The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

In my Arts Review class, we’ve spent a lot of time reading about and discussing the question: “What is art?” While I think the whole debate is about as useful as shooting yourself in the foot, I did come across one definition that I enjoyed. Art, this person (who I can’t be bothered to recall the name of) said, is an artist’s expression that is so uniquely and specifically their own.

If we use this as a guideline, Jose Saramago is one of the great artists of our time. That gold-leaf “Nobel Prize Winner” stamp on all his book covers seem to back this up. His style is truly inimitable. Just the look of the text on the page is unlike anything else I’ve seen. For one thing, there are no quotation marks of any sort. Just words, periods, commas, and maybe an em dash once in a blue moon. Paragraphs will run for four, five pages, and in total there can’t be more than 200 paragraphs in the book.

Just by looking at the book, you’d be tempted to call it stream of consciousness writing. You’d be wrong. It’s true, that if you took all 377 pages and laid them out, top to bottom, you’d have a dense river of unbroken black text stretching about 220 feet; but Saramago never penetrates his character’s consciousnesses. There are no internal monologues, just classic storytelling from a distance, provided by an original narrator.

This narrator is the novel’s greatest strength. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is essentially fan fiction, a retelling of Jesus’s life by somebody who didn’t “create the IP”, if you’ll forgive the term. What’s delightful about Gospel’s narrator is the fact that it’s Saramago himself: an old, wry, possibly atheist, modern Portuguese man. After spending 400 pages in his company, it feels natural to call him Jose. He’s a deft guide through the tale, and takes plenty of asides to address the readers or point out the ironies as he relates the action. It might be distracting from a lesser writer, but Jose’s observations are so on point it’s uncanny.

Jose also has his own take on Jesus’s life. Like with any satire, it helps to be familiar with the source material. In this case, I’m pretty ignorant, so some of the “inside jokes” went over my head. But the stuff that I was familiar with, and knew was being recast, really impressed me - if you check out the book, you’ll know what I mean when you get to Judas Iscariot.

Like I said, I don’t know much about this stuff, having never read The Bible. So I started drawing comparison between Gospel and some other similar works. The Passion of the Christ came to mind immediately, just because the two are so very different. Gibson’s Christianity is masochistic, flagellant - you can almost feel the joy he takes from showing Jesus Christ getting the Christ beaten out of him. Saramago’s take is infinitely more human and infinitely more engaging. Jesus is not punching bag - he’s a man, and instead of focusing on The Passion (which only receives two or three pages of description), he gives us the entire span of Jesus’s existence. And even then, it’s Joseph who dominates the first part of the book.

The book starts off strange. Saramago realistically portrays a society two thousand years old, and it’s jarring at first. The squalor that Mary and Joseph live in, the starkness of their existence. It is so far removed from our frame of reference as to seem alien. We spend the first 50 or so pages getting ground in the culture and customs of the time - the frequent thanksgivings, the outrageous misogyny - and then it fades into the background, the scene established. Before it does, we see Joseph moving through this world, his visits to Jerusalem, etc.

Jesus is born a cave, with the manger and everything. By the way, I clarified my definition of manger to: “trough to feed livestock from”. I think my prior definition was “place to put baby Jesus”. Since Jesus is in a cave and not the town proper, he’s lucky enough to avoid The Massacre of Innocents. Unfortunately, his father Joseph could have done something to prevent the slaughter, and is from there on out a marked man. When Joseph meets his end, I was taken aback. Here we were, happily following along this carpenter, and then he’s crucified, all of a sudden.

But I suppose you have to throw the narrative over to the title character at some point. Jesus’s disputes with his family and subsequent maturation is awesome to read, and here the story transforms a bit. The narrative voice takes front stage, as seen here:

“When critics discuss the rules of effective narration, they insist that important encounters, in fiction as in life, be interspersed with others of no importance, so that the hero of the story does not find himself transformed into an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens… The woman carrying a child in her arms, whom we deliberately planted there to fill in the story, had not been license enough.”

I suppose your enjoyment of this kind of thing will be directly proportional to your enjoyment of metafiction - but I found myself smiling at a lot of it.

Another element I was pleased with was Saramago’s portrayal of the Devil. This was my big complaint with The Testament of Gideon Mack. First off, Saramago’s Devil actually goes by Pastor, and by the end of the book he’s a far more sympathetic character than God. He tends to the largest flock of sheep and goats in all of Israel, and he never kills one of his flock unless it’s sick and ailing. He sells no paschal lambs, and turns no profits. He just wanders with the flock, subsisting on their milk and cheese, and living out in the open. Jesus learns plenty from Pastor, though he is eventually expelled and told that “[he] has learned nothing”. This is probably why the book generated so much controversy and is described as irreverent - God’s a total dick, and Satan is the only one who gives a damn about man’s problems.

Like I said earlier, a lot of the the book’s enjoyment comes from the perceptual twists Saramago puts into Jesus’s story. Lazaraus’s death is easily the most poignant moment in the whole book, and Judas’s is a close second. Pontius Pilate’s sentencing of Jesus takes on a whole new light, and even the crucifixion has a different meaning. And it’s all so much richer than the official dogma.

More to say, but it took me 3 weeks to finish this one, and I’ve got to get moving on Only Revolutions.
Another review of the book, this one focused on plot.