It's not too surprising that people unfamiliar with movie, book and author are pushing this work of art into the little boxes of faith-versus-secularism and censorship-versus-offensiveness and casting their arguments in the language of ideological formula. They are not cinematic trimmings added in, as some of the more overwrought commentators have suggested, by godless Hollywood people with an eye on the box office. All the film scenes that have sparked such outrage - Christ having doubts, resisting his martyrdom and, finally, in a dream sequence, having a sexual relationship - are crucial elements of the book. Bill Bright offered to do) or in intimidating film company chairman Lew Wasserman into withdrawing it with pickets of his house and veiled references to "anti-Semitic backlash." But I have read the novel. It's set for release this fall, assuming that no one succeeds in buying and burning all copies (as one Rev. Like most of the protesters, I haven't seen the movie. Kazantzakis is in the news because a film version of his 1948 novel "The Last Temptation of Christ," directed by Martin Scorsese, has brought violent opposition and demands for censorship from some fundamentalist Christian groups and answering volleys from free-speech organizations.
His grave is outside the city of Heraklion on Crete, in the hills. Kazantzakis was nearly excommunicated and, at his death, barred from normal funeral rites. The Greek Orthodox Church did not feel so. One could argue that to spend an entire artistic lifetime thus grappling with your religion is one way of taking it very seriously indeed - so seriously that you can't just jettison and forget it when its beliefs and constraints become inconvenient. The Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis wrote 15 books trying to thrash out the tormented relationships between his Christianity, his intellectual and political development over a lifetime (including bouts of Marxism) and his heart.
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