Holy Week is not only a religious celebration: above all, it is fertile ground for artistic imagination and the reinterpretation of great myths. The events narrated in the Bible during this period have spurred painters, sculptors, musicians, playwrights, architects, filmmakers, and writers. Some have remained faithful to the sacred book of the Catholic Church, while others have created their own versions, rewriting and enriching them with the most unpredictable element in any story: the spectrum of the human condition embodied in its protagonists.

This temptation has been succumbed to by figures ranging from Thomas Mann to Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, including Robert Graves, Oscar Wilde, Nikos Kazantzakis, Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Mailer, José Saramago, and Colm Tóibín.

Jesus, Mary, Judas, and Mary Magdalene are the four New Testament figures most frequently explored in literature, whose narratives explore the struggle between reason and faith or legend. Four of these demystifications or desacralizations that tell hidden truths about their lives have one thing in common: four kinds of love.

Mary, a mother’s rebellious love

An incredulous, stern, nostalgic, rebellious, skeptical, defiant, hurt, and tender Virgin Mary is the figure created by Colm Tóibín in one of the most daring and moving books about a biblical figure: The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín (Lumen). The Irish author creates a monologue for the mother of Jesus who, in one passage, cries out:

“If it is possible to turn water into wine and raise the dead, then I want time to turn back. I want to live again before my son died, or before he left home, when he was a baby and his father was alive and there was peace in the world. (…) All that is over. The boy became a man and left home and ended up as a dying figure hanging on a cross. I want to be able to imagine that what happened to him will not come to pass, that what happened to him will look at us and decide: not now, not to them. And that it will leave us in peace so that we may grow old”.

Colm Tóibín achieves a moving voice in a work that originated as a theatrical monologue. While the Irish author recreates the last days of a pagan virgin, the Spanish writer Gustavo Martín Garzo explores, in And the Sea Sleeps (Lumen), the possible childhood of a one-armed virgin.

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Jesus, the Resigned Love of the Son

If in The Testament of Mary the Virgin Mary renounces her life and the destiny imposed upon her and her son, he does the same in other literary works. The Son of God is haunted by feelings ranging from guilt to contempt because he knows he is being manipulated and struggles against the machinations that push him toward an imposed destiny. José Saramago recounts this in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Alfaguara).

The Portuguese Nobel laureate rewrites this story, especially that of his childhood. The human condition of a lack of solidarity appears from the moment Joseph learns that Herod has ordered the murder of all children under three. At that moment, instead of warning the others, he runs silently to his cave to save the “Son of God.” From there, the Portuguese writer creates a carpenter named Joseph, son of Heli, very human, restless, and consumed by remorse. The boy, like all children, will soon unleash a torrent of questions, and his encounters with angels and demons will bewilder him. Amidst these apparitions, there is a glimpse of the future: at 33, Joseph is crucified by mistake; his son finds him and inherits the nightmares of his father, an accomplice to murder. At 13, in a dialogue with his mother, Saramago writes:

“Jesus’s hands suddenly rose to his face as if to tear it apart, his voice burst forth in an irremediable cry, ‘My father killed the children of Bethlehem’. ‘What madness are you saying? Herod’s soldiers killed them’. ‘No, my father killed them, Joseph killed them, who, knowing the children were going to be killed, didn’t warn their parents, and when these words were spoken, all hope of consolation was lost. (…) Mary stretched out her hand to her son; ‘Don’t touch me, my soul is wounded’, ‘Jesus, my son’, ‘Don’t call me your son, you are also to blame”.

José Saramago portrays a Jesus who resists his destiny, who doesn’t like to think, who isn’t in control of his decisions. He knows he has been deceived. In the end, it is this child, betrayed by his God, who asks humanity to forgive that God because he didn’t know what he was doing.

In Spain, one of the latest authors to recreate the childhood of Jesus has been Ricardo Menéndez Salmón in Children in Time (Seix Barral), with a key chapter on the stolen childhood of Jesus.

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Judas, the Father’s Manipulated Love

One of the most enigmatic and fascinating figures in the Bible is Judas Iscariot. And hated by Christians. But the truth is that without him, or rather, thanks to him, Jesus is Jesus Christ. Without Judas, God’s word would not have been fulfilled; his betrayal served another. Jorge Luis Borges saw it. He understood it clearly. He recounted it in a marvelous story: Three Versions of Judas (Alianza). There he deciphers “a central mystery of theology.” At the beginning, Borges offers a clue: “Judas’s betrayal was not accidental; it was a predetermined act that has its mysterious place in the economy of redemption”. A few paragraphs later, the Argentinian author offers us a glimpse into the horizon of his theory:

“The Word, when it became flesh, passed from ubiquity to space, from eternity to history, from boundless bliss to mutation and death; to correspond to such a sacrifice, it was necessary that a man, representing all men, make a worthy sacrifice. Judas Iscariot was that man. Judas, unique among the apostles, intuited the secret divinity and the terrible purpose. The Word had humbled itself to become mortal; Judas, disciple of the Word, could humble himself to become a traitor and a guest of the unquenchable fire”.

And after nine mesmerizing pages, Borges concludes: “God fully became man, but man to the point of infamy, man to the point of reprobation and the abyss. To save us, he could have chosen any of the destinies woven into the perplexing web of history; he could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; he chose a lowly destiny: he was Judas”.

And that is Borges.

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Mary Magdalene, a woman’s vilified love

The relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus has all the elements of tragic, forbidden, sinful, and secret love. It’s well known that eternal love is the love that never was. And that’s the biblical version. But the literary version is something else entirely.

The Bible presents a human being, Jesus, devoid of the most wonderful thing and the impulse of everyday life: the trembling and the dream of love—love for another person, passion, desire… Love itself. Nikos Kazantzakis approached that shadow in The Last Temptation (Cátedra). The Greek narrator enters the lives of these hypothetical mortals to create an alternate history in which Jesus turns his back on God. He prefers earthly paradise with Mary Magdalene branded as a prostitute. He prefers the sleeplessness of imagining himself with someone, of loving and feeling loved and desired in return… When he is in that glory, he opens his eyes and there he remains on the cross.

The truth is that the Bible itself says that Mary Magdalene was the first person to whom the resurrected Jesus appeared. Perhaps that is why, between faith and fiction, literature has found in these figures not only sacred symbols, but profoundly human mirrors where love—in all its forms—continues to challenge the reader.

• With translation assistance from Robert Lienhard.

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