Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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73 of 77 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Little Healthy Skepticism, September 1, 2003
The Gospel According to Jesus ChristLet's get this warning written upfront first...if you are a born again Christian or in any other way easily offended by an unorthodox and even blasphemous portrait of one of the most revered and worshiped figures in human history, skip this book entirely. Saramago is not exactly an atheist, but he is a skeptic, and this is a skeptic's look at the Gospels. Saramago plays fast and loose with the canonical Gospel accounts of the life of Christ to create something very different than the comfortable picture of Christ most of us have grown up with. And to my mind, the questions that Saramago raises in his book are good ones, ones that every sincere person of faith should ask. They are not questions that can break a strong faith, but they are ones that hone it and refine it. From the first glowing chapter of this book, I was hooked. Saramago begins the work with a poetic description of the traditional icon of Christ's crucifixion. But from that moment, he wanders far from the Gospel accounts. The first half of the book concerns the events of Christ's birth and boyhood. Joseph, by not warning the citizens of Bethlehem of the murder of the innocents, incurs a bloodguilt that he cannot absolve except by his own mistaken death on the cross years later. This death of his earthly father along with the accompanying sense of bloodguilt haunts the young Jesus and sends him off on a journey to find his own true purpose in life. He spends years as a shepherd apprentice with a man named Pastor who ultimately is the Devil. He meets and falls in love with Mary Magdelene, with whom he lives without the benefit of marriage. He discovers his amazing powers healing and miracle working long before he has any idea of how he is to use them. All through this section, familiar passages from the Gospels such as the calling of the disciples, the walking on the water, and the feeding of the five thousand are presented in unfamiliar guises. Finally, in the last chapter, all of the events of the canonical gospels are condensed into a searing climax. Saramago has a talent for grasping the logical contradictions in Christian faith, though he seems blind to the spiritual depth that lies behind these contradictions. Saramago senses the great paradox between the "all good" God and the need for the atonement of His Son. Saramago's portrait of God is almost a caricature. God is bombastic, greedy for worship and power, and ultimately vain. In many ways, Saramago's version of God resembles the Demiurge of the Gnostics or the Urizen of William Blake....a petty creator god who wants the whole deal for himself. And in Pastor, Saramago creates a devil who's biggest motivator is compassion for the plight of humanity. At times, these characters approach broad comedy. And yet, Saramago is skillful in his handling of language, so that even the most satirical moments have a bittersweet undertone. Throughout the novel, Saramago's prose is brilliant, approaching poetry. Yet it is simple and once you get past the idiosyncratic punctuation, the lines flow beautifully. For language alone, this novel is a wonderful read. Add to that the wealth of historical detail, vivid characterizations and searching questions and this is a novel that challenges the reader to think hard and respond deeply. Saramago's questions challenge Christians, but to my mind they don't break the faith. In fact, a faith that can't stand up to a little blasphemy is not much of a faith at all.
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47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A mind-blowing work of genius, June 6, 2003
"The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" is going to offend a lot of people and one can understand on reading it why it sent the Vatican into a terminal fit. Taken on its merits, it's an awesome work of scholarship by a writer with a deep knowledge of the life of Christ, Christian and Jewish theology and biblical literature. Saramago gives us a Christ that is all too fallible; he's human, after all, as well as divine; a Joseph whose sin of omission in saving his own child from Herod's assassins while failing to warn other parents of the imminent slaughter of the innocents was expiated by his own death on a cross that foreshadowed the death of his son; a Mary who doubted her son's divinity, and a Mary Magdalene who relieved Jesus of his virginity and remained totally faithful to him afterwards, bodily and spiritually, up to the end. Even more disturbing for some readers will be Saramago's depiction of God as a master manipulator, pulling the strings behind the scenes, needing the devil as a foil for his own glory because he knows that without the devil, his glory is diminished. What kind of God is this?
One can't help but wonder, while reading this book, what was Saramago trying to say to us? Is the book a testimony to his own cynicism and atheism, or does Saramago believe in God and Jesus Christ in spite of himself? Because his subject, Jesus as Man/God, comes out as eminently sympathetic, likeable, sometimes irritating, always fascinating; unlike the remote, other-worldly Jesus of Sunday school, Saramago's Jesus is someone we can relate to. And Saramago's God echoes the question all of us have asked from time to time -- how can a benevolent God create a world in which the innocent are allowed to suffer? It's Saramago's suggestion that perhaps God himself can't answer that one, that may disturb so many readers of this book.
Saramago's writing style has been called convoluted, but it wasn't difficult at all for this reader; his paragraphs may go on for pages, but he writes with a sweep and flow that wraps the reader up and carries him or her right along with the narrative. "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ" is totally enveloping; one turns the final page and emerges slightly dazed at having been through a reading experience that blows both the mind and the senses.
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Revelatory. Transcendent. Challenging. Unforgettable., September 23, 2002
I read Saramago's "Gospel" more than a month ago, and it continues to haunt my imagination. Pick it up. Scan the pages. You'll probably think this is a forbidding work, written in dense, often pages-long, paragraphs, with lengthy stretches of run-together dialogue uninterrupted by paragraph indentations or white space. But begin reading, and all hesitation melts away. The writing is stately, scriptural in diction, careful of every nuance. Saramago's original Portuguese, movingly translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero, creates a convincing "gospel voice"--rendered from an ambiguous, perhaps "omniscient," perspective-to portray Jesus of Nazareth in a startlingly new, and believable, way. And into this narrative Saramago adds credible, plausibly motivated, portraits of Joseph, Mary, James "the Brother of Jesus," as well as of both the Deity and the Demon. And, of course, Mary of Magdala.What could a Portuguese atheist (and, perhaps less relevantly, Communist) have to say about the life of Jesus? Don't presume a thing. Simply read, slowly. What will first be apparent is that Saramago respects your intelligence and the sources, and he has done his homework in speculating on how the historical gaps might be filled in: he knows the New Testament, has studied the "Gnostic Gospels" of NT apocrypha, has read his Josephus and other near-contemporary accounts of the "Jewish Wars" and first-century Palestine, and seems familiar with the scholarly Jesus Seminar findings. You will then note the expected traces of irony--sometimes fired from unexpected directions--but here deployed surprisingly to draw out the humanity of Jesus's nature and, in my view, to lure the reader into an early misreading of the author's intent. Indeed, the spell Saramago creates throughout the novel's first half issues from what seems a predictably humanistic, psychological point of view. That changes. But I don't feel I can say any more about the direction Saramago takes his story without spoiling for others what was for me a surprising and thrilling narrative transformation, with a string of unexpected, powerful payoffs. Nor can I pretend to say with any confidence that I know which readers Saramago's novel will appeal to most. Each will find Saramago's telling of the Jesus story challenging in his or her own way. What I can do, though, is encourage you-if Saramago's stature as a Nobel laureate is insufficiently encouraging-to keep an open mind, read the book, and ponder the philosophical and theological questions raised in an unforgettable work of literary art.
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