The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis and Peter A. Bien

The internationally renowned novel about the life and death of Jesus Christ. Hailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels that brilliantly fleshes out Christ’s Passion. This literary rendering of the life of Jesus Christ has courted controversy since its publication by depicting a Christ far more human than the one seen in the Bible. He is a figure who is gloriously divine but earthy and human, a man like any other—subject to fear, doubt, and pain. In elegant, thoughtful prose Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the greats of modern literature, follows this Jesus as he struggles to live out God’s will for him, powerfully suggesting that it was Christ’s ultimate triumph over his flawed humanity, when he gave up the temptation to run from the cross and willingly laid down his life for mankind, that truly made him the venerable redeemer of men. “Spiritual dynamite.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A searing, soaring, shocking novel.” —Time

Loved the first third, when The Son of Mary doesn't quite know if he's really The Son o'God. Loved the dream state that Jesus enters into near crucifixion time. Loved some of the use of language (powerful, beautiful). Bored with some of the parable-tellings. Bored with the soft-misogyny of one-dimensional women.

Either I am becoming a radical atheist, or the book is weaker (more tedious and way too sentimental) than Scorsese's movie. Although I am a fan of Kazantzakis and I salute a Nietzschean Jesus, there was something fundamentally wrong about this book. Right now I can't really be sure where the evil lies: my perception or the crude reality. I believe that the novel is somehow dated: a Heretical reading of the gospels, a Gnostic interpretation of the Christian myth would be much darker and deeper in our Zeitgeist than in the 1950's. For example I found Saramago's version more interesting. However, it is an essential reading for all those who want to explore so to say religion beyond religion. The reaction of the Greek Orthodox Church who excommunicated Kazantzakis mainly for conceiving an alternate Jesus, is, simply put, dumb. From the perspective of film philosophy, the book's final chapters are similar to Matrix.

I knew this book had been condemned by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and there is nothing you can do to make me interested in a book faster than telling me that someone doesn't want me to read it. And last time I read a book banned by a religious authority, The Satanic Verses, I found it interesting even without much of the cultural background that would have likely made it better. Unfortunately for me, this was not that kind of book. It's a very straightforward imagining of the end period of Jesus's life, including both his ministry and his death (many details of which were unfamiliar to me because I mostly did not pay attention in catechism). Where it is scandalous is that it suggests that Jesus wrestled very seriously with the temptation of rejecting his identity as the Messiah/a part of the Holy Trinity in favor of his identity as a man, living a life that would have included marriage and children and all of the normal, messy things about being a human. It's not that this is an idea that couldn't have been compelling. It's more that this book itself is really boring. While Jesus himself is of course drawn richly since his interiority is the point of the book, most of the apostles are flat and the female characters (the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene) are stereotyped and given little to do. I never really got drawn into it at any point and it felt like slogging through mud to get through it.