The Last Temptation of Christ

I knew this book had been condemned by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and there is nothing you can do to make me interested in a book faster than telling me that someone doesn't want me to read it. And last time I read a book banned by a religious authority, The Satanic Verses, I found it interesting even without much of the cultural background that would have likely made it better. Unfortunately for me, this was not that kind of book. It's a very straightforward imagining of the end period of Jesus's life, including both his ministry and his death (many details of which were unfamiliar to me because I mostly did not pay attention in catechism). Where it is scandalous is that it suggests that Jesus wrestled very seriously with the temptation of rejecting his identity as the Messiah/a part of the Holy Trinity in favor of his identity as a man, living a life that would have included marriage and children and all of the normal, messy things about being a human. It's not that this is an idea that couldn't have been compelling. It's more that this book itself is really boring. While Jesus himself is of course drawn richly since his interiority is the point of the book, most of the apostles are flat and the female characters (the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene) are stereotyped and given little to do. I never really got drawn into it at any point and it felt like slogging through mud to get through it.