Irony- Gospel According to Mark

In the short story “The Gospel According to Mark” by Jorge Luis Borges, the author shows through irony how an ordinary character can be transformed into someone Christ-like. The protagonist Baltasar Espinosa comes to La Colorada Ranch as “one of the common run of young men from Buenos Aires, with nothing more noteworthy about him than an almost unlimited kindness and a capacity for public speaking.”(183) Espinosa was a character with different sides to him. He claimed to be a free thinker like his father and “was full of opinions, or habits of mind, that were questionable”(184), but at the same time prayed “the Lord’s Prayer and [made] the sign of the cross every night”(184) like his mother.
Espinosa came to La Colorada Ranch to visit his cousin, but when his cousin goes on a trip to “close a deal on some cattle”(184) Espinosa finds his only company to be the Gutres, a naïve country family. One night, after dinner time, Espinosa starts to read the Bible to the Gutres which they “listened attentively [and] absorbed”(186) everything being said to them. The Gutres started to follow Espinosa wherever he went, “as if lost without him.”(186) The Gutres have Espinosa repeat the Gospel of Mark over again which makes Espinosa see these people as children “to whom repetition is more pleasing than variation or novelty.”(186) He sees no threat from these people who worship Espinosa and everything he says.
After a few days, the Gutres ask Espinosa if Christ died to save all men including the ones that killed him. Espinosa truthfully tells the Gutres that Christ did die to save others from the gruesome fate of Hell. The Gutres seem to receive some sort of wake up call, bow to their knees asking for a blessing. They then take a change in their demeanor by spitting “on him, and [shoving] him toward the back part of the house.”(187) He sees the Gutres making a cross out of the beams from the roof.
Espinosa realizes that by him being a thirty-three year old man with a beard, he was a Christ figure to the Gutres. The Gutres sincerely believed in the gospel that Espinosa read to them daily and wanted to kill him in order to save themselves. This ending is ironic because Espinosa considered himself a free thinker, not a Christ-like preacher but reaches him demise the same way that Jesus Christ did. By preaching to the Gutries, he was subconsciously telling them to crucify him.