An Essay about Two Movies about Jesus

In 1988, when I was nineteen years old, I crossed a picket line to see Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Sign-waving protesters informed me that the movie was blasphemous, that it misreported the truth about Jesus, and that I risked hellfire for supporting theaters that screened it. They even told me that the film showed Jesus having sex. I suppose that even this last warning was intended to dissuade me from buying my ticket, but, like I said, I was nineteen.

The movie, based on the 1951 novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis, presents the story of Jesus from a decidedly human perspective. Jesus is shown to be full of doubts, unsure of his mission, conflicted even about God. While it doesn’t actually show Jesus having sex, it does hint at the possibility. More to the point, it features a long sequence in which Jesus imagines giving up the burden of his sacrifice, coming down from the cross, and living a pleasant life as a husband and father with Mary Magdalene. The idea is that this is what Jesus could have had—happiness and human love—had he not chosen to die as he felt he must. (There was also a little full-frontal nudity, but that had more to do with Willem Dafoe’s acting style than with any ideas about Christianity per se. Dafoe played Jesus. Harvey Keitel played Judas. The amazingly creepy Harry Dean Stanton played Saint Paul.)

But what bothered the protesters most about the film, I believe, wasn’t the sex or the casting but the fact that the gospel story had been changed. The movie added new events to the accepted gospel stories, and it suggestively altered the significance of others. This was not the story of Jesus; it was a story of Jesus, and one that presumed to redefine foundational Christian meanings. “God loves me,” says the film’s Jesus at one point, “I know he loves me. I want him to stop.”

Of course The Last Temptation of Christ was openly and avowedly a reinterpretation; it did not attempt to be a replacement for the gospels, and it certainly did not pretend to present the “truth” of events that may or may not have occurred almost two thousand years before. The film was remarkably faithful to the book, which I had recently read. The thematic point of both was to bring alive again the truly complicated issues that animate the gospel narratives, but that are easily lost because the gospels are so familiar. Perhaps the greatest of those issues was the pain that comes with faith: in this version of the story, Jesus knows that he must make his sacrifice; what he does not know is whether it will come to anything. This Jesus lacks divine knowledge of what is to come, and what it is for. In other words, he is genuinely in the position of anyone who must make a terrible, ultimate choice. (Not a few theologians have pointed out that, if one knows that one is to be gloriously resurrected, dying isn’t really much of a sacrifice.)

I can’t help but compare these elements of doubt in Scorsese’s Last Temptation to the complete absence of any such qualms in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The latter movie, which presents the gospel of Matthew (one of the four canonical stories of Jesus’ ministry and death) as literally as possible, shows us the bloody suffering of Jesus’ crucifixion as only modern filmmaking can: it is impossible to believe that the character being tortured on screen is not suffering infinite, unendurable pain. The visual impact of blood and bruises is hard to deny, and even when we know that make-up is involved we feel something of the agony and significance that those marks are made to represent.

But Gibson’s story is less affecting because we know from the beginning how it is going to end—just as Gibson’s Jesus does. Leaving aside the (sometimes crucial) differences between visual and written storytelling, I remain unaffected by The Passion of the Christ precisely because I have seen it (read it, heard it) a thousand times before. I’m moved by the agony of sacrifice, but not by the act of it, for I know that it will all be rolled away in the end. In The Last Temptation of Christ, on the other hand, the sacrifice truly is a sacrifice, because there is no certainty of life everlasting, and because in this film we are given—at least for a time, the length of a long imaginary scene—that which Jesus could have had: a life of love and happiness, children, the security of knowing what one is living for. Unfaithful as it is to the original stories, Scorsese’s gospel shows us the story of Jesus’ sacrifice in terms of something actually lost.