The Last Temptation of Christ

Loved the first third, when The Son of Mary doesn't quite know if he's really The Son o'God. Loved the dream state that Jesus enters into near crucifixion time. Loved some of the use of language (powerful, beautiful). Bored with some of the parable-tellings. Bored with the soft-misogyny of one-dimensional women.

Either I am becoming a radical atheist, or the book is weaker (more tedious and way too sentimental) than Scorsese's movie. Although I am a fan of Kazantzakis and I salute a Nietzschean Jesus, there was something fundamentally wrong about this book. Right now I can't really be sure where the evil lies: my perception or the crude reality. I believe that the novel is somehow dated: a Heretical reading of the gospels, a Gnostic interpretation of the Christian myth would be much darker and deeper in our Zeitgeist than in the 1950's. For example I found Saramago's version more interesting. However, it is an essential reading for all those who want to explore so to say religion beyond religion. The reaction of the Greek Orthodox Church who excommunicated Kazantzakis mainly for conceiving an alternate Jesus, is, simply put, dumb. From the perspective of film philosophy, the book's final chapters are similar to Matrix.