its conception of Christ is the popular liberal American understanding that Jesus was a peace-loving hippie who preached love and came to overthrow the old order. There are a number of problems with this portrayal, not the least of which is the tacit anti-Semitism of ahistorically treating Jesus as a supplanter of Jewish law. “Love your neighbor” isn’t some truism coined by Jesus; he’s citing Leviticus. Luke’s Gospel has Jesus beginning his career with a recital of Isaiah. “Hippie Jesus” Christology is anachronistic, but it’s also simply a misreading of the Gospels. Iconoclastic as he was, Jesus was less an overt threat to the established order than a dedicated adherent of Jewish tradition, particularly the line of Jewish apocalypticists from which he hailed. Any book about Jesus worth its salt clears up anachronistic, bowdlerized post-Jewish incarnations of Jesus in its opening pages — I recommend Bruce Chilton’s Rabbi Jesus and AmyJill Levine’s The Misunderstood Jew for those interested in the historical Jesus and competing Christologies.

Yet Scorsese and Dafoe’s Jesus isn’t totally unconvincing. The extent to which the movie frames the entirety of Jesus’ message as a spurned call for peace and love is tiresome and simplistic (and carries an implicit liberalism that reduces Jesus to an agent of acquiescent solidarity similar to mythologized versions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi), but in its own way hints at the historical impact of Jesus in Roman-occupied Judea. Jesus’ contentiousness within his community (which sprang from a radical adherence to the Tanakh rather than a rejection of it) was expressed through his engagement with Jewish tradition of how to follow the law. The Pharisees represented a school of Jewish thought that valued ritual cleanliness rather than some inherently tyrannical view of the world. While Jesus was hardly an advocate for overt revolution against Roman occupation, and indeed came across as ambivalent to Roman rule, his preaching of a king was certainly viewed as dangerous. The Pharisees were understandably afraid that this seditious preaching would get Jews killed — not an unreasonable fear when Pontius Pilate had violently struck down a Samaritan uprising (a slaughter that prompted Rome, the global capital of bloodlust, to strip Pilate of his gubernatorial duties and recalled him to Rome). Last Temptation’s treatment of Christ as a contentious figure just short of being a political revolutionary is vaguely concomitant with the historical Jesus.

Indeed, Willem Dafoe’s Jesus is out of sorts with the hypostatic union or the Gospels. Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel presents a Jesus tortured by the contradictory natures of Christ the Man and Christ the Son of God, engaging in iconoclasm of both an intriguingly revolutionary sort and in a way that sort of misses the point. Jesus in the Gospels is wracked by his own mortality, and confronted by it quite frequently. His visit to Lazarus’ tomb is one such indication of how much mortality hurts him, and the Agony in the Garden, which to Scorsese and especially Dafoe’s credit is one of the most powerful scenes in Last Temptation, also points to an excruciating dilemma between mortality and divinity. Yet Kazantzakis, and by extension Scorsese, doesn’t quite grasp the nature of this tension. Scripturally, the hypostatic union presents a tormented odyssey through mortality for the Son of God. In Last Temptation, that tension is reduced to a flesh versus spirit dichotomy, anachronistic to Roman-occupied Judea. The Desert Fathers, ascetic hermits of Christianity, didn’t disparage sexual practice to the extent God’s law in Last Temptation does. Peter Brown’s masterpiece The Body and Society enumerates at length the sexual mores of Judea and how reproduction at an early age was normalized to propagate societies before everyone died at 25. Jesus being too special to fuck is an ostentatiously anachronistic idea.

So Last Temptation fails to depict a Scripturally coherent vision of Jesus. In its defense, that was never its intention. Castigating it for a lack of theological coherence is about as constructive as criticizing the Prophet Ezekiel for not writing an autobiography. It really must be read as a treatise on Christology, and particularly how 20th century European Christianity shaped the lives of its followers. Dafoe’s Jesus is not Yeshua Ben Josef; he’s a Catholic in constant internal torment with Catholic doctrine. The anachronism is the point of the exercise. “What if Jesus were Catholic” is a perfectly worthwhile experiment. Kazantzakis’ novel basically works as postmodern literature; the dream denouement confirms that. Scorsese’s film, faithful to Kazantzakis at its core, follows the book’s footsteps. The crucial problem with both works is that God the Son becomes a non-entity in the hypostatic union. There’s relatively difference between the God the Father aspect of Jesus and his mortal nature to the extent that Jesus as God’s son is mostly a human entity in the company of Heracles. The consciousness of such an individual is fundamentally inconceivable to human consciousness, but the epistemology makes the exercise somewhat futile.

Therein lays the problem with Last Temptation. Rather than being a castigation of Christ’s divinity, it’s too orthodox, laying normal feats of masculinity at Christ’s door. Epistemologically it’s lacking in its radicalism, and Kazantzakis’ advice to the faithful about his novel bolstering the faith is somewhat undercut by the orthodoxy of his message. The story only becomes truly radical with Judas’ redemption of Jesus at the end (an idea executed only slightly better in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Three Versions of Judas”), before which it’s a compellingly anachronistic if traditional story of a monk out of his time. EWTN toady Mother Angelica’s lacerations of Last Temptation as “the most blasphemous ridicule ever uttered against the Eucharist” is fatuous on multiple levels. To be truly extraordinary, The Last Temptation of Christ would have to obliterate the human consciousness of its own authors.