A Holy Furor

By John Leo

Jesus has brief onscreen sex with his first wife Mary Magdalene and later commits adultery. Judas is a hero, the strongest and best of the apostles. Paul is a hypocrite and liar. Jesus is so dazed that, even on the eve of his Crucifixion, he is still not quite sure whether to preach love or murder Romans.

Ready for Director Martin Scorsese's new movie, The Last Temptation of Christ?

Powerful, eccentric, bloody, filled with theological gaffes, Temptation is an excruciatingly earnest and freewheeling docudrama based on the 1955 best- selling novel by a tormented Greek Orthodox believer, Nikos Kazantzakis. It is the result of an obsessive 16-year quest by one of Hollywood's most esteemed directors to bring to the screen a struggling Christ who only slowly comes to see himself as the Messiah. The movie, Scorsese says, "is my way of trying to get closer to God."

When it opens this Friday in New York, Los Angeles and other cities, religious crowd scenes are almost certain to appear outside the theaters as well as in them. For the past month, conservative Christians have denounced the film as blasphemous, staged demonstrations, called for boycotts and shaped a national campaign to have the picture destroyed or withdrawn. Along the way, there have been anti-Semitic incidents and threats against the "non- Christians" at Universal Pictures who took a chance on the film partly to encourage the filmmaker to pursue future projects at the studio.

So far, most of the voices raised against the film belong to people who have not yet seen it. Italian Director Franco Zeffirelli called the movie "damaging to the image of Christ. He cannot be made the object of low fantasies." Fundamentalist Leader Jerry Falwell called for a boycott against MCA, Universal's parent company; all MCA products, which include Grosset & Dunlap publishers, Spencer Gifts and Motown Records; and any theater that shows the film. Said Falwell: "Neither the label 'fiction' nor the First Amendment gives Universal the right to libel, slander and ridicule the most central figure in world history."

To head off further furor or perhaps even cash in on it, Universal decided last week to move the opening up from Sept. 23 to Aug. 12. Says Tom Pollock, chairman of MCA's motion picture group: "The best thing that can be done for The Last Temptation of Christ at this time is to make it available to the American people and allow them to draw their own conclusions, based on fact not fallacy." But Tim Penland, a born-again marketing expert once hired by Universal to placate conservative critics and now a critic himself, believes the six-week jump will unleash more Fundamentalist anger. "It's the most serious mistake a studio has made in decades," he says.

The dramatic centerpiece of the film is a half-hour segment in which the dying Christ, played by Willem Dafoe, hallucinates about the devil's final temptation: come down from the Cross, renounce your role as the Messiah, marry Mary Magdalene and live a long and ordinary life.

Nothing unorthodox there, strictly speaking. As both fully human and fully divine, Jesus is viewed in Christian theology as free of sin but subject to all temptations, including sexual ones. Following Kazantzakis, however, Scorsese presents the early Jesus as a weak and dithering collaborator who builds crosses used by the Romans to execute Jewish rebels. Later he becomes the wild-eyed guru to a band of ragged followers but remains apprehensive and fundamentally confused about his message and his mission. He persuades Judas, his best friend, to betray him to fulfill God's plan. During the reverie on the Cross, Jesus is shown briefly having sex with his wife, Mary Magdalene. Later in the fantasy, after Magdalene dies, he weds Mary of the biblical duo Mary and Martha, then commits adultery with Martha.

Temptation is drenched in blood. The blood of sacrificed animals runs through the streets, blood unaccountably pours out of an apple Jesus eats and, at the Last Supper, the wine literally turns into blood. In one grotesque scene, Jesus reaches into his chest (though it looks more like his belly), yanks out his heart and holds it up for his apostles to admire.

For a few critics, this display seems to be an arch-send-up of the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Some dialogue also hints at satire, probably unintentionally. Asked by a Zealot to compare being dead with being alive, the resurrected Lazarus says thoughtfully, "I was a little surprised. There isn't that much difference." At times Jesus sounds like a mumbling method actor (his first sermon begins "Umm, uh, I'm sorry"), at others like a recent graduate of the Shirley MacLaine School of Theology ("Everything's part of God")

For Scorsese, a former altar boy who once wanted to be a priest, the movie is no frivolous matter. Actress Barbara Hershey, who plays Mary Magdalene, gave him a copy of the Kazantzakis novel in 1972, and he has been contemplating it ever since. Kazantzakis' Jesus, he insists, is both human and divine, in accordance with Christian teaching. What interested Scorsese in the author's approach "was that the human part of Jesus would have trouble accepting the divine."

For many believers, the problem with all this is that Scorsese is not tinkering with a minor historical figure, as Gore Vidal did with Aaron Burr, but with the founder of their faith. "This is an intentional attack on Christianity," concludes Joseph Reilly, national director of Morality in Media. The group is particularly incensed by Jesus' anguished comment, "I am a liar, I am a hypocrite. I am afraid of everything . . . Lucifer is inside me."

Universal Pictures had anticipated controversy. Paramount, originally set to produce the movie in 1983, backed out just weeks before the cameras were to roll. To head off a storm, Universal took the unusual step last January of hiring Penland to calm down the religious right. But Penland resigned in June, charging that Universal had reneged on a promise to let conservative religious leaders see the film and comment on it well in advance of its release.

Although Universal did hold screenings for religious leaders last month, most conservatives refused to come. Instead they staged protests at the Universal lot and published an admonishing ad in the Hollywood Reporter. In a letter to MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman, Bill Bright of the Campus Crusade for Christ offered to raise money to reimburse Universal for all copies of the film, which would "promptly be destroyed." Universal responded with lofty, full-page newspaper ads in four cities, quoting Thomas Jefferson and announcing that the constitutional rights to free expression and freedom of religion were not for sale.

In the most organized campaign of resistance, Methodist Minister Donald Wildmon, head of the American Family Association, is sending out 2.5 million mailings protesting the film and has scheduled anti-Temptation spots on 700 Christian radio stations and 50 to 75 TV stations. "In the twelve years of my current ministry," he says, "I've never seen anything like the response to this movie."

Make that the response to the response. As an annoyed Scorsese points out, "Ninety-nine percent of the people who are complaining have not seen the picture." Many complainers are instead responding to a bootleg copy of an outdated script, circulated by the Sisterhood of Mary, a group of ultra- conservative Protestant women. That version contained the egregious line, which is not in the movie, spoken by Jesus to Mary Magdalene: "God sleeps between your legs."

Universal has tried to calm things down, inserting a disclaimer in the movie saying it is fiction and making Scorsese available for interviews stressing his religious sincerity. Yet the protest has taken on a life of its own. Virtually every televangelist, including Pat Robertson, has mentioned the film during appeals for money. A nonsectarian group called Concerned Women for America has asked all MCA stockholders to sell the company's stock on Sept. 15. And Mother Angelica, a nun who runs the nation's largest Catholic cable network, is calling on protesters to drive with their lights on on Aug. 22. Both dates were picked at random when the opening was still set for September.

Some of the protests have taken on ugly anti-Semitic overtones. Three weeks ago, the Rev. R.L. Hymers Jr., a Christian extremist in the Los Angeles area, staged a demonstration near the Beverly Hills home of MCA Chairman Wasserman, who is Jewish. An actor portraying Wasserman stepped repeatedly on the bloody back of an actor dressed as Jesus and carrying a heavy cross. An airplane meanwhile flew overhead trailing a banner that read, WASSERMAN FANS JEW-HATRED W/TEMPTATION, and a crowd chanted, "Bankrolled by Jewish money."

As conservatives shriek all around them, liberal churchmen have been bending over backward to avoid criticizing the film, stressing Scorsese's right to interpret Jesus in his own way and sometimes issuing a tepid defense or two. Fundamentalist fears are exaggerated, says the Rev. Eugene Schneider of the United Church of Christ, because "people who go to the movie are going to come out bored and leave before it is over."

The Rt. Rev. Paul Moore Jr., Episcopal Bishop of New York, offered one of the strongest defenses, calling Temptation "theologically sound." Though the lovemaking between Jesus and Mary Magdalene may offend some, he said, "Remember, it's a dream. This is yet another portrait -- a work of art -- which emphasizes certain aspects of Jesus." The Rev. William Fore of the National Council of Churches similarly sees the movie as "an honest attempt to tell the story of Jesus from a different perspective."

Catholics and Methodists have issued no formal response to the film. Bishop Anthony Bosco of Greensburg, Pa., head of the communications department for the National Council of Catholic Bishops, thinks that the movie should be allowed to expire quietly. "This too shall pass away," he says. But not all Catholics are so patient: his office has received hundreds of phone calls demanding that the church speak out. Says Bishop Bosco: "The anti-Semitism and the hatred this movie has caused can hardly please the heart of Christ."

Many clergymen say they have no interest in fanning hysteria over the film, but they wish that Scorsese had made a better movie. The film's Jesus questions himself so much that "it's sort of like watching The Three Faces of Eve," complains the Rev. Michael Morris, who teaches religion and the cinema at a Catholic school in Berkeley.

There are knotty theological problems too. In the dream sequence, for example, when Jesus interrupts Paul's preaching to explain that he did not die and rise again, Paul says the facts are not important as long as people have something to believe in. This appears to reinforce the familiar and cynical view that Paul invented Christianity and distorted Jesus' teachings. Scorsese's Jesus also makes a number of doctrinal blunders. He announces that his death will pay for his own sins, rather than for the sins of mankind. And he picks up dirt and stones and says, "This is my body too," which apparently makes him a founder of pantheism as well as Christianity.

Such theological slipups are fueling passions about the film. Father Morris says he was told by Scorsese that the filmmaker wonders why everyone is so upset when "it's just a movie." After all, the director said, he has a right to work out his private quest for Jesus on film. "This irks me a bit," admits Father Morris. "You can't be working out private problems to the degree that it causes people to riot in the streets." Although that prospect is unlikely, The Last Temptation has touched off the angriest religious debate in years.

With reporting by Marguerite Michaels/New, York and James Willwerth/Los Angeles