This provocative yet unnecessarily controversial reinterpretation of Jesus’ life imagines the struggle, the profoundly human struggle that Jesus confronted as the Messiah, the Chosen One. The novel meditates on what it meant to be the One, if there is such a one. By making Jesus such a human character—so frail, so distracted from the mission that Kazantzakis construes as coming so late in his life after so much torment—the author makes his act, dying for the sins of humankind aka SAVING THE WORLD, so much more amazing. The last temptation, of course, is the desire (that plagues Jesus throughout his life, according to this modern re-conception) to live as a human. While on the cross, in a flash, he is taken by the devil (in the form of an angelic, golden-locked girl in the film and a male angel who later transforms into a little black boy that looks after Jesus) to take a wife (Mary Magdalene, the busy prostitute of a town near Nazareth and Jesus’ childhood crush), have children, grow old, like any normal human so he does not have to face the burden of saving the world. In his prologue, Kazantzakis observes “How splendidly, how sensibly he had acted in choosing the road of men! What insanity to have wanted to save the world! What joy to have escaped the privations [of carnal desires, the novel’s plot infers] the tortures, and the Cross.”
Another important point that the work presents is found in Jesus’ encounter with Saul (Paul). After Christ’s supposed death, Jesus tells him that No, he did not die on the cross for his sins, that he chose human life. And Saul (Paul) responds saying that It did not matter, that his god died for him on the cross. And that is why he is saved. “Liar! Liar!,” Jesus retorts. “I am Jesus of Nazareth and I was never crucified, never resurrected. I am the son of Mary and of Joseph the Carpenter of Nazareth. I am not the son of God, I am the son of man—like everyone else. What blasphemies you utter! What effronteries! What lies! Is it with lies, swindler, that you dare save the world?” And this is the big question surrounding religion. Are they (what larger forces might they be) just using lies to make man submissive, to control him. Paul cannot bear to hear Jesus’ reply. Jesus goes on to explain what really happened (or what he thinks is happening because it is later inferred that it is all a dream): “What I should have suffered while awake, I suffered in my sleep. I escaped; I came to this tiny village under another name and with another body. Here I lead the life of a man: I eat, drink, work and have children. The great conflagration subsided, I too became a kind tranquil fire; I curled up in the fireplace, and my wife cooks the children’s meals. I set sail to conquer the world but cast anchor in this tiny domestic trough. And that’s that—I have no complaints. I am son of man, I tell you, not son of God… And don’t go around the whole world to publish lies. I shall stand and proclaim the truth!” But Paul explodes in his response, “Shut your shameless mouth! Be quiet, or men will hear you and die of fright. In the rottenness, the injustice and poverty of this world, the Crucified and Resurrected Jesus has been the one precious consolation for the honest man, the wronged man. True or false—what do I care! It’s enough if the world is saved!” And Jesus responds, “It’s better the world perish with the truth than be saved with lies. At the core of such a salvation sits the great worm Satan.” Paul again: “What is ‘truth’? What is ‘falsehood’? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts us a man’s height above the earth—that is true. Whatever clips off man’s wings—that is false.”
This brief exchange (as Kazantzakis imagines it could have been) is so important for me in my understanding of world religions. It tells me that our relationships with god(s) should be just between us and said god(s). And even atheists, by not believing in such god(s), have their own important creed that should be respected. Because if you believe that your belief will save you, then it will. Who is to argue? If thinking about a god in times of darkness gives you strength, then you should give thanks and be grateful that you are alive. If finding comfort in knowing that there is no god, that we are all worm food when we die, is what allows people to make sense of their lives, they should be content feeling that way and knowing that our heavens and hells are not in some supernatural region but right here on this earth. When we persecute others for their beliefs, whatever they might be, we disrespect all religions (and especially our own).
I find God or at least what some people yearn for when they search for God—solace, a comfort, a feeling of being so small in the universe because the universe is so profoundly powerful and beautiful and hard to grasp—when I listen to Yo Yo Ma play a Bach cello prelude or when I see the Flaming Lips perform live under the stars or when I scale the ridge on the hike to Lake Ann in the Mt. Baker Wilderness, or when I wander through a forest in the mountains of Oaxaca.
Paul’s exchange with Jesus illustrates both the power of the human will to create a god while also demonstrating just how essential this power is to human life. And this is why I believe. Because I see the heterogeneity to it. When groups (any extremist fringes of any religion attempt to narrow one’s vision of God and/or heaven by mongering hate, in hypocritical form or another, towards groups that do not fit into their narrow categorization of how humans should behave), it weakens the power of the human spirit, thereby limiting its service to humanity and dishonoring the group propagating said hatred. For me, one of the more striking Bible verses is the one about not taking a grain of sawdust out of your neighbor’s eye when you have a log in your own. I’ve come to terms with having a log in my eye, and knowing this makes me more accepting of others. The need for religious groups (particularly the extremists, Muslim, Christian and others) to end their persecutions of others is illustrated by Kazantzakis in his reading of Judas, the catalyst for everything that we have in the New Testament. Judas really has the more difficult job rather than Christ who just gets crucified. The crucifixion is a more passive act compared to the active betrayal of the Messiah carried out by Judas. According to the novel, they spent long nights scheming out just how it would come to pass and Judas was tormented by the idea of betraying his best friend and someone that he worked so hard to vet out to see if he was the Messiah. Conversations between the two characters in the novel indicate Judas’ apprehension and Christ pacifies his most loyal disciple by making him aware of the importance of his act of betrayal in the grand scheme of things. Without Judas’s “betrayal,” we do not have Christianity. Judas’s sacred mission (and the Bible talks about Judas being the most important disciple-he was the one who carried the money bag for Jesus and the disciples when they traveled, as indicated by Luke and John), to promote Christ by making him a martyr, is celebrated by the novel and so is Jesus’ palling around with the fringes of society, characters like John the Baptist, who is such a visionary that he is beyond radical, beyond punk rock. He and his followers are dipping in the Jordan River and eating locusts and wild honey, appearing more like gypsies or modern-day deadheads than people preparing the way for the saving of the world. John the Baptist, Jesus, and their disciples are the outsiders, the drifters, the punks knocking over trading tables in the temple, the poets pointing to new directions in a time of extreme darkness. And the idea that Jesus is the son of God may sound crazy. But we are all children of God. Jesus was just one prophet of many who got this. And he was an amazing prophet at that. He had a tremendous inner turmoil—was he the Prince of Peace or did he come to bring war? If you read the gospel, it appears that Jesus himself did not know. Nobody knows because he brought war to be a prince of peace. But I find comfort in other prophets, other children of god that have shown us the way.
It is Judas who has a revelation as he, the disciples and Jesus are arriving in Jerusalem: “The people are the Messiah—I, you, every one of us.” In the novel, Judas, like Barabbas and many others are looking for the One to lead Israel out of its bondage to the Romans. The search for a One, which coincided with prophets and false prophets sprouting up like mushrooms, was about finding someone to free Israel from the Romans. It did not have the grandiose project that Christianity in its present form has co-opted. Jesus begins his message saying that they are all brothers—Galileans, Samaritans, Judeans. And even the Romans. This was a revolutionary concept at the time. Unthinkable. “God is everywhere…and we are all brothers,” he says. This question of whether to save the Jews, the Gentiles or everybody is the subject of Books of Acts and Romans in the Bible in which Paul and his followers meditate on the brotherhood of men.
This novel imagines what life might have been like in Jesus’ times. It projects all the nitty-gritty details, the reactions to Jesus both positive and negative that could never have been portrayed in the Bible. For example, during his Sermon on the Mount, the novel includes all the nay-sayers’ interjections which also influence what Jesus says. In the movie, Willem Dafoe, who plays Jesus, stutters and stammers and we can see, at least according to one interpretation, how unsure Jesus might/could have been when he delivered the sermon. Jesus appears as a transmitter for God as he opens his mouth and lets God’s words come out. But he stutters and stammers details that do not/could not have been described by the Bible. The words of his sermon (and not the nay-sayers’ interjections) and his life are trustily recorded by Matthew, who is visited by an angel that visits and informs him about Jesus’ birth and his life before being a Messiah. Jesus is unaware that he was born in Bethlehem, under very unusual circumstances, and when he reads Matthew’s writings, he claims that it is a lie. These particulars and sidenotes, as imagined by Kazantzakis, make Jesus more human, and for me, more believable and more admirable. Being more human, and actually being imperfect, makes it easier to sympathize with the Messiah. As P.A. Bien, the translator of the novel, remarks in his biography on the novelist: Kazantzakis saw Jesus, like Odysseus, as engaged in the struggle for freedom and as the prototype of the free man. Jesus is like Nietzsche’s Superman, “one who by force of will achieves a victory over matter, or, in other words, is able, because of his allegiance to the life force within him, to transmute matter into spirit. But this over-all victory is really a succession of particular triumphs as he frees himself from various forms of bondage—family, bodily pleasures, the state, fear of death. Since, for Kazantzakis, freedom is not a reward for the struggle but rather the very process of struggle itself, it is paramount that Jesus be constantly tempted by evil in such a way that he feel its attractiveness and even succumb to it, for only in this way can his ultimate rejection of temptation have meaning.” Of course, this is the heresy of which the critics accused the novel when it first appeared and that incited the protesters when the film came out.
But that is the power of the novel, of literature itself. In the Bible, the disciples approach Jesus and ask why he explains everything using parables. This is like asking Why literature? Why novels? Why heretic novels? Why stories? Jesus responds, “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables: ‘Though seeing, they do not see; thought hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: “‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’” (Matthew 13:11-15; Mark 4: 11-12Luke 8:10).
Rather than grandiose speeches that seem so certain in the Bible (when you read them closely, they are far from certain), Jesus’ indecision in the novel makes him come to life. It is Jesus’ simpler interjections that make his teachings so powerful. A powerful example (from novel, film and the Bible—John describes it best) is when a woman caught in adultery (in the novel and film, it is Mary Magdalene) is persecuted by the townspeople who want to stone her, thus following Moses’ law. And Jesus butts in: “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” And eventually when they leave (in the novel and film there are some hecklers who hang around, making things more difficult), Jesus confronts the woman: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?... Then neither do I condemn you.” Here is an example of a just god, an understanding god. This is a human Jesus, and the novel takes this episode (and others like it) and runs with this human characteristic of Jesus. Jesus, rather than some alien creature sent by divine sources, seems more shaped by his surroundings and portrayed as influenced to some degree by his nay-sayers and his followers, particularly Judas. Jesus’ greatest struggle is with dying. Why is it by dying does he bring deliverance? His disciples are perplexed but the novel enters Jesus’ head and we see the great inner turmoil that he confronts. It is like humanity’s great struggle: to be free from dying. And as I am approaching 33, the supposed age of Jesus’ acts, I am seeing the beauty of Jesus’ humanity.
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