Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Tr. Sp-Eng. from a review in Shvoong

 Long before Dan Brown used the idea of an earthly Jesus Christ to manufacture the product of consumption we all know, José Saramago, the Portuguese writer laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, had dabbled in the 1st century Judea and Galilee to offer a conjectural version of basic events of Christianity. Saramago admits to being atheist, but as to all the atheists the religious phenomenon, the ability to believe, fascinates him. That's why he wrote this Gospel for those who do not believe, perhaps because Jesus did not believe much in what was happening to him either, or as Nikos Kazantzakis said in Christ Last Temptation, because the cross he had to endure during his life was infinitely heavier than the one loaded in the Way of the Cross. Why did you choose me, why am I here? 

 To face this novel, Saramago chose a fleshly Jesus, a Jesus who shared daily reality with characters who surrounded him in life, or very similar to these people. A Jesus lacking myth and as strong and weak as any. Was it not a man the one who fell to Earth? What real suffering had Jesus to endure if he had been God himself, omnipotent and absolute? The facts in Saramago's Gospel are the same and are different. Joseph, the father, was a carpenter who was crucified at the age of thirty-three.

 Mary Magdalene, an older woman who besides love gives him maturity and temperance, virtues that seem not to abound in the Portuguese writer's Jesus. Judas Iscariot, as in so many other interpretations of the Apostolic figures, is a rebel and not a traitor, more of an operator of inscrutable designs than a meaner and devious character willing to benefit from a few money. Mary, the mother, in short, is an eclipsing figure as the child progresses towards his destiny. 

 If books must be measured by the distance between what they set out to achieve and what they, in effect, got, it corresponds to The Gospel According to Jesus Christ a privileged place in the history of literature. Saramago intended a carnal Jesus and a carnal Jesus we receive. Perhaps it is appropriate an objection to form: those peculiarities of punctuation, from my perspective, do not add anything and obligate, however, to an additional effort by the reader. But it's a minor objection you can rather ignore based on the final outcome.

 A review by Sergio Gaut vel Hartman 

and then we were one, 
the cross just the original axis
through which cosmic information
flows once again clean,
no blood at all, no blame,
ready to expand itself
through knowledge, our choice,
once again the wrong perception 
cleansed after the last sacrifice
of an embodied solar-christic cluster
Each one that cosmic channel