The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ is a novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, published in 1991 under the original title O Evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo. Saramago, who would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, retells the life of Jesus using the episodes of the Gospels as a framework on which to build his own story. The book does not follow the chronology of the New Testament closely: it lingers far longer over the protagonist's early years, and above all over his conception and childhood, giving considerable weight to the figure of Joseph, the earthly father, whom the novel portrays as a man haunted by a guilt that marks him for life.

The story opens with Jesus's conception, in the spiritual presence of God, and his birth in Bethlehem is heralded by a mysterious figure who claims to be an angel. Herod, warned in dreams by the prophet Micah, orders the slaughter of the newborns. Joseph learns of the plan and rushes to save his son without warning the other families of the village, and that choice pursues him like a nightmare. When Jesus is already a teenager, Joseph is crucified by the Romans, who mistake him for a Zealot rebel. Jesus then inherits his father's nightmare, distances himself from Nazareth and his family, and embarks on a journey of learning that includes work with a shepherd whom the novel identifies with the devil, an encounter with God in the desert, and his later arrival at the Sea of Galilee, where he discovers an extraordinary talent for fishing and meets Mary Magdalene.

The philosophical core of the work comes when God and the devil appear to Jesus at sea. God sets out his plan: Jesus must found Christianity, because God wishes to cease being the god of a single people. Jesus resists a design he sees as selfish and bound to produce suffering, but comes to understand that he has no way out. He takes on the role of prophet, performs miracles and preaches, and ends up provoking his own arrest, hoping to thwart the divine design by concealing his divine nature. The novel closes with Jesus on the cross realizing that nothing has changed: God's plan will go forward, with the centuries of torture, slaughter and misery it will bring.

The book caused considerable controversy. Catholic sectors condemned it as blasphemous, and the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano accused Saramago of a substantially anti-religious vision. Other critics praised it as a deeply philosophical, provocative and compelling work. The Portuguese government of the time blocked its nomination for the European Literary Prize, and the episode led Saramago to leave Portugal and settle in Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands, where he spent his last years. Harold Bloom considered it imaginatively superior to any other life of Jesus, including the four canonical Gospels.