Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
in a form that can immediately be
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verified against the texts themselves, albeit in an unforeseen form that will startle all
traditions, not excepting the Christian tradition, which has never acknowledged the crucial
importance in the anthropological domain of what I call the scapegoat.
The Gospel Revelation of the Founding Murder
The Curses against the Pharisees
G.L.:
How do you intend to show that the truth of the scapegoat is written for all to see in the text of the Gospels?
R.G.:
In the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, there is a group of texts that used to be entitled
the
"Curses against the Scribes and Pharisees."
This title is no longer employed because of the embarrassment the reading of these texts usually provokes. In the literal sense, of course,
such a title is perfectly valid. But it does tend to restrict unduly the vast implications of the
way in which Jesus accuses his audience of Pharisees. Obviously he is directing his
accusations at them, but a careful examination reveals that he is using the Pharisees as an
intermediary for something very much larger, and indeed something of absolutely universal
significance is at stake. But then this is always the case in the Gospels. Every reading that
restricts itself to particulars -- however legitimate it may seem on the historical level -- is
nonetheless a betrayal of the overall significance.
The most terrible and meaningful "curse" comes right at the end of the text in both Matthew
and Luke. I quote first of all from Matthew:
Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and
crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that
upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and
the altar. Truly, I say to you, all this will come upon this generation.
( Matt. 23:34-36)
The text gives us to believe that there have been many murders. It only mentions two of
them, however: that of Abel, the first to occur in the Bible, and that of a certain Zechariah,
the last person to be killed in the Second Book of the Chronicles, in other words the last in
the whole Bible as Jesus knew it.
Evidently mention of the first and last murders takes the place of a more complete list. The
victims who belong between Abel and Zechariah are implicitly included. The text has the
character of a recapitulation, and it cannot be restricted to the Jewish religion alone,
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since the murder of Abel goes back to the origins of humanity and the foundation of the first
cultural order. Cainite culture is not a Jewish culture. The text also makes explicit mention of
"all the righteous blood shed on earth." It therefore looks as though the kind of murder for which Abel here forms the prototype is not limited to a single region of the world or to a
single period of history. We are dealing with a universal phenomenon whose consequences
are going to fall not only upon the Pharisees but upon this
generation
, that is, upon all those who are contemporary with the Gospels and the time of their diffusion, who remain deaf and
blind to the news that is being proclaimed.
The text of Luke is similar, but it includes, before Abel is mentioned a further crucial detail.
It identifies "the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, from the
blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah" ( Luke 11:50-51). The Greek text has
apo kataboles
kosmou
. The same expression comes up in Matthew when Jesus quotes from Psalm 78 in
reference to himself:
I will open my mouth in parables,
I will utter what has been hidden
since the foundation of the world.
( Matt. 13:35)
On each occasion the Vulgate uses the translation
a constitutione mundi
. But
kataboles
really seems to imply the foundation of the world insofar as it results from a violent crisis; it
denotes order insofar as it comes out of disorder. The term has a medical use to mean the
onslaught of a disease, the attack that provokes a resolution.
We must certainly not lose sight of the fact that, for Jewish culture, the Bible formed the only
ethnological encyclopedia available or even conceivable. In referring to the whole of the
Bible, Jesus is pointing not only at the Pharisees but at the whole of humanity. Clearly the
dreadful consequences of his revelation will weigh exclusively on those who have had the
advantage of hearing -- if they refuse to take its meaning, if they will not recognize that this is
a revelation which concerns them in the same way as it concerns the rest of humanity. The
Pharisees to whom Jesus is speaking are the first to put themselves in this difficult position,
but they will not be the last. It cannot be deduced from the Gospel text that their innumerable successors will not fall under the same condemnation, even if they belong to a different
religion named Christianity.
Jesus is very well aware that the Pharisees have not themselves killed the prophets, any more
than the Christians themselves killed Jesus. It is said that the Pharisees were the "sons" of those who carried out the killings ( Matt. 23:31). This is not to imply a hereditary
transmission of guilt, but rather an intellectual and spiritual solidarity that is achieved
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by means of a resounding repudiation -- not unlike the repudiation of Judaism by the
"Christians." The
sons
believe they can express their independence of the
fathers
by condemning them, that is, by claiming to have no part in the murder. But by virtue of this
very fact, they unconsciously imitate and repeat the acts of their fathers. They fall to
understand that in the murder of the Prophets people refused to acknowledge their own
violence and cast if off from themselves. The sons are therefore still governed by the mental
structure engendered by the founding murder. In effect they are still saying:
If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in
shedding the blood of the prophets.
( Matt. 23:30)
Paradoxically, it is in the very wish to cause a break that the continuity between fathers and
sons is maintained.
To understand what is decisive about the texts in the synoptic Gospels we have just been
considering, we need to confront them with the text from the Gospel of John that is most
directly equivalent:
Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You
are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer
from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. (
John 8:43-44)
Here the essential point is that a triple correspondence is set up between Satan, the original
homicide, and the lie. To be a son of Satan is to inherit the lie. What lie? The lie that covers
the homicide. This lie is a double homicide, since its consequence is always another new
homicide to cover up the old one. To be a son of Satan is the same thing as being the son of
those who have killed their prophets since the foundation of the world.
N. A. Dahl has demonstrated that calling Satan a homicide is a concealed reference to the
murder of Abel by Cai
n. 3. I
t is undoubtedly true that Abel's murder in Genesis has an exceptional importance. But this importance is due to the fact that it is the first founding
murder and the first biblical account to raise a corner of the curtain that always covers the
frightful role played by homicide in the foundation of human communities. This murder is
presented to us, we have seen, as the origin of the law that sanctions murder as a sevenfold
reprisal, the origin of the rule against homicide within the Cainite culture, and in effect the origin of that culture.
____________________
3. N. A. Dahl, "
Der Erstgeborene Satans und der Vater des Teufels
,"
Apophoreta
( Berlin: Töpelmann, 1964), 70-84.
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So the synoptic Gospels refer to Abel's murder because it has an exceptional significance. But
we should not wish to bring the Johannine text back at any price to the literal meaning of the
synoptic text, which refers to a certain person called Abel or to a category of victims called
"the prophets." In writing "he was a murderer from the beginning" John's text goes further than the others in disentangling the founding mechanisms; it excises all the definitions and
specifications that might bring about a mythic interpretation. John goes to the full length in
his reading of the text of the Bible, and what he comes up against is the hypothesis of the
founding violence.
Biblical specialists are misled on this point in much the same way as ethnologists, and all
other specialists in the human sciences, who move invariably from myth to myth and from
institution to institution, from signifier to signifier in effect, or from signified to signified,
without ever getting to the symbolic matrix of all these signifiers and signifieds -- that is, to
the scapegoat mechanism.
G.L.:
It is indeed the same mistake. But there is something more paradoxical and exclusive
about the blindness of the biblical experts compared with those in the human sciences,
because they have right under noses, in the text which they claim to be able to decipher, the
key to the correct interpretation -- the key to every interpretation -- and they refuse to make
use of it. They do not even notice the unbelievable opportunities staring them in the face.
R.G.:
Even with John's text, the danger of a mythical reading is still present, clearly so, if we do not see that Satan denotes the founding mechanism itself -- the principle of all human
community. All of the texts in the New Testament confirm this reading, in particular the
"Temptation" made by Satan the prince and principle of this world,
princeps huius mundi
. It is no abstract metaphysical reduction, no descent into vulgar polemics or lapse into
superstition that makes Satan the true adversary of Jesus. Satan is absolutely identified with
the circular mechanisms of violence, with man's imprisonment in cultural or philosophical
systems that maintain his
modus vivendi
with violence. That is why he promises Jesus
domination provided that Jesus will worship him. But Satan is also the
skandalon
, the living
obstacle that trips men up, the mimetic model insofar as it becomes a rival and lies across our
path. We shall be considering the
skandalon
further in connection with desire.
Satan is the name of the mimetic process seen as a whole; that is why he is the source not
merely of rivalry and disorder but of all the forms of lying order inside which humanity lives.
That is the reason why he was a homicide from the beginning; Satan's order had no origin
other than murder and this murder is a lie. Human beings are sons of Satan because they are
sons of this murder. Murder is therefore not an
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act whose consequences could be eliminated without being brought to light and genuinely rejected by men. It is an inexhaustible fund, a transcendent source of falsehood that infiltrates
every domain and structures everything in its own image, with such success that the truth
cannot get in, and Jesus' listeners cannot even hear his words. From the original murder, men
succeed in drawing new lies all the time, and these prevent the word of the Gospel from
reaching them. Even the most explicit revelation remains a dead letter.
J.-M.O.:
What you have shown, in short, is that despite differences in style and tone, the
Gospel of John says exactly the same thing as the synoptic Gospels. For the majority of
modern commentators, the work of exegesis consists almost exclusively in trying to find the
difference
between the texts. You, on the other hand, look for the convergence, since you
believe that the Gospels represent four slightly different versions of one and the same form of
thought. This form of thought necessarily escapes us if we start off from the principle that
only the divergences are worthy of attention.
R.G.:
These divergences do indeed exist, though they are minor ones. Yet they are not
without interest. In a number of cases they allow us to discover what might perhaps be called
particular minor defects in respect to the entirety of the message that they are obliged to
transcribe.
The Metaphor of the Tomb
R.G.:
I must now come back to the "Curses." They testify to a concealed relation of
dependence on the founding murder; they demonstrate a paradoxical continuity between the
violence of past generations and the denunciation of that violence in contemporaries. Here we
are getting to the heart of the matter; in the light of this mechanism -- the very one that has
preoccupied us from the outset of these discussion -- a great "metaphor" within the Gospel
text becomes clear. This is the metaphor of the
tomb
. Tombs exist to honor the dead, but also
to hide them insofar as they are dead, to conceal the corpse and ensure that death as such is