Film / The Last Temptation of Christ

"The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God - has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onwards has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh... and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met."

— Nikos Kazantzakis

What Monty Python's Life of Brian was to comedy, The Last Temptation of Christ was to drama.

This is the 1988 film directed by Martin Scorsese, with a screenplay by Paul Schrader, adapted from the 1955 novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis. Starring Willem Dafoe as Jesus, what follows is a loose reinterpretation of the Biblical story of Jesus' life and Crucifixion (sorry, at 2 hours and 43 minutes the film's already long enough without him coming back).

As stated earlier, the film/novel depart substantially from The Four Gospels' account of Jesus' life. First to come to mind is that Jesus, while still capable of miracle working, is a fallen and deeply flawed human being, who disrespects his mother, watches prostitutes have sex, and wants to be abandoned by God. Secondly, Judas isn't that bad of a guy. Instead of outright betraying Jesus, he's practically forced into it by the man himself. Because of these deviations, the film ends up using many tropes of Jesus movies while Playing With them in new and rather un-Christian ways.

Released at a time when conservative Christians in America were eager to re-assert themselves as a cultural force after the embarrassing televangelist scandals of The '80s, the film became a huge flashpoint, probably the single most controversial film ever released by a major studio. Protesters picketed theaters, and several theater chains refused to carry it. Beyond the religious controversy, it was also hotly debated by critics, who disagreed on whether Scorsese made a misstep by taking on such an atypical project and whether his modernistic approach to a Biblical tale helped make it more relevant. As the controversy has subsided, it's gained positive re-evaluation as one of Scorsese's most daring films. Thomas R. Lindlof's book Hollywood Under Siege gives a full account of the making of the film, and the uproar it caused when it was released.

Other people appearing in the film include Harvey Keitel as Judas, Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene, Harry Dean Stanton as Paul of Tarsus, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate. The film also featured a score by Peter Gabriel, who later released Passion, a collection of songs composed for and inspired by the film, in 1989; the soundtrack album was the debut release for his vanity label Real World Records. A supplementary compilation of the album's source material, i.e. traditional music recordings (some recorded on-set when the film was shot), Passion: Sources, soon followed.

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This film provides examples of:

• Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Jesus is given this compared to the gospels. Though as Paul Schrader and Scorsese point out this is an Unbuilt Trope, most notably when Jesus wonders why God had forsaken him.
• Adaptational Heroism: Judas, summed up by the fact that in the climactic scene, it's he who yells "traitor!" at Jesus, and it's totally justified in the context of the story. He gets here the very 20th-century characterization of an ally of Jesus who betrayed him per his own orders. The Gnostic Gospel of Judas and other ancient texts give a very similar portrayal, making this Older Than Feudalism, but this idea didn't become popular until much later (ironically, even after the novel had been released).
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: Jesus doesn't have his crucifixion wounds during the temptation segment, even though they are clearly seen when the "angel" takes him off the cross. The wounds reappear when Judas confronts him during the Roman attack on Jerusalem. This makes sense in the novel, since the "angel" that appears during the crucifixion tells him that he's dreaming, and he never went to Gethsemane and got caught by the Romans. He wakes up the previous day, discovers that his disciples have fled, and returns home to Nazareth. The reappearance of his wounds is how he realizes that he's still on the cross, and he wakes up. This doesn't make sense in the adaptation, in which Jesus is saved while being crucified, and the wounds would still be present.
• Adapted Out: The novel contains more characters that do not appear in the film, such as Simon of Cyrene (portrayed as a foul-mouthed yet kind owner of the tavern Jesus and His disciples used to hang out at). Some of the more supernatural/fantasy sequences found in the novel are also muted down or cut out altogether.
• Affably Evil: The way Pontius Pilate is depicted, played by David Bowie no less. He talks politely with Jesus, listens to the story of Nebuchadnezzar's dream which is interpreted as predicting the fall of the Roman Empire, then orders Jesus off to be flogged and crucified because the Romans don't want change.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: In-Universe. The story provides one to the Bible, in tandem with External RetCons.
• Apologetic Attacker: Pontius Pilate doesn't regret Jesus' crucifixion but takes pity on the man and his cause, which he sees as a Hopeless War.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: As noted below, the film goes out of its way to have a Middle Eastern/West Asian-influenced musical score instead of the now-cliched Western choral/"churchy" music in other Bible movies (see the Hallelujah Chorus unironically used in The Greatest Story Ever Told), to the point of Anachronism Stew for aesthetic reasons.
  • The biggest example is probably an Arabic song from Senegal based on the Muslim confession of faith ("Call to Prayer" in Passion: Sources) used for the Last Supper scene.
  • The opening title music, called "The Feeling Begins" in the soundtrack, is based on an Armenian folk song called "Hovern Engan" ("The Wind Subsides", among other translations) with added percussion and other effects.
• Award-Bait Song: It Is Accomplished by Peter Gabriel could be considered an instrumental version of this.
• Beat Still, My Heart: In a startling scene, Jesus tears his hand through his chest and pulls out his heart to his disciples, in a demonstration of his power and his newfound determination to take the temple of Jerusalem back.
• Bible Times: A deconstruction, as it shows the time to be really poor, with a lot of violence and many religious mystics aside from Jesus, in addition to the Zealots. All of this was Truth in Television, in fact.
• Big Bad: Satan, represented here first as a snake, then a lion and a pillar of fire. Later he reappears as the angelic little girl and finally a pillar of fire again.
• Break Them by Talking: The older, un-crucified Jesus confronts Paul over his preaching, and is shut down right quick. Then again, that speech occurs during the titular Last Temptation.:
  Paul: You see, you don't know how much people need God. You don't know how happy He can make them. He can make them happy to do anything. Make them happy to die, and they'll die, all for the sake of Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus of Nazareth. The Son of God. The Messiah. Not you. Not for your sake. [beat] You know, I'm glad I met you. Because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more important and much more powerful.
• Came Back Wrong: Lazarus is resurrected as in the gospels, but the experience of dying and dwelling for a while in the underworld has left him visibly traumatized.
• Celibate Hero: To Magdalene's chagrin, Jesus has vowed to remain a virgin as part of his mysticism. It is later subverted when he finally makes love with her after the crucifixion. Then double subverted because all of it was an illusion.
• Classical Anti-Hero: Jesus being this in the movie is basically what's so controversial about it, in a nutshell.
• Composite Character: Mary Magdalene is equated with the unnamed woman Jesus saves from being stoned to death in The Gospel of John.
• Creator Cameo: Martin Scorsese did this many, many times. In this film, he pops up as the prophet Isaiah, with his face obscured under his cloak. He is also the distorted voice heard beneath Satan's regular speaking voice.
• Creepy Child: The guardian angel, not only for how slightly eerie she is but also because she doesn't age like Jesus does. Justified as she is actually Satan.
• Death by Adaptation: Lazarus, who isn't mentioned in the Bible beyond being raised from the dead, gets murdered by Paul to cover up the proof of Jesus' most incredible miracle.
• Deconstruction: A highly intellectually driven look at not only the life of Jesus but the way he's depicted in art and movies. And averting Christianity is Catholic with its source novel written by a Greek Orthodox Christian and co-screenwriter Paul Schrader, a Dutch Calvinist (with a PhD in theology), joining Scorsese as the Catholic.
  • One thing which Scorsese pointed out in interviews and the book Scorsese On Scorsese is that the Crucifixion has been Entertainingly Wrong all through history, with the nails driven through the palms which in fact would not have hinged the body on the cross. Scorsese cited the latest archaeological research as grounds to put the nails through Christ's wrists, just as the Romans did it.
  • The musical score by Peter Gabriel, a Genre-Busting effort that was an attempt to create music similar to what could have been played in Israel of that time, with some Anachronism Stew thrown in for good measure, generally taking Jesus away from the European High Culture trappings of Classical religious music which developed centuries later and in a land, continent, and culture far removed from First Century Israel.
  • Scorsese also deconstructs Jesus Was Way Cool, pointing out that if Jesus was so charismatic, then there wouldn't have been such hatred or controversy provoked by him in the first place.^note  According to the Gospels, the reasons for the enmity towards Him included people disagreeing with Him saying He was the Messiah, and He made enemies of those who were corrupt among the Pharisees and Chief Priests when He called them out on their corruption, hypocrisy, abuses of power and not doing their job. He shows Jesus as a King of the Homeless attracting lepers, prostitutes, and other outcasts whom the establishment would regard as weirdos, with Willem Dafoe's Jesus getting Adaptational Angst Upgrade rather than a Messianic Archetype we see. The movie also deconstructs Christian attitudes to sexuality by foregrounding the conflict between "Fully Human and Fully Divine". Also, The Last Temptation is the first work in Western art to depict women with Jesus at The Last Supper.
  • The movie in general takes the opposite stand to the Hollywood Epic Movie giving Jesus a Film Noir narration, using a variety of American accents (because as pointed out in the quote below, they were no less realistic than the BBC or the old English of the King James Bible used in earlier adaptations) and in showing Jerusalem and the Biblical lands as the dirty, oppressed Wretched Hive that it was under Roman occupation and also suggested in the Bible itself, and showing the poor who gravitated to Jesus with as little glamour or affect as possible.
  • The film breaks from the tradition of portraying Jesus as an impossibly beautiful, angelic-looking handsome man in several ways. Willem Dafoe, with his long, gaunt features and Villainous Cheekbones, is not exactly a traditionally handsome man, and certainly not the image of divine beauty. (As Sergio Leone famously said, "That is the face of a murderer, not of Our Lord!") In addition, the depiction of Jesus as having sparkling white robes and unrealistically perfect hygiene is nowhere to be found; Jesus is allowed to look as grungy, malnourished, and generally unstable as a poor prophet (or cult leader, if you asked the Romans) would actually look. He is, however, as appropriately muscular as you would expect from someone who has been a carpenter for most of his life.
  • Biblical scholar and Jesus mythicist Robert M. Price made the argument that the film deconstructs the apologetic argument known as the Lewis trilemma according to which Jesus was either a cynical con man, a complete madman or the messiah.
    And yet, [The Last Temptation of Christ] is certainly the most orthodox treatment of Jesus of any movie ever made [...] the Liar, Lord, or Lunatic argument that [Christian apologists] use is, I think, deeply flawed because it implies Jesus wasn't a genuine human being because the idea that he was God — whether he was or not — would have driven him insane. Right? And that's exactly what happens in The Last Temptation; no other movie ever took that seriously.
  • The film also flips over the whole "Pilate washing his hands" and trying to appeal for Jesus's release. Pilate is the one who wants Jesus dead, and his sympathy comes from seeing Jesus as a deluded man condemning himself to death. He rejects Jesus message of love as "against the world and against Rome". The priests are not even suggested as wanting Jesus dead, and his confrontation with them comes off as them trying to talk sense into him before he gets himself into trouble.
  • The Catholic imagery of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, usually an abstract/symbolic representation of Jesus himself with the heart just being on its own or visible on his chest or floating in his hand, and always depicted as being on fire, emitting rays of light and wearing a miniature crown of thorns, is interpreted in a stunningly literal way with Jesus digging into his chest and holding out and offering his bloody heart to the speechless apostles.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Ultimately, as unusual as the film is as a dramatization of Jesus, the film is still highly respectful and, as one reviewer noted, "the work of a believer". Scorsese said that the reason he made all these changes was because he wanted to take Jesus away from the pious and safe traditional iconography and make it relevant to a modern audience, since Jesus' ideas and messages are still radical and important to the world, and he wanted to place it in a more alien and unfamiliar context so that people would understand it fresh without the preconceptions and pomp and piety.
• Dehumanizing Insult: Satan calls Jesus "Nazorean", the equivalent of calling him a peasant.
• Demythification: This movie portrays Satan and Jesus' divine origin as real, but offers a down-to-earth version of the latter and the Crucifixion. The unconventional-looking Willem Dafoe plays Jesus, he is shocked when he pulls off his first miracle, the Last Supper scene avoids a "Last Supper" Steal by involving a lot more people than the traditional thirteen (including women) and having them sit on the ground, and the Crucifixion scenes skew from traditional religious portrayals in favor of archaeology and non-religious accounts of how Roman crucifixions happened (for example, Jesus only carries the horizontal section to Golgotha, he is nailed by the wrists and also tied, and the two thieves are nailed to dead trees). Jesus' cross looks like a traditional Latin cross by sheer accident, due to the wooden sign reading "Jesus Nazarene King of the Jews" being placed on top of it; if not for that, it would look like a 'T'.
• Devil in Disguise: The "angel" who appears to Jesus upon the cross.
• Divinely Appearing Demons: Satan is able to very convincingly pass himself off as Jesus' guardian angel in part because of this trope.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You: Pontius Pilate criticizes the Jewish rebels for resisting the Roman order and forcing harsh repression against the population. He tells Jesus that he considers pacifists like him to be just as bad. He tells Jesus that he will be crucified at Golgotha which has "3000 skulls" and tells him that he wishes he and other residents of Jerusalem counted those skulls before Romans have to add more to that tally.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Jesus rejects Satan's illusion and is immediately brought back to the cross, where he cries out "It is accomplished!" in utter triumph, having fulfilled his Father's plan.
• The Ending Changes Everything: With the reveal that Satan's trying to persuade Jesus into giving up his role as the Messiah by promising him a normal life, it is quite probable that the whole movie right until the final scene at the crucifixion was indeed part of the titular Last Temptation.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Quite literally with the child guardian angel, who turns out to be Satan in disguise.
• Fiery Redhead: Judas very conspicuously has red hair here, and is portrayed as being quick to anger.
• The Film of the Book: No, not that book. It's actually an adaptation of a book by the same name.
• The Final Temptation: It's right there in the title, really.
• Foregone Conclusion: Jesus dies on the cross to save humanity from its sins and allow everyone in the world a chance to reach Heaven and see God. It's not like the story can really change the formula up. Until it does, by way of having Satan appear to tempt Jesus into giving up his destiny for a normal life. Double Subverted right at the end when Jesus declines the Last Temptation, choosing to "go back" and die on the cross.
• Foreshadowing: The first scene in the movie is Jesus making a cross, carrying it, then watching someone get crucified.
• Futureshadowing: Jesus' final temptation has glimpsing Saint Saul/Paul preaching Christianity and twisting his beliefs for personal ends. He also glimpses the sack of Jerusalem, the end of Jewish independence, and the birth of the diaspora.
• God Is Flawed: Played with. The point of the novel is to examine Christ as both entirely divine and entirely human. He's subject to many of the fears and temptations that humans have, and while he doesn't necessarily indulge in sin himself, his intrinsically paradoxical nature as the Messiah fills him with severe self-doubt, insecurity as to his worthiness, and suppressed anger towards those who merely plan to use him for their own purposes. Satan tempts him with power, authority, and sovereignty, but the final temptation — and the hardest to overcome — is a vision of himself as a normal man married to loving wives with children of his own. He ultimately resists and becomes the Christ of The Bible, gladly accepting his Father's plan.
• Go Out with a Smile: Jesus grins ecstatically after the final temptation: "It is accomplished!"
• Guardian Angel: During the last quarter of the movie, Jesus is accompanied by an otherworldly girl who claims to be his guardian angel, but is actually Satan.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Jesus's guardian angel takes the form of a golden-haired girl. Subverted when it is revealed that she is Satan in disguise trying to tempt him.
• Hannibal Lecture: Pontius Pilate tries to give this to Jesus, Satan gives it all the time, and even Saint Paul steps in.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Jesus and Judas are best friends and are practically inseparable. In this story, Jesus orders Judas to betray him to the Roman authorities, which Judas does not wish to do.
• Hopeless War: How Pontius Pilate sees the Jewish Revolts — he chides Jesus and the zealots, seeing them both as two sides of the same coin for forcing harsh Roman reprisals against their people.
• Human Notepad: Downplayed, as it is mostly limited to hands and feet, but Mary Magdalene here shows several mock-Phoenician/Canaanite occult tattoos.
• It Sucks to Be the Chosen One: It really does. The woman you love and would have married becomes a prostitute and, finally, God's plan doesn't involve you becoming the Icon of Rebellion to topple the Roman occupation. No, God's plan is for you to sacrifice yourself so that you can become an Inspirational Martyr that ensures your cause becomes truly immortal.
• It's a Wonderful Plot: The final quarter of the film is Jesus seeing how the world would be if he was just a regular person. But a form of Christianity still survives, espoused by Paul. Another interesting twist is that in this reality Jesus gets to witness firsthand the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70 (the event that hastened early Christianity's break from Judaism). Universal Pictures president Tom Pollock greenlighted the film in part because he recognized the similarities to It's a Wonderful Life.
• Jesus Was Crazy: The film begins Jesus portrayed as a paranoid schizophrenic who starts preaching because he hears voices in his head. Jesus is first shown working as a carpenter building crosses for the Romans and rambling on about how he wants to crucify all the messiahs. The story goes through many plot-twists, and the psychiatric perspective grows obsolete after a while — but Jesus being crazy in one way or another remains the only constant throughout the movie. And trying to live a decent life turns out to be the craziest thing of them all.
• Large Ham: Paul. Just listen to his rantings and try not to laugh.
• "Last Supper" Steal: Meticulously averted. Everyone sits on the floor, the table is arranged in a square, and the female followers are in attendance as well.
• Magical Barefooter: It's never commented upon (alongside her more self-evidently supernatural traits, like her eternal youth), but Jesus's guardian angel never wears shoes.
• Meta Casting:
  • Barbara Hershey as Mary Magdalene was appropriate, since she was the one who introduced Scorsese to the Kazantzakis novel in the first place.
  • Michael Been, who'd been an early figure in Christian Rock and whose later mainstream band The Call often had religious themes in their lyrics, as the apostle John.
• Ms. Fanservice: Largely averted with Barbara Hershey's nude scenes. The fact that she (as Mary Magdalene) is servicing a long line of men, one after another while Jesus waits at the end of the line for a chance to speak to her, makes the scene itself repulsive, but Hershey still looks stunning.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: All actors, but Harvey Keitel got the most crap for it. This was a deliberate artistic decision by Scorsese, who wanted to subvert the highfalutin cliches associated with the Biblical epic genre up until that time.
  "I mean, basically, they say, okay, this is a defense, in a way. We don't have to get too emotionally involved because this happened a long time ago and people spoke funny. We said no, this man talks like you, talks like me, some guy has a Brooklyn accent, another guy has a Canadian accent... where does it say that everybody in ancient Judea spoke by listening to the BBC?"
  • Scorsese stated at one point that he'd even considered doing the film in Aramaic much like Mel Gibson did later, but that he ultimately decided against it in part because he wanted his film to be seen by a general audience rather than by academics and intellectuals. The other, more practical reason was that Aramaic is a dead language, leaving the actors without a standardized guide for pronunciation beyond what could be reconstructed by linguists.
• Oh, Crap!: Jesus has one, when he resurrects Lazarus. He's as wide-eyed and shocked as the spectators when Lazarus emerges from the crypt.
• One-Steve Limit: A notable aversion with the three different Marys in Jesus' life — his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Lazarus's sister, Mary of Bethany) — which becomes symbolically important during the last temptation because all three women are associated with motherhood. In the vision of the last temptation, Mary Magdalene becomes Jesus's first wife and carries his child, only to die during pregnancy. The third Mary (along with her sister Martha) eventually gives birth to Jesus's children. Satan even lampshades the symbolism while in the form of the guardian angel after Mary Magdalene's sudden death, persuading Jesus to seek out Lazarus's sisters by telling him that "there is only one woman in the world, with different faces."^note Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany being different people is a reflection of Niko Kazantzakis' Orthodox background, since there's a long-held Catholic tradition that conflates them, though more recently the Church has gone with the view that they're separate.
• Our Angels Are Different: Jesus' guardian angel is portrayed as just an otherworldly blonde girl in a white tunic. However, it turns out she is not an angel at all - or rather, she is the fallen angel himself.
• Passion Play: Subverted Trope. Just as Christ is put on the Cross, an angel rescues him and lets him live a life without the burden of being the Messiah. Jesus goes on to marry Mary Magdalene and lament the fact that people like Paul of Tarsus continue to use the story of his Passion as the center of a new religion. The Twist Ending plays with the trope further. The movie is a Double Subversion, because the angel Christ was the Devil wearing a disguise, who gave Christ a vision of what could be in order to tempt Christ not to fulfill his mission to save humanity from sin.
• Period Piece, Modern Language: As part of the film's effort to move depictions of The Four Gospels away from the trappings of conventional retellings, the mostly-American cast speaks in their natural accents and speech patterns. These line up with the kind of dialogue that the film's audiences might hear on an everyday basis, rather than using the Received Pronunciation and Flowery Elizabethan English that are more typical of Biblical epic movies.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: A sprawling 500-page novel had to be tightened up considerably for its film version. One of the main talking points for the studio in the middle of the uproar in 1988 was that the film doesn't include some of the more provocative sequences from the novel.
• Prefers Going Barefoot: Mary Magdalene walks around barefoot, showing off her elaborate tattoos.
• The Queen's Latin: Almost entirely subverted, except for David Bowie as Pontius Pilate.
• Race Lift: In the novel, the guardian angel who appears to Jesus during his last temptation (who is actually Satan in disguise) is a black Ethiopian boy. Perhaps to deflect accusations of negative portrayal of non-white people, the angel is played by a white girl in the film.
• Refusal of the Call: This trope is more or less the narrative's axis; the novel and the film are predicated on exploring Jesus's nature as both fully human and fully divine, and the inner-conflict this would cause anyone. Jesus is initially terrified of his role as the messiah on earth, and goes to great lengths to distance himself from it. Even after he begins his ministry, he's plagued by insecurity, reluctant to accept his destiny, and the entire third act of the movie is a dream-sequence where Jesus nearly eschews his godhood to live out the rest of his life as a mortal man.
• Saved by the Church Bell: The film ends with Jesus triumphantly accepting his death on the cross, shouting that "it is accomplished" before the film gives way to a heavenly light show and the closing credits. All the while, the footage is underscored by Peter Gabriel's "It Is Accomplished", a jubilant mix of church bells tolling and Gabriel himself chanting in praise, representing Jesus' salvation of mankind from sin.
• Shades of Conflict: Jesus and Satan are, respectively, purely good and purely evil; everyone else, including the Apostles, the Sanhedrin, and Pontius Pilate are various shades of gray.
• Shout-Out:
  • The depiction of Satan as a shape-shifting little girl owes greatly to Luis Buñuel's Simon of the Desert and Federico Fellini's Toby Dammit.
  • An oblique bit of Author Appeal from screenwriter Paul Schrader—the scene where Jesus pulls his heart out of his chest was partly meant to be a reference to the school seal◊ of Schrader's alma mater, Calvin College (plus, it would have resonated with certain iconography from Scorsese's Catholic background).
• Shown Their Work: Even if the film's thematic material was summarily rejected by the pop culture subconsciousness, its exhaustive depiction of Judea in the 1st century has influenced every "serious" film set in the period since its release. Even The Passion of the Christ owes a great deal to The Last Temptation.
• Smash Cut: An unintentional example. During the final scene, right as Jesus finally dies on the cross, the film flickers out into a myriad of colors before cutting to the end credits. This was because the film reel cut out right as Willem Dafoe's eyes closed. Scorsese, finding it a magnificent way to end the film, decided to Throw It In!.
• Stylistic Suck: The stilted and rambling preaching of Paul of Tarsus. According to historical accounts, Paul was no great orator, which is why he's most remembered for his letters. Paul Schrader, the film's screenwriter, later mentioned that Harry Dean Stanton modeled his performance as Paul after televangelists.
• Truth in Television: Setting aside the controversy surrounding the film, one undeniable detail is that Dafoe's physical appearance as Jesus is more realistic than is usual for the Western canon. To elaborate, the Western Jesus is usually conceptualized as a long-haired, conventionally attractive white man who, beyond being just thin, usually appears emaciated in depictions of the Passion. While Willem Dafoe is certainly a long-haired white man, he's hardly what most people would consider "conventionally attractive", and his wiry physique in the film makes a lot more sense considering that Jesus was a carpenter before beginning his ministry, even if the bits about Jesus also being a Jewish Middle Easterner still did not make it into the film.
• Tragic Hero: Jesus is tormented by his dual nature as both completely human and completely divine, as he not only has to come to terms with the fact that he is the messiah, but he also ends up facing all the temptations, fears, and insecurities any human does. This drives people away from him, draws in people who are trying to exploit him, gets him pitied by the authorities, and ultimately costs him any chance for a normal and happy life as a regular human being. This is, however, hugely averted by the ending, where Jesus manages to fulfill his role as the redeemer of mankind wholeheartedly, proclaiming God's victory in utter triumph before dying on the cross.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The guardian angel never leaves Jesus's side once he begins his life after the crucifixion, but although she interacts with the people around him, no one ever seems to question why she doesn't age. It's justified in the end when it's revealed that the guardian angel is actually Satan tempting Jesus with visions of mortal life as he dies on the cross.
• Voice of the Legion: Naturally, by Legion's boss, who gets to speak in quite a few voices throughout the film in addition to having this special effect.
• Wham Line: A couple during the last temptation.
  Jesus: Who's getting married?
  Angel: You are.
  • And:
  Judas Iscariot: What angel? Look at her: Satan!
  Satan: I told you we would meet again.
• Windmill Crusader:
  • Jesus is portrayed as the insane kind of Windmill Crusader. This is played straight for most of the movie; he's even cured of his messiah complex and gets to live a normal life. In the Twist Ending, however, Judas accuses Jesus of betraying him by not going through with dying on the cross as they had previously agreed. Jesus’ guardian angel is then revealed to be the devil, who had tricked him into believing that he’s not the messiah. Thus, it turns out that it was No Mere Windmill after all.
  • In the same movie, Paul is briefly portrayed as the misguided kind of Windmill Crusader. However, he is quickly shown as a Straw Hypocrite who simply doesn’t care if the gospel he preaches is true or not. Of course, this Paul is part of the vision shown by the Devil as part of the titular temptation, so YMMV.

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