Thoughts Provoked by Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Christ"

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"The Last Temptation of Christ" feels like a true historical epic despite apparently being made in a rushed and cheap manner. Peter Gabriel's music is a fantastic blend of Middle Eastern and prog rock instrumentals, and the photography is gorgeous. It also has a lot of thoughtful big ideas. Portraying Jesus as having some negative thoughts and feelings is I guess edgy and challenging, but it's not the most interesting thing in the world to me. A lot of the traits he gets here (fear of the future, regret for not helping more people, a weird emotional detachment from the people he does help) are pretty common to the protagonists of writer Paul Schrader. It's good stuff, but purely as a character study I suppose that "First Reformed" is a "better" script. The themes, though. The themes on display here really get at the core of what Christianity is, and they had me thinking about the film for days after I saw it. Here are some of those thoughts.

1) What did Jesus actually *do*, and does it matter if we can't answer that?

I'm not religious, nor a historian. I do not have any personal investment in proving that Jesus did or didn't do certain miracles. But what's fascinating about the script here is the acute awareness that Jesus, the real man who must have lived and felt things and done things, is not exactly the same as Jesus the storyteller, Jesus the teacher of moral philosophy, Jesus the miracle performer. What's more, the film portrays Jesus' disciples at the time as fully knowing this. There are two scenes (one perhaps an hour into the film where the disciples debate around a campfire, and one monologue of Saul's near the very end) where characters make a compelling argument that people's need to believe in Jesus is more important than what Jesus actually does. I'm sure Scorsese loved these scenes: they're more about the nature of storytelling as a whole than any specific biblical element. The scene with the disciples is an admission that even the characters depicted in the bible relied on some secondhand knowledge of what Jesus might have said without knowing for sure. On some level they have doubts that Jesus said or did half the things people credit him for, but they follow him anyway. Saul's speech is a direct challenge to the whole concept of biblical historians: the masses have miserable lives and need to believe in something, and even if Jesus abdicates his role on the cross, he will never get a choice in whether that something is him. The story of Jesus, the film tells us, is much bigger than any one man. The stories are important not because they happened, but because people take meaning in thinking that they happened. A difficult question is posed, taken seriously by the filmmakers, and the conclusion is that the story of Jesus is worth believing in regardless of historical accuracy. Surely that's the ultimate endorsement of faith.

2) Is Judas actually the villain in the story of Jesus?

If "The Last Temptation of Christ" is a movie about how stories have power because they get told and inspire people, and what actually happened isn't always important, then there's a metatextual element to how it handles Judas. In the film, Jesus explicitly asks Judas to betray him, and says it's the harder job than being crucified. I don't know whether this happened. No one does. A quick google tells me that the historians have decided it maybe could have happened. Judas is known as history's worst betrayer. Why? No living person can say with absolute certainty that he did or didn't betray Jesus, but the story that people have told for thousands of years is that he did, so that becomes the accepted truth. The argument for Judas' innocence in the movie seems persuasive enough to me. If Jesus knew that he had to be crucified, and the crucifixion in the end was a good thing for humanity, how can you really say that the person who put the crucifixion in motion did a bad thing? It's more of a moral argument than a historical one, but that line of thinking makes it hard to see Judas as a "bad guy". Maybe that perspective should be more widely considered - I certainly know enough about Christianity to know that some people use the story of Judas as a motive to be anti-Semitic. Maybe there is no villain in the story of killing Jesus. Maybe people just like sorting characters into good and evil because it's easier to understand.

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