Monday, 30 June 2025

Book Review - The Last Temptation by Nikos Kazantzakis

 The Last Temptation a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis

(Translated from the Greek with a note on the Author and his Language by P.A. Bien)

London: Faber and Faber, 1983 (first published in English 1961)   ISBN 0571114342

I first became aware of this novel when the film The Last Temptation of Christ came out in the late 1980s. I've never seen the film, but had always been interested in fishing out the book to read. After the pleasure I got from reading Zorba the Greek, which showed me that Kazantzakis was a deep thinker about life and how it is led, I felt it was finally time to find a copy of this book and read it.

In this fictional re-telling of the life of Jesus, Kazantzakis is concerned with how the physical and spiritual intersect in human life. He hews fairly closely to the Gospels for his inspiration, but uses their sometimes conflicting stories and themes to advantage in depicting Jesus as a man tormented by God and by his fate as saviour of the World. Over the course of the novel Jesus comes to realise that while love is the answer, it cannot be achieved without pain and sacrifice.

One of Kazantzakis' strengths as a novelist is his characterization, and that is certainly a strong point in The Last Temptation. The figures of Judas, Zebedee, and Mary Magdalene are wonderfully created, and through them Kazantzakis explores greed, hard-headedness, repentance and love. The other disciples are wonderfully human, both in their failure to understand Jesus' parables, in their vain boasts of bravery in the face of death, and lustful thoughts of the treasures awaiting them in the Kingdom of Heaven.

But it is the figure of Jesus that is the main character in the book. Kazantzakis portrays him as a man wishing to deny his destiny, initially by denying that God was calling him, and then by thinking that the Kingdom of Heaven would come simply by preaching a gospel of loving one another. God drags him reluctantly to the conclusion that the human race can only be saved by the ultimate sacrifice, that he is a human version of the scapegoat Jesus encounters in the desert, therefore he must take the path of pain and death so that we can all live again in God.

Even to the last Jesus is reluctant. The last temptation of the title sees Jesus imagining a different life, of marriage and children, only to realise that this dream is in fact the work of Satan, and that he has indeed fulfilled his earthly mission by dying on the Cross.

One of the beauties of this book is that while it is clear that Jesus' life is one lived in service of the spirit and the spiritual, at no stage is the physical life looked upon with scorn. Kazantzakis revels in the mundane and the everyday, and often has Jesus espousing that God is everywhere and in everything, from ants to rocks, and even sinful men if only they would let God's light shine in their hearts.

Kazantzakis' exploration of the foment of Jewish society at the time of Jesus gives the novel an air of authenticity. The depiction of Judas and Barabbas as Zealots and of John as an ascetic allows Kazantzakis to explore the differing avenues the Jewish religion was travelling down at the time, and to cast into greater relief the radical nature of Jesus' teaching. While (in this novel) Judas was looking for a rebellion that would crush the Roman occupation and enable a Jewish state, Philip and Nathaniel were looking for thrones, gold and silken clothing. None of the disciples could grasp the true meaning of Jesus' parables, and could not understand why Jesus was not happy about the idea that his life would be recorded and a church created over him - his encounter with Paul during his last temptation is an excoriation of the established church, in a scene that is horrifying and edifying at the same time.

This translation reads very well (although in an afterword the translator explains how it is not really possible to convey the Demotic Greek of Kazantzakis into English), and even though most who begin to read this book will know how it ends, the story it tells is compelling and self-contained. Kazantzakis doesn't explain away any of the miracles, but in the milieu he creates in this book they seem like natural events.

There is no doubt that Kazantzakis has thought long and deeply about the life of Jesus, and about the message of Christianity and, in the (not coincidentally) thirty three chapters of The Last Temptation, he has written a very good novel.


Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell



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