Title: The Last Temptation of Christ Author: Nikos Kazantzakis Creation Date: 1955 Location: Greece Collection: Banned, Burned & Dangerous Books
Brief
Nikos Kazantzakis completed The Last Temptation (O Teleftaios Peirasmos) in the early 1950s, though he had been working toward it for decades. He was already, by that point, the most widely translated modern Greek writer — Zorba the Greek had been published in 1946 — and one of the most persistently controversial figures in Greek letters, a man whose philosophical and spiritual preoccupations had led him through Marxism, Bergsonism, Nietzscheanism, and Buddhism before settling into a peculiarly Kazantzakian synthesis that found no orthodox home in any tradition. The novel was published in Greek in 1955 and in English translation by Peter A. Bien in 1960.
The book is an act of devotional imagination, not theological argument. Kazantzakis does not propose a historical reconstruction of Jesus or a debunking of orthodox claims. He proposes something stranger and, from the orthodox perspective, more threatening: that Christ's humanity was not a costume worn over divinity but the genuine and excruciating condition through which divinity worked, that the temptation to remain human — to take a wife, to have children, to be ordinary — was the real battle that the crucifixion resolved, and that the victory was real because the temptation was real.
The Vatican placed the novel on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1960, following the appearance of Peter Bien's English translation; Kazantzakis had also circulated the manuscript well before its Greek publication. The Greek Orthodox Church condemned it and moved to excommunicate him. He responded with the epitaph he composed for himself, now inscribed on his tomb in Heraklion: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. He died in 1957. The novel's subsequent history of suppression runs through Martin Scorsese's 1988 film adaptation, which was banned in several countries, attacked by arson in a Paris cinema, and refused certification across multiple jurisdictions. Wherever the book has been suppressed, the stated reason has been blasphemy; the actual problem has been the imaginative freedom with which Kazantzakis treated sacred material as literature.
The Banning
The manuscript had circulated in advance of the Greek edition, drawing condemnation from the Greek Orthodox Church before the book was even in print. In 1960, following the appearance of Peter Bien's English translation, the Holy Office — the successor to the Inquisition — placed The Last Temptation on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a binding directive forbidding Catholic clergy and laity from reading it. In jurisdictions where the Church held political influence, the designation carried practical consequences for booksellers and libraries alike.
The Greek Orthodox Church's response was equally severe. The Holy Synod condemned the novel and moved to excommunicate Kazantzakis. He responded with the epitaph now inscribed on his tomb: I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. He died in October 1957 in Freiburg; the Archbishop of Athens refused his body a church lying-in-state. He was buried outside consecrated ground in the Martinengo Bastion of Heraklion's city walls, where Cretan readers continue to leave flowers.
The suppression extended well beyond Europe. In predominantly Catholic Latin American countries, the book's availability was restricted by a combination of episcopal instruction and bookseller caution — in Chile, it was not formally available until after the democratic transition. In Turkey, it was periodically restricted; in Singapore and the Philippines, banned outright. The most explosive phase came with Martin Scorsese's 1988 film adaptation. The American Family Association organised a national boycott of Universal Pictures. On 22 October 1988, Catholic traditionalists firebombed the Saint-Michel cinema in Paris, injuring thirteen people, four seriously. The film was banned or refused certification in Singapore, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, and parts of Greece.
The Fallout
The firebombing of the Saint-Michel cinema was the most violent consequence of the novel's adaptation — one of the few instances in which opposition to a work of fiction resulted in a terrorist attack on a civilian audience in a Western European city. The attack was carried out by members of a Catholic integralist group; French courts prosecuted and convicted several participants, and the cinema was rebuilt. The broader cultural fallout was a sustained debate about the boundaries of artistic freedom in relation to sacred subjects — a debate that anticipated and in many ways prefigured the controversy over Rushdie's The Satanic Verses the following year. The two cases were structurally parallel: a work of literary imagination treating the founding figure of a major religion as human material, met with official condemnation, popular outrage, and violence.
Kazantzakis's literary reputation was paradoxically enhanced by the controversy. Before The Last Temptation, he was known internationally primarily as the author of Zorba the Greek, a novel that presented no theological difficulties. After the novel and the film, he became recognised as a writer of genuine philosophical seriousness, and academic scholarship on his work expanded considerably. The Index was abolished by Pope Paul VI on 14 June 1966 — the Index Librorum Prohibitorum itself ceased to exist as a binding instrument of Church discipline, and the books it had condemned passed into a quieter, less formal state of disapproval that no longer carried the weight of canon law.
The novel remains controversial among Orthodox Christians in Greece and among evangelical Christians in the United States, but it is no longer the subject of active legal suppression in any Western country. Kazantzakis's tomb in Heraklion, outside consecrated ground, remains a pilgrimage site for readers who understand the epitaph. The visitors come to a man who lost his Church and kept his vocation — and who, by losing the Church, became a writer the Church could no longer dispose of.
Why It Was Feared
Orthodox Christology holds that Jesus is fully divine and fully human — the formula of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 — but in practice the tradition has always emphasised the divine at the expense of the human, treating Christ's temptations as formally genuine but substantively predetermined. He was tempted, but the outcome was never in doubt, because divinity cannot fail.
Kazantzakis reversed this emphasis. His Jesus is a man who does not want to be the son of God, who makes crosses for the Romans hoping to avoid his calling, who loves Mary Magdalene and wants to marry her, who experiences the divine pressure on his consciousness as physical pain. The temptation in the title is not the devil's theatrical offer in the desert but the quiet, devastating offer of an ordinary life: a wife, children, a death in bed surrounded by grandchildren, the warm human reality that the cross takes away.
What the churches could not tolerate was the implication that the outcome was uncertain — that Christ could have chosen the ordinary life, that the victory of the cross was a genuine choice rather than a predetermined conclusion. If the temptation was real, the possibility of failure was real, and the entire edifice of salvation history — the atonement, the resurrection — was contingent rather than necessary. Kazantzakis's treatment of Judas was equally threatening: not the traitor but the most trusted disciple, asked by Christ to perform the betrayal because only a man who truly loved him could be trusted to do what must be done.
The novel treated sacred narrative as literary material — something a novelist could enter, inhabit, and reimagine from the inside — and for traditions that held the Gospel accounts as historically and theologically definitive, this act of imagination was itself the offence. Kazantzakis did not deny the Resurrection or attack the Church. He did something the Church found harder to answer: he loved the figure of Jesus more than the institution did, and he loved him in the only way a novelist can love a character — by inventing for him an inner life the institution had never authorised.
The Reading
The dual substance of Christ — the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God, or more exactly, to return to God and identify himself with him — has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. The struggle between God and humanity is the only struggle worth recounting. And within Jesus the two natures — human and divine — were both completely real and completely in conflict. His agony was not theatre performed for the benefit of a watching world. His temptation was not performance. His victory, therefore, was not guaranteed.
The Carpenter
Jesus appears first as a carpenter in Nazareth, making crosses for the Romans. He makes the crosses deliberately, hoping that the collaboration with the occupier's machinery of punishment will protect him from the voice that calls to him, the divine pressure on his skull that he experiences as physical pain — a clawing, insistent weight that arrives without warning and leaves him gasping. He does not want to be the son of God. He wants to be ordinary.
He wants to marry Mary Magdalene, whom he has known since childhood, whom he loves with a love that is entirely physical and entirely sincere, and whose continued prostitution he experiences as a wound — because it was his rejection of her, driven by the dread of divine calling, that drove her to the brothel. He is not a hero at the beginning. He is a frightened man making crosses for the Romans to crucify people on, hoping to buy himself out of the purpose God has chosen for him.
The Nazareth of these early chapters has a palpable sensory thickness — the smell of cedar and pine in the workshop, the dust of the village street in summer, the taste of olives and rough wine, the cry of the hour from the synagogue, the keening of women at funerals, the heat that accumulates in the stone houses through the long afternoons. The eastern Mediterranean is in the bones of the prose; this Galilee is not the bleached landscape of Sunday school illustrations but a real place where bodies sweat and food is shared and grudges last for generations. Into this world comes Judas Iscariot, and he stays at the centre throughout.
Judas
Judas is a Zealot, a nationalist resistance fighter who has come to Nazareth to kill Jesus — a carpenter who collaborates with Rome is, from the Zealot's perspective, a traitor deserving execution. But he sees something in Jesus that gives him pause: not gentleness, which he distrusts, but the mark of suffering, the authenticity of a man in genuine agony over something larger than politics. He becomes Jesus's follower and, ultimately, his most trusted companion.
The relationship between Jesus and Judas is the deepest bond and its most painful irony: Judas is the one man who will truly do what Jesus asks of him at the end, and the asking will cost them both everything. They are followed through the dust of Galilee with the unselfconscious intimacy of a narrative that knows the great betrayer of Christian tradition was, in the only version of the story that genuinely matters here, the great friend.
The Desert
Jesus retreats to the desert, where John the Baptist baptises him and where the temptations begin in earnest. The desert section draws on the gospel narratives but expands them with fevered imagery steeped in the icons and hymns and exorcism rites of Cretan Orthodox Christianity. The Devil here is not a figure of conventional evil; he is the voice that offers Jesus the comfort of what he might have been — a prophet who stays within limits, a teacher who does not claim too much, a man who takes his place in the human community without demanding that the community be remade. The temptations are not grand theatrical set pieces but quiet, persuasive arguments delivered in the voice of reason, and their danger lies precisely in their reasonableness.
Jesus returns from the desert changed — harder, more certain of his mission, though the certainty brings no peace. He begins gathering disciples. The disciples are individual and sometimes reluctant: Matthew the tax collector, who writes down Jesus's words as fast as they come out and sometimes hears things that were not quite said, editing the divine message into a shape he finds more satisfactory, smoothing the rough edges of actual speech into something more like scripture; Peter, massive and faithful and slow to understand, a fisherman whose loyalty is the loyalty of a dog that has chosen its master and will not be shaken; Thomas, who needs proof and says so without apology, whose doubt is not a weakness but a form of intellectual honesty the others lack.
Mary Magdalene
Mary Magdalene appears again in Magdala and is not redeemed in the conventional sense — Jesus does not simply forgive her and send her on her way — but transformed through the sheer weight of his presence into something she was not before. The Magdalene sections are written with tenderness and without prurience. The scandal is not that Jesus loved a woman but that he loved her with the full capacity of his human nature and chose the cross instead, and that the choosing cost him precisely because the love was real. She does not become a passive figure trailing the disciples; she remains herself — sceptical, sensual, observant — and her continued presence is one of the ways the sacred is shown to be inseparable from the body that experiences it.
Miracles That Cost
The miracles proceed with hallucinatory intensity. The wedding at Cana, the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the multitude — they are not demythologised, no natural explanations are found. Something more disorienting occurs: they are rendered from inside, as events that terrify the man performing them, who does not always understand what he has done or why, who feels the divine power moving through him as a force he did not choose and cannot control.
When Lazarus is raised, Jesus is not triumphant; he is shaken, barely able to stand, his body trembling from the contact with a power that belongs to another order of reality. He has done something that should not be possible, and the contact with that impossibility has left a visible mark on him, something in the eyes, that the disciples can see but cannot name. The miracles cost him. Each one takes something from the human side and gives it to the divine, and the transfer is tracked with the precision of writing about a body under increasing strain — a body that is being consumed by the power that inhabits it, that is becoming less human with each act of divine intervention, and that knows it.
Toward Jerusalem
Jerusalem builds slowly. The journey toward it occupies the middle third, and the time is used to develop the relationships within the group of followers — the jealousies, the misunderstandings, the moments of genuine fellowship around a fire at night when the men share bread and the conversation turns to what the kingdom will look like. Peter is certain it will be a kingdom of power. Matthew is writing it all down, constructing the narrative even as it happens. Judas watches them with the piercing intelligence of a man who understands that none of them, except perhaps himself and Jesus, grasps what is actually being demanded.
Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey, greeted by crowds whose expectations are various and irreconcilable — some want a nationalist military leader who will drive out the Romans, some want a healer, some want a prophet who will restore righteousness to the temple, some simply want the feeling of being in the presence of something outside the ordinary. Jesus knows that the entry is the beginning of the end and he moves toward it with the terrible clarity of a man who has finally understood what was always required of him.
The cleansing of the temple is violent. Jesus takes a rope and drives out the money changers with physical force, overturning their tables, scattering coins across the flagstones, his face contorted by an anger that has nothing to do with the gentle teacher of the Sermon on the Mount. The scene is deliberately shocking — it shows the human nature at its limit, the point where patience breaks and the body takes over, and the disciples watching are frightened because they have never seen this in him before.
The Last Supper, the Garden, the Kiss
The Last Supper is the formal centre. The room is small; the bread is broken; the wine is poured. Jesus looks at the faces around the table and knows what each of them will do — who will deny him, who will scatter, who will endure. He tells Judas, in private, after the others have fallen asleep, what must happen: Judas must betray him, must hand him to the authorities, must be the instrument of the arrest that will lead to the crucifixion.
He asks this as a friend, as the person he trusts most in the world, because it is the most necessary and most terrible thing he could ask of anyone. Judas refuses at first — the request is monstrous, the kind of thing no man should be asked to do, the kind of thing that will make him the most hated name in history. Then he accepts. He accepts because he loves Jesus and because he understands that this is the task that only love could perform. The betrayal in Gethsemane, the kiss, is rendered as an act of sacrificial obedience rather than treachery — the most courageous act in the book, performed by the man the tradition will call the worst of traitors.
The Cross, and the Last Temptation
The cross arrives in the most technically demanding passage: Jesus, fully conscious, experiencing the hours of dying with a sensory attention rendered in prose simultaneously naturalistic and visionary — the heat of the Jerusalem afternoon, the flies clustering at the wounds, the weight of the body pulling against the nails, the slow failure of breath, the thirst that becomes the only sensation, the crowd below shrinking as the hours pass until only the women remain. And then the last temptation comes.
Not the devil's desert temptations. Something more subtle, more intimate, and infinitely more dangerous: a young angel, beautiful and gentle, appears and tells Jesus he has suffered enough, that God does not require this of him, that he is free to come down from the cross and live. The angel's voice is tender, convincing, maternal. Jesus comes down. He marries Mary Magdalene. She dies in childbirth — the first loss in the new life, the price of ordinary happiness — and he takes Mary and Martha of Bethany as his wives. He has children. He grows old.
He lives a human life, full of the domestic texture that has been established from the first pages as what he always secretly longed for — bread on the table, children playing in the dust of the yard, the smell of woodshavings from the workshop, the sound of a wife's voice calling him to supper, the weight of a grandchild on his knee. The years pass with the particular quality that domestic years possess — not the compressed, burning time of ministry but the slow accumulation of seasons, harvests, children's illnesses, the gradual greying of hair, the small pleasures of an evening meal with family around a table.
He hears, dimly, that his disciples are carrying on his work without him, preaching and suffering and dying for a story they believe is true, building churches and arguing theology and making martyrs of themselves in cities he has never visited. Occasionally he encounters one of them — aged, bewildered, travel-worn — and they look at the ordinary old man before them and try to reconcile what they see with what they remember.
The vision's power lies in its specificity: the ordinary life is not summarised but rendered with the same intensity brought to the miracles, so that the reader feels the weight of what Jesus is being offered — not an abstraction called ordinary life but this particular house, these particular children, this particular woman's face in the lamplight.
Saul, and Waking
Saul of Tarsus — Paul — appears, preaching Christ crucified and risen. Jesus, now an old man, confronts him and tells him the truth: there was no crucifixion, no resurrection. Paul is unmoved. The story is what matters, he says. The story has its own truth, more powerful than biographical fact. Jesus is appalled and then, slowly, understands that Paul is right in a way he himself could not have articulated — that the story of his sacrifice has already entered the world and cannot be recalled, that the meaning has outgrown the man.
And then he wakes. He is on the cross. The angel was the last temptation — the temptation to escape the cross, to live normally, to be ordinary — and he passed through it and came out the other side. The decades of domesticity, the wives, the children, the old age, the encounter with Paul — all of it was a vision, a moment extended to lifelong duration in the timeless space of dying. He wakes on the cross and he is grateful, wild with gratitude: he is not ordinary; he did not escape; he will not come down. He cries out — It is accomplished! — and dies. The cry that carries across Golgotha is not resignation but triumph, the triumph of a man who saw everything he wanted and chose to let it go.
What the Book Argues
The theological argument, made through narrative rather than proposition, is that the humanity of Jesus was not a limitation on his divinity but the mechanism of his redemption. He could only save what he had fully experienced; he could only conquer death by knowing life; he could only choose the cross by genuinely wanting to avoid it. The last temptation is the last because it is the most complete, the most convincing, the most nearly irresistible: not physical pain or political power or doctrinal compromise, but the quiet offer of an ordinary human life with all its warmth and texture and loss — bread on the table, children in the yard, a wife's hand on his forehead in the evening.
That he passes through it and chooses the cross anyway is the measure of the victory. The churches found this intolerable not because it diminished Christ but because it made the victory contingent — and contingency, the possibility that it could have gone otherwise, is where the meaning lives. The man who wrote this was buried outside the walls. I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free. The epitaph reads like someone who, having written this book, had earned the right to stand on the threshold of his Church and refuse to come back inside.
This post is part of Books They Tried to Destroy, a series on the books that power tried to silence. See the full collection →
Peter A. Bien's 1960 translation, reissued by Simon & Schuster's Scribner imprint, remains the standard English-language edition. Bien — Kazantzakis's principal English translator and biographer — provides a substantive introduction. Faber and Faber publish the same translation in the United Kingdom.
The Scribner paperback of Peter A. Bien's translation — the standard English-language edition for sixty-five years.
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