When released, The Last Temptation of Christ received almost unanimous praise from film critics, yet bombed at the box office due to protest from religious groups. The Da Vinci Code, released this year, was critically panned, but has earned nearly a billion dollars worldwide.
The Last Temptation of Christ, like Nikos Kazantzakis' book that inspired it, did not intend to rewrite history, but used historical fiction to emphasize the humanity of Christ. Neither did it intend to blaspheme; Kantzakis, director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader considered themselves within the fold of traditional Christianity.
Many protested the film and book's inclusion of Jesus in a love scene, but that was not presented as a literal event, but Christ's final temptation, an illusion created by Satan:
The film contains many ideas not present in the Scriptures. The main source of controversy stems from a scene near the end of the movie in which Jesus imagines himself marrying Mary Magdalene instead of dying on the cross. A brief scene of the married couple making love is shown in the film, sparking the anger of many protesters.
The rationale behind this scene is that it represents Satan's tempting of Christ with the life of a normal man, free from the burden of being crucified and of being the salvation of mankind. In the guise of a beautiful angel, Satan deceptively brings Christ down from the cross in a dream sequence and gives him the life he has desired, telling him he is in fact not the Messiah. Under Satan’s sham, Jesus marries and raises a family. However, as he is nearing the end of his life, his most devoted disciple, Judas Iscariot, awakens him to the truth of what is happening. As Judas calls him a traitor, Jesus finally realizes he has abandoned his duty to be crucified and to be the salvation of mankind. Seeing that he has been tempted into living a man’s life and dying a peaceful death, Jesus crawls out into the streets of Jerusalem as it burns with the fires of the Jewish Rebellion, and begs God to return him to his crucifixion, finally rejecting Satan’s offering. At that point, he is returned to the cross, awakening from his dream. Jesus has now been tempted as a man, and having survived this temptation utters his dying words, "It is accomplished."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_T ... al_content
Jesus then dies with a look of relief and satisfaction on His face, knowing that His ultimate destiny has been fulfilled. If Jesus is like us in everything but sin, then it's not farfetched that He would have been tempted by sex, though never giving into such a temptation.
Hebrews 4:15
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.
This article is rather helpful in understanding Scorsese's film:
The Last Temptation Reconsidered
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9602/iannone.html
Controversy over this retelling of the Christ tale did not begin with Scorsese. The Last Temptation of Christ almost led to Kazantzakis' excommunication from the Greek Orthodox Church. The novel was placed on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books, and Protestant fundamentalist groups in the United States tried to have it banned from libraries (thereby helping to make it a bestseller). Yet Kazantzakis was a serious spiritual seeker. His search took him through Bergson, Nietzsche, Buddha, Mussolini, Marx, and Lenin, but ultimately all roads led him back to Christ. The latter part of his career was devoted to an exploration of Christian concepts, not only in The Last Temptation but also in other novels, including The Greek Passion (1951), in which a Greek village under Turkish occupation becomes involved in staging a Passion Play, and St. Francis (1956). The Last Temptation of Christ is prefaced with his remarkable statement of spiritual and artistic purpose, an excerpt of which Scorsese uses to introduce the film, and and some of which appears in a fuller context in Kazantzakis' spiritual memoir, Report to Greco (1961):
"My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. . . . Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed; it is universal. . . . Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally-the supreme purpose of the struggle-union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks. . . .
If we are to be able to follow him, we must have a profound knowledge of His conflict, we must relive his anguish. . . . In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. All-and that is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we pity him, and why his final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ's nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world; he is fighting at our side. . . . This book was written because I wanted to offer a supreme model to the man who struggles; I wanted to show him that he must not fear pain, temptation, or death-because all three can be conquered, all three have already been conquered."The Last Temptation of Christ seems to me the effort of an ordinary man to understand Christ's sacrifice from the inside and to experience it as his own. In order to speak to modern man, arriving so late in the ages of belief, Jesus must be made to bear the infirmities of our age-the doubt, the angst, the fear and trembling, the existential dread, and yes, even the sexual obsessiveness. Moreover, in an age of complacent materialism Christ must be tempted not only by extraordinary evil but by the possibility of a life of ordinary pleasure as well-not only by lavish indulgence but also by the life of middle- class satisfactions...
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9602/iannone.html
Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, unlike The Last Temptation, specifically intends to revise history with Brown's neo-Gnostic conspiracy theories, albeit through the device of a fictional novel. Having said that, why was The Last Temptation so despised and commercially unsucessful, while the Da Vinci Code has made so much money? If the Last Temptation were blasphemous, then one could say the same for Jesus Christ Superstar and Monty Python's The Life of Brian.
Peace.
