Week 17 - 2-D or 3-D Jesus?

The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis

  I've been in a complaining mood lately, so don't take my whining too seriously. 

  This book and the one I paired it with in my head - Gibran's Jesus The Son of Man - are beautiful, inventive, devotional. For both Gibran and Kazantzakis Jesus is the great Romantic Hero: striving, yearning, strong and sympathetic, a misunderstood poet, working outside institutions, overcoming worldly cares, a lover of nature and beauty, tragic yet triumphant. At the least, Jesus is our best self. Jesus fully integrates heaven and earth, in his existence and/or through his words and deeds. 
   Gibran's Jesus leans more towards the sage and mystic, and Kazantzakis' Jesus more towards the fear and trembling, existentialist kind of hero. I hope they got to read each other's work. Two wonderful writers, spiritually devoted to Jesus, sailing into his life with paper sails and a pen as rudder. 
   So...why are their Jesus's such dead characters? Maybe dead isn't the right word. Forced. We could chalk it up as another instance of the uninteresting-hero-in-an-interesting-cast-or-story problem, which I think is one of the great unsolved problems in the history of the universe. 
   You can tell as you read that Gibran and Kazantzakis both love Jesus very much, so perhaps they were trying too hard to get it right. It's as if they took a beloved icon, in all its two dimensional profundity, and tried to add perspective, make it 3-D, while still keeping the basic style of the icon. Jesus looks like a cartoon character on a live set. Who framed Roger Rabbit? Kazantzakis' Jesus is more human, Gibran's more divine, but they're stuck in a similar contortion - a mix-up of 2-D and 3-D conventions.
   Another complaint - they both pin Paul as a power hungry fanatic. Also their female characters hang on the male characters, not just socially (mother, potential mother, wife, potential wife, servant) but spiritually: women's spirituality is portrayed mostly as sensuality - in relationship to a husband or child. One more gripe: Gibran paints a bleak picture of Jewish religion; Kazantzakis's is more lively, thankfully.