‘The Last Temptation of Christ’: Martin Scorsese’s Controversial Movie About Sexy Jesus Turns 30

By August of 1988, director Martin Scorsese was already one of the great American directors, having directed, among others, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Mean Streets, and most recently having directed the great Paul Newman to his first Academy Award in The Color of Money. And yet one movie that Scorcese had always wanted to make had eluded him: a movie about the life of Jesus Christ.

The Last Temptation of Christ was based on a novel by the great Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis. It tells the story of Jesus up through the crucifixion, but takes a departure from the Bible in sketching out a Christ who is subject to fear, doubt, and temptation. In the story’s most famous and notable conceit, Jesus is spared from the cross by an angel, with God saying he’s done enough. Jesus goes on to resume his life, including marrying Mary Magdalene and having children.

When the book was published in 1960, the Greek Orthodox Church sought to have it banned for depicting Jesus in such fallible and, yes, carnal ways. But surely by 1988, after a decade mired in secular, consumerist decadence, nobody would bat an eye about a fictionalized account of Jesus’ life, right? Yeah, obviously that was not the case. Scorsese’s film — which cast Willem Dafoe (two years removed from his Oscar nomination for Platoon) as Jesus, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, Harvey Keitel as Judas Iscariot, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate — was the subject of massive protests from Christian groups who were irate at a filmed depiction of a mortal Jesus. Protesting hordes of Christians got theater chains to refuse to screen the film, darling little TV nuns decried the movie as a spiritual “holocaust,” and in one case, at a theater in Paris, a Catholic group set off an incendiary device in a theater.

The depiction of The Last Temptation of Christ and Scorsese behind it as godless and anti-Christian was more than just an anti-art overreaction, though. Anyone who actually took the time to watch the film would have seen a filmmaker grappling very honestly with questions of faith and human nature. Kazantzakis’s novel pivots off of a story in the Bible, where shortly after his baptism, Jesus went to the desert and was tempted by Satan to perform various acts of self-glorification. Kazantzakis’s novel offers Jesus one last temptation, in the guise of an angel: that of a mortal life, of companionship and love and family; of respite and comfort. Scorsese’s film has the look and feel of horror at times, because the reality of Christianity, when viewed objectively, does have elements of horror. What is a crucifix but a monument to a crime scene worn as a sign of devotion, after all? But where Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ took Christ’s gory suffering as its own statement, Scorsese’s film asks a more probing question: what kind of sacrifice would it have taken the man, Jesus Christ, to offer himself up in such a way.

Of course, many people missed out on that message after being distracted by sexy Jesus and Mary Magdalene consummating a hypothetical marriage. Which, not to get into a whole DaVinci Code thing, is a longstanding controversial notion within the Christian church to begin with.

In the ensuing 30 years, many films have presented themselves as controversial for their sexual or violent content. The Last Temptation of Christ stands out for being a controversy simply because its director chose to tell a story that challenged Biblical orthodoxy, even while still respecting the source of that orthodoxy. The Last Temptation of Christ took Jesus far more seriously than many of its followers ever did.

Where to stream The Last Temptation of Christ