In Christian calendar, the ‘Holy Week’ begins on Palm Sunday and ends on Easter. Easter also marks the culmination of the 40 day long lent season which began on Ash Wednesday. Palm Sunday commemorates the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. Crucified on Good Friday, Jesus rises from the dead the following Sunday that is Easter. This holy week is a time of remembering Jesus and people do a lot of soul searching during these days. Among many others, there are two important literary works on Jesus which worth remembering. ‘Barabbas’ by Nobel prize winning Swedish author Par Lagerkvist and ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ by Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis are the two significant novels which deal with the life of Jesus away from biblical narrative and religious constructions.
When Jesus was brought before the Roman judge there were three men ready to be crucified, but the crowd demanded that Jesus be crucified, so the judge decided to release one and he released Barabbas, a murderer and rioter. Thus the innocent Jesus goes to the cross and the guilty Barabbas is freed. The novel narrates the story of the rest of Barabbas’ life. Barabbas is fascinated by Jesus but he remains the exact opposite to Jesus in many ways.
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After realising who was Jesus, Barabbas the murderer and robber becomes a quiet, modest person, eventually a slave. But at one point he swears that he is not a Christian to escape a death sentence. Later he was captured among other Christians and the Christians came to know that he is the man who was freed so that Jesus could be crucified. In the end, Barabbas himself is crucified. The full logic of the opposite of Jesus and Barabbas plays itself out to the end in the novel. This chilling, challenging and brilliantly troubling novel is an unusual take on the Christian theme.
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Nikos Kazantzakis’ ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ is a retelling of the story of Christ. Kazantzakis follows the Gospels in accepting the miraculous events they relate but he deviates in the psychological make-up of the Christ who is portrayed as a reluctant Messiah heeding to the calling of God but also drawn toward living a normal life among men. So, this novel created a stir of controversy. Orthodox Christians got disturbed by the portrayal of Jesus and other prominent biblical characters. In his preface Kazantzakis argues that by facing and conquering all of man’s weaknesses, Jesus struggled to do God’s will without ever giving in to the temptations of the flesh. ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ is only an expansion of this argument. The novel, as well as the movie based on it by Martin Scorsese, was banned in some parts of the world.
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