The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
In 1998 the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jose Saramago, “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.”
His book The Gospel According to Jesus Christ has been described as “irreverent, profound, skeptical, funny, heretical, deeply philosophical, provocative and compelling.“ In the novel, Joseph overheard a soldier talking about Herod’s plan to slaughter the infant boys of Bethlehem (rather than learning it from an angel, as in the gospels). Joseph acted in stealth to save his own son, but did nothing to avert the general carnage. Guilt plagued him for the remainder of his life, as Saramago works out his astonishment at Joseph’s chosen course of action.
Written in Portugese under the title O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, it is available to English-speakers in translation.