The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Friday, April 7th, 2006 @ 22:09
by José Saramago (1991)
Here’s a gospel where Jesus is a very common human being without a priori divinity if confused, pessimistic and guilt-ridden, an unwilling “restive lamb that resists being taken to be sacrificed, becomes agitated and bleats in the most heart-rending manner” to his sealed destiny. In a manner of the Anti-Hero, he is unsure of himself, plagued with nightmares and guilt passed down by his deceased father, aghast at the power he chanelled and at the inescapable covenant with this power-hungry, indifferent God.
The book opens with a woodcut illustration of the crucifixion, the narrator analytically dissecting the characters and symbols not without mocking witticism and second-guessings of the readers’ thoughts (characteristics of Saramago’s narration). From there we’re brought to meet pious Joseph and Mary as a young, common poor married couple, and the angel comes in the form of a dubious beggar.
The central theme of unpardonable sin, of guilt, begins with the killings of the 25 babies in Betlehem, whose plan Joseph overhears spoken by Roman soldiers (one later revealed to be an angel). In his haste and panic, Joseph rushes to save Mary and Jesus, but this recklessness, as inevitable as the deaths as they’ve been “decreed in heaven”, will be his unpardonable crime and guilt that will forever haunt Joseph until the moment of his death. He is crucified at the age of 33, falsely accused as a rebel, when he’s just trying to rescue a dying neighbour.
Thus begins Jesus’ questioning of his destiny, of the mysteries of his birth, the slaughtered innocent babies, and the plan God has for him. He meets an elusive shepherd (who calls himself as Pastor) and follows him, even if he’s bewildered by Pastor’s spiritual apathy. During Passover, however, Jesus, at the last minute, can’t bring himself to sacrifice the lamb given to him. In the end, however, it is sacrificed as a sheep to seal a covenant between God and Jesus: because God will take what is stolen from Him. For this, Pastor dismisses him, “You’ve learned nothing, be gone with you.”
Jesus wanders back to his home, meets Mary Magdalene, a prostitute, and learns of “carnal knowledge”, both trusting and loving each other more than anyone else. Rejected and not believed by his family, together they settle near a coast where Jesus, fully realising that it’s God’s powers, works out miracles (starting from catching full net of fish where he instructs the fishermen to cast, calming down the weather, turning water into wine, etc.) and naturally, attracts many bewildered people.
And then comes the final meeting with God, and the Devil (who turns out to be — surprise, surprise — Pastor). God reveals his power-hungry plan of, and Jesus’ pivotal role in, the creation of the Church that “will be founded by you or in your name, which basically comes to the same thing . . . but in order to be truly solid, its foundations will be dug out in flesh, and the bases made from the cement of abnegation, tears, suffering, torment, every conceivable form of death known or as yet unrevealed” because a worship by “a tiny population which occupies a minute part of this world” is “a depressing sight”, too paltry to satisfy God.
Pastor (or Satan, Lucifer, Devil) apathetically goes along, saying almost nothing, though at the end he attempted a proposal, the “temptations” of the Devil (which, needless to say, God rejects):
No one knows better than You that the Devil also has a heart . . . Today I intend to use it by acknowleging and hoping that Your power will spread to the ends of the earth without any further need of so many deaths, and since You insist that anything which thwarts and denies You is the fruit of the Evil I represent and govern in this world, I propose that You should receive me into Your Heavenly Kingdom, my past offences redeemed by those I shall not commit in the future, that You accept and preserve my obedience as in those happy days when I was one of Your chosen angels, Lucifer, You called me, the bearer of light, before my ambition to become Your equal consumed my sould and made me rebel against Your authority . . . Because if You were to do so and grant me that same pardon which one day You will promise so readily right and left, then Evil will ceasae at once, Your son will not have to die, and Your Kingdom will extend beyond the land of the Hebrews to embrace the entire world, whether known or yet to be discovered, Good will prevail everywhere and I shall sing amongst the lowliest of the angels who have remained faithful, more faithful than all of them now that I have repented, shall sing Your praises, all will end as if it had never been, all will start to become what it should always have been, I’ve always known you have a talent for confusing and losing souls, but I have never heard you make such a speech with such conviction and eloquence, you’ve almost won Me over, So You won’t accept or pardon me, No, I neither accept nor pardon you, I much prefer you as you are and, were it possible, I’d prefer you to become even worse than you are, But why, Because the Good I represent cannot exist without the Evil you represent, it is inconceivable that any Good might exist without you, so much so that it defies imagination and, in short, if you were to come to an end, so would I, for Me to be Goodness, it is essential that you should continue to be Evil, unless the Devil lives like the Devil, God cannot live like God, the death of the one would mean the death of the other . . . Pastor shrugged his shoulders and addressed Jesus, Never let it be said the Devil didn’t tempt Jesus one day, . . .
With this knowledge and his power, along with the inevitability of his planned death, Jesus welcomes his own crucifixion, desperately as the last resort of rebellion to God’s plan, though in the end realising how futile it was, bringing to full circle the complete meaning of the last sentence of the first chapter:
One day, and forever more, this man will be much maligned and accused of having given Jesus vinegar out of spite and contempt when he asked for water, but if truth be told, he offered him vinegar and water because at that time it was one of the best ways of quenching thirst. The man walks away, does not wait for the end, he has done all he could to assuage the mortal thirst of the three condemned men, and made no distinction between Jesus and the Thieves, for the simple reason that these are things of this Earth which will persist on Earth, and from these things the only possible history will be written.
Those familiar with Saramago’s other books will recognise the characteristically friendly, very engaging world-wary storytelling narrator (the unconventional punctuations, lack of quotation marks, page-long sentences and stretched out paragraphs, etc.), but they will also find a hint of more bitter sadness and anger at the futility of it all. Saramago created a tightly-knitted story with strong interwoven relations. Like a lot of “alternative history” fictions, it offers you different, not improbable perspectives and possibilities. Those who enjoy the retelling the story of Jesus like Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew (Il Vangelo secondo Matteo) will likely love this. (Or if you’re into the whole recent Gospel of Judas news, though Borges’ Three Versions of Judas might be of more interest…)
April 12th, 2006 12:42
Ah ya saya pernah lihat buku saramago yang ini tapi ndak beli waktu itu. The Gospel of Judas? gimana dengan The Jesus Papers? (Michael Baigent is on the loose again, heh heh heh)
April 14th, 2006 12:32
[…] And since Easter is coming (and in the wake of Gospels of whoever…): The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, Bagram Ibatoulline (illustrator). Nice illustrations, (sub-)standard story. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago. Angsty Jesus. Imagine Jesus as Ikari Shinji, the Devil as Nagisa Kaoru. (If I made it sound bad, not at all. A Saramago’s is almost always worth reading.) […]