Take This Cup

I cannot save anything but what I can do is write about what I think and feel and the anguish of seeing a world that could already have resolved a large portion of its humanitarian problems, but which not only has not solved any, but which, in fact, aggravates many of them.... The Romans used to say that man is the wolf of mankind. What would they say were they alive today? 

José Saramago 

I have taken issue with the Gospels before – their inconsistencies, their confabulations, and their peculiar prejudices. Christianity is a religion of converts, which explains why so much is made of baptism and why some insist on being born again. Once convincing the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah had failed, the only way the first Christian leaders could keep their sect alive was by turning to converting the Gentiles – all manner of people in 1st century Palestine worshipping a panoply of gods. From that turning point, Christianity was on the road to becoming a world religion, whether that was part of the original plan or not. 

But the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem led directly to a horrific slaughter of infants whose numbers vary wildly, according to which source in consulted. An account of what was officially called “the massacre of the innocents” can be found in Matthew's Gospel. The significance of the event is reflected in its observance on December 28 as a holy day on the Roman Catholic calendar known as The Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. The actual number of infants killed by Herod’s soldiers is stated in a Syrian text to have been 64,000, while a Byzantine liturgy counted 14,000. Clearly, these numbers are absurdly exaggerated, and only begs the question of why they should have been. 

In an extraordinary novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,* the number arrived at was just twenty-seven. Among the arguments that Saramago presents in the novel is that Joseph, the husband of Mary, overhears a group of soldiers in Jerusalem who, under the orders of King Herod, are on their way to Bethlehem to find and kill every child under the age of three. What Joseph does with this intelligence seals his fate and that of his first son, Jesus. As an angel explains to Mary several years after the event, 

the carpenter could have done something, he could have warned the villagers that the soldiers were coming to kill their children when there was still time for parents to gather them up and escape, to hide in the wilderness, for example, or flee to Egypt and wait for Herod's death, which is fast approaching. 

Instead, Joseph tells no one, the children are killed, and he, Mary and Jesus escape to Nazareth unscathed. Thereafter Joseph is visited by a recurring dream in which he is one of Herod’s soldiers and is on his way to kill his own son. Years later, Joseph is captured by Roman soldiers under suspicion of participating in a rebellion and is crucified. By then 14 years old, Jesus leaves home and, on finding Joseph’s body, begins to have a recurring dream of his own in which Joseph is coming to kill him. 

Saramago’s account of Jesus’s maturity and of the miracles he performs loosely follows the commonly accepted chronology, except that Saramago introduces Jesus’s own skepticism of his fate. He introduces a character named Pastor to whom Jesus apprentices as a shepherd, despite his suspicion that Pastor is a demon. 

Then in the novel’s longest chapter, Jesus rows a fishing boat alone to the middle of the Sea of Galilee (which is actually a lake) when an impenetrable mist descends on it. When the mist clears around his boat, Jesus notices God sitting in the prow. After conversing with Him a short while, Jesus hears the sound of someone behind the mist swimming towards the boat. It is Pastor, and he climbs aboard the boat, sitting between Jesus and God. Pastor is, of course, the Devil, a former beloved angel whom God cast out of heaven. In a conversation both strange and humorous, God informs Jesus quite matter-of-factly of his future mission, that he is to announce to the Jews that he is His son and that he will be put to death for it – but that his sacrifice will attract even Gentiles to embrace God. Jesus asks him what will follow, and God gives him a macabre account of all those, including his current followers, who will meet violent deaths in His name. 

God sighed, and in the monotonous tone of one who chooses to suppress compassion He began a litany, in alphabetical order so as not to hurt any feelings about precedence and importance... 

God then launches into an appalling account of martyrdoms. After several dozen decapitations, eviscerations, bludgeonings and stabbings, 

have you had enough, God asked Jesus, who retorted, That's something You should ask Yourself, go on. So God continued... 

At the end of his list, and after relating to Jesus all of the wars to be waged, and seeing how appalled Jesus is, God says 

You are not to blame, your cause demands it. Father, take from me this cup. My power and your glory demand that you drink it to the last drop. I don't want the glory. But I want the power. 

Surprised by these glimpses of the future, Pastor makes a proposal to God.

I've been listening to all that has been said here in this boat, and although I myself have caught glimpses of the light and darkness ahead, I never realized that the light came from burning stakes and the darkness from great piles of bodies. It shouldn't trouble me, for I am the devil, and the devil profits from death even more than You do, it goes without saying that hell is more crowded than heaven. No one knows better than You that the devil too has a heart. Today I use it by acknowledging Your power and wishing that it spread to the ends of the earth without the need of so much death, and since You insist that whatever thwarts and denies You comes from the evil I represent and govern in this world, I propose that You receive me into Your heavenly kingdom, my past offenses redeemed by those I will not commit in future, that You accept my obedience as in those happy days when I was one of Your chosen angels, Lucifer You called me, bearer of light, before my ambition to become Your equal consumed my soul and made me rebel against You... if You grant me that same pardon You will one day promise left and right, then evil will cease, Your son will not have to die, and Your kingdom will extend beyond the land of the Hebrews to embrace the whole globe, good will prevail everywhere, and I shall stand among the lowliest of the angels who have remained faithful, more faithful than all of them now that I have repented, and I shall sing Your praises, everything will end as if it had never been, everything will become what it should always have been. 

But God selfishly refuses Pastor’s proposal. 

I neither accept nor pardon you, I much prefer you as you are, and were it possible, I'd have you be even worse. Because the good I represent cannot exist without the evil you represent, if you were to end, so would I, unless the devil is the devil, God cannot be God. 

“Is that Your final word,” Pastor asks. “My first and last, first because that was the first time I said it, last because I have no intention of repeating it.” Pastor shrugged and said to Jesus, Never let it be said the devil didn't tempt God.” 

So Jesus rows back to the shore only to find out from his followers that he has been on the lake forty days. Jesus goes through with God’s plan and the story ends as it always has - except that, instead of Jesus saying "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do", as he is dying, he says "Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what he has done." 

The narrator of the novel is both knowing and unknowing, modern and ancient. He even intrudes at one point with a postmodernist editorial: 

When critics discuss the rules of effective narration, they insist that important encounters, in fiction as in life, be interspersed with others of no importance, so that the hero of the story does not find himself transformed into an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens. They argue that this narrative approach best serves the ever desirable effect of verisimilitude, for if the episode imagined and described is not, and is not likely to become or supplant, factual reality, there must at least be some similitude. 

The novel, which is one of the most powerful indictments of Western history in what is now called the Common Era (C.E), but used to be Annis Domini (A.D.), is filled with the breathing details of a story that is at once all-too-familiar and exceedingly strange. When Joseph is visited by his dream for the first time, hiding in the cave where Mary had given birth to Jesus, from Herod’s soldiers, he fearfully awakes: 

Yet the night, calm and remote from all living creatures, showed that supreme indifference which we associate with the universe, or that other absolute indifference, the indifference of emptiness, which will remain, if there is such a thing as emptiness, when all has been fulfilled. The night ignored the meaning and rational order that appear to govern the world in those moments when we can still believe the world was made to harbor us and our insanity. 

*O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, 1991. English translation by Giovanni Pontiero, New York: Mariner Books, 1994.