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The Gospel According To Jesus Christ Analysis

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Jose Saramago, in his novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, is purposely misrepresenting the story of Jesus Christ, to teach us about the violence and danger inherent in religion. His message that religion is inherently a force for evil, is discerned through careful analysis in one of the last scenes of the novel.
The scene begins when Jesus meets God face to face for the first time in the novel. He finds God to be “a big man, elderly, a great flowing beard over His chest, head uncovered, hair hanging loose, [with] a broad and powerful face”.(Saramago, 609 iBooks) The astonishing part about this scene is that God and Satan look identical apart from the beard. This suggests that the distinction between God (religion) as a force for good and the Devil ( a force for evil) is negligible.
Then, Jesus receives prophecy about the coming of Christianity. With that prophecy comes the history of death and destruction that accompanied it. He saw the coming of the crusades, the “necessary evil’ of the inquisition, and the endless bloodshed. (Saramago, 656) In vivid imagery God describes to him the bloodshed that is to come in particular “corpses will blot out the sun, human flesh will sizzle over live coals, the stench will be nauseating.” (Saramago, 658) Jesus astonished and somber responds, “And all this is my fault.” God replies “You are not to blame, your cause demands it”. (Saramago, 658)
Jesus upon hearing this prophecy, comes to the understanding that inherent in religion

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