Resumen

Abstract

A reading of José Saramago’s novel O Evanghelo segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel according to Jesus Christ) in view of ancient biblically themed Jewish and Christian texts which have been excluded from the canons of the Hebrew, Protestant and Catholic Scriptures reveals a high level of what can be designated inverse intertextuality. In order to reconstruct of the life of Jesus, Saramago appropriates episodes, characters, and symbols from the Bible itself as well as from those ancient apocrypha and transforms them such that they often acquire a significance opposite to the one given them in their source texts. In this way, Saramago performs a particularly bold and personal type of exegesis which serves to overturn or dismantle certain assumptions considered essential by the Biblical tradition. Likewise, the novelist employs a series of literary and hermeneutical techniques akin to those used in ancient apochryphal texts. As in a Hebrew midrash, Saramago retells a sacred story from a different perspective, in this case that of the weak and underprivileged. Similarly, the Jewish technique of derash is echoed in his desire to fill in the gaps left unexplained in the canonical Gospels. A detailed analysis of the main characters and of recurring symbols in the novel brings to light a systematic, if at times subtle, glorification of the small and the powerless as points of resistance against those mighty forces that wish to dominate and silence them. At the center of this struggle stands a profoundly human Jesus who searches fruitlessly for answers to some of the fundamental questions that continue to plague humanity: Why did evil and pain come into the world? Why does God punish human beings? Why must man be tormented by the anguish of guilt?