[3] The Relic is narrated in the first person by the central character, Teodorico Raposo, an orphan at the age of seven, who is entrusted to the care of his aunt, Dona Patrocínia das Neves, who is very wealthy but obsessively devout.

A long, sudden and unexplained section in the middle of the novel is in the form of an apparent dream in which Teodorico is transported back to the time of Jesus's arrest, trial and execution, where he and Topsius become witnesses to history.

In her Introduction to the novel, its translator argues that this conclusion gives relevance to the earlier dream sequence, in which Teodorico discovers that the Resurrection of Jesus was a lie that created the foundations of Christianity.

It was the book's rejection of any moral focus and the "rewriting of Christianity as a myth based on a well-intentioned lie" that inevitably led to criticism in Portugal when it was first published.

[2] After being thrown out by his aunt, Teodorico survives for a few months by the selling of the other fake relics he had brought home, such as cigar-holders made out of a piece of wood from Noah's ark; straw from the crib of Jesus; a piece of wood planed by Saint Joseph; a fragment of the water jug with which the Virgin used to go to the fountain; a shoe from the donkey on which the Holy Family had fled into Egypt; and a rusty nail from Noah's Ark.

[3] Another reviewer notes that it shares with other novels by Eça “sharp satire and criticism of the backwardness and hypocrisy that pervaded Portuguese society” of the time.