By now you've read the Huffington Post article, or another one, describing the falling-out between Playboy Enterprises and Playboy Portugal. Problems arose when Playboy Portugal published an unauthorized cover for the July 2010 issue – showing Jesus knelling in bed with a tattooed topless girl.

"[A] shocking breach of our standards" is how Theresa Hennessy, Playboy Enterprises vice president of public relations described the cover. She continued, "we would have not allowed it to be published if we had seen it in advance." And as a result, Playboy Enterprises has terminated its contract with Portugal's Frestacom-Lisbon Media Publishing.

Except, the cover photo and the ones in the accompanying pictorial, for all their sexiness, are more artsy than they are salacious. Which is underscored by the absence of any eye contact between Jesus and the girls.

Put yourself in Jesus's sandals. There He is, all luminescent and arms outstretched, but the girls won't have anything to do with Him. Theresa Hennessy is right – it's shocking. We're looking at Playboy photos where the titillation is of the PG-13 kind. We can easily imagine Jesus dragging Himself home at the end of the night, without having spread the Kingdom of God.

However, that's not Jesus's fate in José Saramago's novel. Saramago is a Portuguese national hero, for having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. The July Playboy cover prominently displays the title of Saramago's most controversial novel painted on the headboard of the bed: O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo (The Gospel According to Jesus Christ). In the novel Mary Magdalene seduces Jesus – which is a concept much more risqué than anything depicted in the July photos. And in fact, the July issue is intended as a tribute to José Saramago, who passed away less than a month before, on June 18, 2010. You have to wonder if Playboy International could even have completed its approval process on such a short fuse.

In giving Playboy Portugal the ax, Playboy International delivered its own backhanded tribute to José Saramago. In 1991 the conservative Portuguese government – in a censure similar to Playboy International's – prevented The Gospel According to Jesus from being submitted for a prestigious European literary prize, ostensibly because the novel offended the country's Catholics, who, even now, we can hear decrying the novel as "a shocking breach of our standards." (Personal note to Laura Schlesinger and Sarah Palin: That's what it looks like when a government infringes on someone's free speech.)

Hefner gets the last word on this, I think, because at the end of the day – after the sudden publicity for José Saramago has died down and the online distribution of some Playboy photos has circuited the globe a few thousand times – the problem is Playboy's and how it succeeds in the global, online marketplace. The Hefner formula from 1962 still sounds like a good reason to pick up the magazine (virtually or otherwise) from time to time.

Playboy has always dealt with the lighter side of contemporary life, but it has also—tacitly and continuously—tried to see modern life in its totality. We hope that Playboy has avoided taking itself too seriously. We know that we have always stressed—in our own way—our conviction of the importance of the individual in an increasingly standardized society, the privilege of all to think differently from one another and to promote new ideas, and the right to hoot irreverently at herders of sacred cows and keepers of stultifying tradition and taboo.