The Christ of Kazantzakis’s Christ Recrucified

In the wake of Martin Scorsese’s film adaption of the controversial novel The Last Temptation of Christ by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, Kazantzakis’s work received a flurry of attention, but focused on The Last Temptation. The figure of Christ, however, is central to Kazantzakis’s larger literary oeuvre, and a rounded picture of Kazantzakis’s fictional Christology requires tending to these works. This article develops the central themes of the tacit Christology informing Kazantzakis’s Christ Recrucified: crucifixion as an emblem of spiritual-moral struggle; motifs of adoptionism and exemplarism; spring/Easter as the agitation of matter to transubstantiate; the defiant, war-like “face” of Christ; and Christ’s affinity to the broader pantheon of Greek gods and fertility myths.