The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991)

I can't help but compare this book with my favorite Saramago book, "Blindness". They are so different in many ways. "Blindness" has its anonymity, "The Gospel..." has God and Jesus. As a Catholic, I know God and Jesus like I know my mother and father. I grew up hearing stories about Jesus. Reading "The Gospel" was a challenge for me because it was a different story I've heard and I can't help but feel guilty reading it. Saramago can be persuasive and if your faith does not have a good foundation then you'll probably be an atheist after. It was written so well that you can't help but believe it. However, it might be written so well but I think it still lacks emotion/feeling which "Blindness" has. I thought i would at least feel some deep emotions because its about Jesus but all I felt was remorse that the book ended the way it did. Saramago took his time with this book then suddenly the ending felt too hurried. He just wanted Jesus to die. He has given more thought on Joseph's death than on Jesus'. Overall, it felt biased and maybe it is since the book it suppose to be about the humanness of Jesus but still, I felt uncomfortable about it. its up to you if you want to read it or not because this is a book that has no limit which is both good and bad. ( )

Wonderful, wonderful book. I barely noticed when the story diverged from orthodoxy. It created a new, beautiful gospel. ( )

The reviews of 1998 Noble Prize winner Jose Saramago’s brilliant book on Amazon and elsewhere have generally been quite comprehensive, very well written, and informative. Therefore I will not delve again into the aspects of the novel that they discussed, such as the book’s plot; whether it is irreverent or blasphemous, as his native Portugal government claimed; the portrayal of Joseph, Jesus’ natural father, as an unintelligent, non-expert carpenter who committed an enormous crime for which he was crucified and whose sin was passed on to his son Jesus; his frequent exaggerated and satirical depictions of ancient Jews as primitives; and the author’s unique writing style. I will address two points: Saramago’s deep understanding of Jewish history, customs, laws, and sensitivities, and his mocking humor. I know something about Jewish life, having written some dozen commentaries on the Bible that refer to ancient practices.

Saramago knows the Jewish culture well. He refers to different aspects of it often, although not always correctly, for Nazarites, for example, are not non-Levitical priests, as he writes. This is the second novel of his that I read, the first being “Cain,” and I found that he displayed his knowledge about ancient Judaism, the Bible, talmudic, midrashic, and legal literature in both books. However, readers need to know that he mentions these matters briefly and subtly. He knows that most people don’t know what he knows; so if he dwells on esoteric subjects over much, he will bewilder, bore, and even anger his readers. In most incidences, he distorts and thereby mocks these Jewish references in both books. I’ll give one example from this book.

Some ancient Jews developed a prayer that male Jews should say in the morning: “Blessed are you Lord, the God who is king of the universe, who did not make me a woman.” The prayer apparently intended to say, thank you God who gave me as a male more of your commands to observe than you gave to women to observe. Despite good intentions, this prayer outraged women and men who sensitively realized that the prayer insults women; for it is as if the man is saying, thank you God for not making me into this subhuman creature. Another problem is that women who want to pray are unable to say this prayer. After some years, rabbis invented a substitute prayer for women: “Blessed are you Lord, the God who is king of the universe, who created me as you wanted.”

Saramago mocks this unfortunate history and the two prayers. He describes the terrible condition of women during the beginning of the Common Era. Then he portrays Joseph having intercourse with a passive Mary. Joseph does so with insensitivity, without consideration for her feelings, almost like rape. He finishes, roles off his wife in ecstasy, says nothing to Mary, and almost howls like a rooster as he thanks God for what he has just experienced by reciting, “Blessed are you Lord, the God of the universe, who did not make me a woman.” Submissive Mary accepts her role as a passive participant by saying, “Blessed are you God who is king of the universe, who created me as you wanted.”

This portrayal will insult, horrify, and appall many, but not all Christians, Jews, and Muslims, but this is how the Portuguese Nobel Prize Winner Jose Saramago thinks and writes. ( )

The story has been written many times, and inspired many stories. Jose Saramago's is unique though. Here the antagonist is God, and Jesus is the unwilling accomplice. God is portrayed as a clever megalomania who wants to propagate his influence outside the Jewish community, to the whole world. Saramago's Satan, portrayed as a shepherd who looked like God, was even more likeable than his God. God made a covenant with his son, Jesus, who also had a human father, Joseph the carpenter, who in this story also died on the cross. He promised power and glory to Jesus, which would be given after his death, if he would die for God's cause. Not that Jesus had a choice in the matter. Like thousands of lambs led to slaughter in the Jewish Temple of that time, he did not have much say. Unwillingly he used the power God gave him to perform miracles and cure people. God told Jesus what would happen to his friends and future followers, all the horrible deaths and blood that would be sacrificed in his name after his death, as God's church propagate throughout the world. Reluctant Jesus tried to take matter in his own hands and trick God out of the covenant to save the world from all these horrible deaths.

It is a very engaging story, and a very interesting perspective (to treat God as the antagonist). It is doubly interesting to me. I was born and raised in the Catholic faith, but even though I've strayed far since then and formed my own thoughts about what religion and spirituality are, I still winced many times reading this story and unconsciously still consider the story rather blasphemic. The power of religious upbringing! No wonder Salman Rushdie received a lot of death threats.

The book is also very interesting in its style of writing. All the conversations are written without quotes, so the tones feel ( )

Saramago tackles the big one: I was expecting this to be a simple retelling of the gospel stories from a left-wing point of view, but it's actually a completely self-contained magic-realist novel, using some of the recorded incidents in the gospels to punctuate a story that has nothing to do with the conventional narrative of Christ's life. Saramago makes it explicit at several points in the story that it is a constructed narrative that has to fit in with our expectations of the ways stories work: we're meant to read it as a novel.
The story is set up as a savage satire of religion, in which the god of the Jews and his counterpart the devil are the joint villains of the piece; Jesus is the man who finds himself cast as the innocent pawn in their plan for world domination. By separating himself completely from the conventional story, and substantially simplifying the moral situation, Saramago frees himself to develop his characters - in particular Joseph, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Jesus - as proper three-dimensional human beings with the full range of emotions, prejudices, doubts and certainties, and the satire is not allowed to undermine the book's status as a fully-developed, satisfying piece of fiction for the reader. Very clever.
Of course, it was written to provoke, but there's a lot more to it than schoolboyish shouting of dirty words in church. Saramago is challenging us to ask ourselves whether religious belief does ever do any real good in the world, other than to promote itself, and to think about how far it's possible to separate that from all the many bad things that have been done in the name of religion. ( )