The Gospel According To Jesus Christ
- José Saramago
- Harvill (first published 1999)
You can imagine the sort of outraged comments this book will have provoked from many zealous Christians. If online bookseller Amazon certainly intended customer reviews to help sell books, there’s a danger here of their pages turning into a forum for religious debate. “The Bible storyline is flagrantly ignored, replaced, changed, and enlarged,” spits one reviewer at the American website, “with Jesus, instead of being the ‘perfect sacrifice’, being a pretty good guy who falls into sin just as easily as your or I”. The same reviewer later adds, “If the gospel is true, and I believe it is 100% true, we had all better be deadly serious about what it says.”
Those who have read more of Saramago will know that ‘deadly serious’ is a state into which the author never allows himself to transgress. It must be said, however, that he is frequently less playful in The Gospel According To Jesus Christ than in others of his works, signalling that he may well be mindful of the paths he treads here.
Indeed Saramago shows himself to have a detailed knowledge of the synoptic gospels, the geopolitics of the period and even an appreciation of the social mores. Whilst his rendering of the biblical world offers up cruelty, hardships and instability, this never obscures its immediacy for the reader.
Before I set out into the author’s desert, in the midst of which he reminds us we may all speak freely, I expected to encounter blasphemies through the course of some sort of alternative narrative of Jesus Christ’s life. In this way, the novel’s path would bear comparison with those already fashioned by Norman Mailer or Nikos Kazantzakis.
What surprised me instead was how Saramago actually more or less stuck to the original plot of the gospels. There are a few fascinating deviations, most of which serve to emphasise Jesus’ humanity, but in general the preference is for biblical course of events.
Saramago presents his most studied profanations in Jesus’ dealings with God and the Devil. In the novel’s climax, all three can be found together in a sort of holy council. For the author, God is an implacable, almost arrogant God who acknowledges and downplays the existence of other deities, treats humanity with harsh indifference and seeks only His Own Greatness. The devil, conversely, comes across as a reasonable sort of figure who recognises the implicit necessity of his own existence in order to maintain the status of the Other.
Ultimately, however, the success of the novel is to be found in the marvellous illustration of human relationships, moulded by the conditions and circumstances of the times. Even if Saramago tends to zigzag rather wildly between “authorised” history and dramatic invention when the story accelerates in the third act, you have to admire his steady handling of family and guilt issues earlier on.
