The Work
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo) was published by Caminho (Lisbon) in 1991. It was translated into English by Giovanni Pontiero and published by Harcourt Brace in 1994. The novel is approximately 377 pages. It was nominated for the European Literary Prize by the Portuguese government in 1992, but the nomination was withdrawn by the government's Council of Ministers following pressure from Catholic groups who found the novel blasphemous - an act of state censorship that caused Saramago to go into voluntary exile in Lanzarote, where he lived until his death in 2010.
The novel contributed significantly to the international recognition that led to Saramago's Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998, where the Swedish Academy described him as a writer 'who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.'
Biblical Engagement
The novel systematically rewrites the four Gospels and their surrounding traditions from a materialist, humanist, anti-clerical perspective. It engages the biblical text with detailed knowledge - Saramago clearly read the Gospels carefully - but inverts or challenges their theological claims at nearly every point.
Matthew 2:16 (the Massacre of the Innocents) is the novel's darkest transformation. Saramago elaborates the scene of Herod's slaughter of children into a haunting act of collective guilt: Joseph, warned in a dream that Herod intends to kill male infants, saves only his own son Jesus and flees to Egypt without warning his neighbors. This act of self-serving silence makes Joseph (and through him, Jesus) complicit in the death of the other children. Jesus grows up haunted by the guilt of those deaths - a guilt that God ultimately refuses to lift.
John 1:14 ('And the Word was made flesh') is the theological claim the novel most directly contests. Saramago's Jesus is not the incarnate divine Logos but a fully human figure trapped between an indifferent, power-hungry God and his own human compassion. The Johannine prologue's identification of Jesus with the creative Word is replaced by a Jesus who is the victim of divine manipulation.
Matthew 26:39 ('O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me') - Jesus's prayer in Gethsemane - is treated sympathetically: Saramago's Jesus genuinely does not want to die, and his resignation to death is not willing sacrifice but submission to a God whose plans he finds morally repugnant. In the novel's climactic scene, God reveals to Jesus the full extent of his plan - the centuries of religious violence and persecution that will be conducted in his name - and Jesus asks God to reconsider. God refuses.
The devil (O Pastor, 'The Shepherd') appears as a sympathetic figure in the novel - a companion to Jesus who offers a genuinely kinder alternative to God's sovereignty. This Manichean inversion is Saramago's most deliberately provocative theological move: the novel suggests that a God who would use innocent suffering as an instrument of institutional power is morally inferior to the being who refuses to serve that power.
Author and Context
José Saramago (1922-2010) was born in Azinhaga, Portugal, the son of rural laborers. He was largely self-educated; his family could not afford to send him to secondary school. He worked as a car mechanic, social worker, translator, and journalist before publishing his first significant novel, Levantado do Chão, in 1980. He was a lifelong member of the Portuguese Communist Party - a commitment he maintained even after the fall of the Soviet Union - and his atheist, materialist worldview shapes all his major works.
Saramago's engagement with biblical texts is paradoxical: he is among the most knowledgeable of biblical atheists, reading the Gospels carefully enough to exploit their tensions, inconsistencies, and disturbing implications with great precision. His other major engagement with religious narrative is Cain (2009), a retelling of Genesis from Cain's perspective as a victim of divine arbitrariness.
Structure and Argument
The novel follows Jesus from before his birth - including a striking opening meditation on the Annunciation through the perspective of Joachim and Anna - through his childhood in Nazareth, his encounter with a shepherd who is gradually revealed to be the devil, his relationship with Mary Magdalene (depicted as a loving partner), his ministry and miracles, and his crucifixion. The narrative is written in Saramago's characteristic style: long, minimally punctuated paragraphs, an ironic narrator, and a prose that moves between tenderness and savage wit.
The novel's theological argument is built around the problem of divine violence and complicity. If God chose Jesus for his purposes knowing that those purposes would lead to centuries of religious persecution and war, then the innocent suffering of Jesus is instrumentalized - used as a means to a divine end that benefits God's institutional power more than humanity. Saramago presents this as a reductio ad absurdum of the Christian narrative of willing sacrifice: Jesus's willingness to die is not genuine freedom but manipulation.
Critical Reception
In Portugal, the novel was immediately controversial, generating both critical admiration and sustained religious offense. The government's withdrawal of the European Prize nomination was widely condemned by European intellectuals as censorship and helped make the book internationally known. Outside Portugal, critical reception was largely positive, with reviewers admiring Saramago's formal gifts and his willingness to engage seriously with the Gospel narrative.
Christian critics raised legitimate objections: the novel's God is a straw man whose power-hunger is asserted rather than argued; the sympathetic devil depends on a Manichaean dualism that most sophisticated Christian theology rejects; and the novel's Jesus is more interesting as a human figure but less coherent as a theological claim. Saramago's defenders argue that these objections miss the point - the novel is not theology but a parable about the relationship between religion and institutional power.
Theological Significance
Despite Saramago's atheism, the novel has significance for theology as a document of the secular humanist challenge to Christian claims. Its central argument - that a God who uses innocent suffering as an instrument of institutional expansion is morally problematic - is not easily dismissed. The history of religious violence conducted in Jesus's name is real, and the question of whether that violence implicates the God who set the narrative in motion is a genuine theological question.
The novel also demonstrates the enduring power of the Gospel narratives to generate new interpretations even from radically hostile readers. Saramago's careful reading of the Gospels - his exploitation of Matthew's silence about Joseph's warning, his attention to the Gethsemane prayer's genuine anguish - shows that the biblical texts resist simple devotional appropriation and contain within themselves the seeds of the critique he develops.
Legacy
The novel, along with Saramago's Cain (2009), is athe most significant engagement with biblical narrative by a major twentieth-century atheist novelist. It has been widely taught in courses on religion and literature as a representative of the secular humanist critique of Christianity and as evidence of the continuing cultural power of the Gospel narratives.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study the four Gospels' nativity narratives (Matthew 1-2, Luke 1-2), the Gethsemane scene (Matthew 26:36-46, Luke 22:39-46), the passion narratives in all four Gospels, and John 1:1-18 (the theological claim about the Word made flesh that the novel most directly challenges). The Book of Job provides Old Testament background for the novel's theology of divine arbitrariness.
Further Reading
- Giovanni Pontiero, The World of José Saramago (1993) - an introductory study of Saramago's narrative method by the novel's English translator. - Teresa Pais, Saramago: A Theological Study (2005) - a detailed engagement with the novel's implicit theology from a Catholic perspective. - Harold Bloom, ed., José Saramago (Chelsea House, 2005) - collects major critical essays, including theological perspectives.