Playboy Jesus!

Jose Saramago, Portugal’s Nobel laureate (literature) died last month. Due to controversies surrounding the censorship of his work, he had moved from his home country to the Canary Islands.

Saramago was notorious for O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ) , depicting a passionate personality full of doubt and flaws. The story uses the framework already set out by the Biblical gospels, but goes into detail regarding the earlier years of Jesus’ life.

At one point in the tale he becomes apprenticed to a shepherd who gives him a lesson in hedonism. Sheep are viewed as a sexual outlet, and Jesus is encouraged to make use of this. God is shown to be petty and jealous, (not unlike His Old Testament persona) and dissatisfied with being supreme deity over just one set of people. The novel concludes with Jesus’ realizing that God’s plan, and the ensuing centuries of torture, slaughter, and misery that Christianity will bring, will proceed despite his efforts. His last words from the cross are “Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what He has done.” (Wikipedia article )

Naturally his iconoclasm was unappreciated by the Catholic church, who accused him of possessing a “substantially anti-religious vision.”

He managed to piss off the Jews as well, in effect stating that they play the self-pitying “Holocaust card” to trump any assertions that they themselves are behaving in a racist or exclusionary manner. He calls them out on the racial hubris of claiming to be a “chosen people”, basically stating that he is just sick of their collective whining about how their suffering is/was worse than anyone else’s- especially the Palestinians. But I am not a Nobel laureate- here is a rant in his own words:

“Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted ‘certitude’ that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, Jews will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner.” From a Madrid newspaper El País (as translated by Paul Berman in The Forward) on April 21, 2002

So what does this radical freethinking literary genius have to do with Playboy?

In his honor, the Portugese incarnation of the magazine has done a photo spread of Jesus (well, a dude who looks a lot like him) cavorting with topless women. While it is true that Jesus did minister to harlots and adulteresses, would it to be wrong to wish they’d gotten Johnny Depp to pose as Jesus?