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Title: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0-15-600141-1 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: September, 1994 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.71 (59 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The atheist's bible
Comment: Jose Saramago's "The Gospel according to Jesus Christ" does not need any reviews. The author already has a Nobel prize for literature and, if what I heard last week from a well informed source is correct, the Vatican has put the book on its "no-no" list and the author was induced to move from conservative Portugal to more liberal Spain. Need any open-minded author (or reader) better recommendations? Certainly not. And it is much better reading than Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian" (which, more correctly, should have been "Why I am an atheist").
The "Gospel..." is a readable story and an esthetic, free-flowing, beautifully written parable on the life of J.C. which slowly but surely, first in between the lines and later with gradually increasing gusto, condemns theism totally and absolutely. This indeed has been done more efficiently before in "howlers" written by British schoolboys: "Faith is when you believe something you know is not true..." but for those inclined to read good books rather than howlers the "Gospel..." will do much better. Warmly recommended to Christians, Jews, Moslems and all other theists and non-theists (for that matter).
Rating: 5
Summary: A mind-blowing work of genius
Comment: "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 and caused Saramago's excommunication by the Church. 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 son; a Mary who doubted her son's divinity, and a Mary Magdalene who relieved Jesus of his virginity and remained totally faithfully 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fresh air
Comment: Your other reviewers don't get it.
Saramago is an atheist lefty who enjoys lambasting the preposterousness of the Jesus story but makes of his reworking of it a love story, fable of tyranny, exploration of the forces bringing a religion into being, and commentary on the barely human existence of the poor around 0 BCE, as well as (and much more so than) a bit of Christianity-knocking. The miracles are of the same stuff as Portugal drifting off to take a tour of the Atlantic in "The Stone Raft" or the whole world going blind in "Blindness", they are lightly-weighted metaphor, candid tricks (I the author can do this, and you can enjoy or hate it, as you please, if you enter this lengthy sentence I promise I will break many other rules but thoroughly entertain you with novel conflations of the great and the small, the dire and the hilarious, so as to challenge your perceptions of great, small, dire, etc).
To find this treatment of Jesus "blasphemous" is funny, we may be thankful that most of civilization finds blasphemy as quaint as Baal and other vicious antique gods, but it is also scary, America the secular state is still very much under attack, and freedom of-and from- religion are hardly assured. The Inquisition and the awful Hibernian royalty of Saramago's "Baltasar and Blimunda" are mocked by the author so that we laugh at the horrendous and ridiculous antics of tyrants and villainous monks that so appall us. In his Gospel "liberated" from Matthew, Mark and the other incriminants, Saramago loves his very fallible Jesus and all the Mary's, mocks and mourns everything from our credulity and slavery to religion to even our notion of what is funny, and has a heck of a good time doing it.
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Title: Blindness by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero ISBN: 0156007754 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Cave by Jose Saramago, Margaret Costa ISBN: 0156028794 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 15 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Baltasar and Blimunda by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero ISBN: 0156005204 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: All the Names by Jose Saramago, Margaret Costa ISBN: 0156010593 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 05 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Stone Raft by Jose Saramago ISBN: 0156004011 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 14 June, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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