Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
no longer visible. This act of concealment is essential. The very murders in which the fathers
directly took part already resemble tombs to the extent that, above all in collective and
founding murders but also in individual murders, men kill in order to lie to others and to
themselves on the subject of violence and death. They must kill and continue to kill, strange
as it may seem, in order not to know that they are killing.
Now we can understand why Jesus reproaches the scribes and Pharisees for putting up tombs
for the prophets who have been killed by their fathers. Not to recognize the founding
character of the murder, whether by denying that the fathers have killed or by condemning
the guilty in the interests of demonstrating their own innocence, is to perpetuate the
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foundation, which is an obscuring of the truth. People do not wish to know that the whole of
human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man's violence by endlessly
projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on this foundation,
which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals.
Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation of murder.
The tomb-religion amounts to nothing more or less than the becoming visible of the
foundations, of religion and culture, of their only reason for existence.
Woe to you! for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and consent to the deeds of your fathers; for they killed them, and you build their
tombs.
( Luke 11:47-48)
"For they killed them, and you build their tombs": Jesus at once reveals and unambiguously
compromises
the history of all human culture. That is why he takes to himself the words of
Psalm 78: "I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world --
apo
kataboles kosmou
" ( Matt. 13:35).
If the metaphor of the tomb applies to all forms of human order taken in their entirety, it can
also be applied to the individuals formed by that order. On the individual level, the Pharisees
are absolutely identified with the system of misrecognition on which they rely as a
community.
It would be foolhardy to call "metaphorical" our usage of the term "tomb," since we are so close to the heart of the matter. To speak of the metaphor is to speak of displacement, and yet
no metaphorical displacement is involved here. On the contrary, it is the tomb that is the
starting point of the constitutive displacements of culture. Quite a number of fine minds think
that this is literally true on the level of human history as a whole; funerary rituals could well,
as we have said, amount to the first actions of a strictly cultural type. There is reason to
believe that these rituals took shape around the first of the reconciliatory victims, on the basis
of the creative transference achieved by the first communities. This also brings to mind the
sacrificial stones that mark the foundation of ancient cities, which are invariably associated
with some story of a lynching, ineffectively camouflaged.
J.-M.O.:
We must turn back at this point to what we said the other day on all these subjects.
We must keep them continually in mind in order to grasp what is at once the simplicity of the
hypothesis and the endless wealth of applications to be drawn from it.
R.G.:
Archaeological discoveries seem to suggest that people were really building tombs for
the Prophets in Jesus' period. That is a very interesting point, and it is quite possible that a
practice of this kind suggested the "metaphor." However, it would be a pity to limit the sig-
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nificance generated in our text by the different uses of the term "tomb" to a mere evocation of this practice. The fact that the metaphor applies both to the group and to the individual clearly
demonstrates that much more is involved than an allusion to specific tombs, just as much
more is involved in the following passage than a mere "moral" indictment:
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like white-washed tombs, which
outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.
( Matt. 23:27)
Deep within the individual, as within the religious and cultural systems that fashion the
individual, something is hidden, and this is not merely the individual "sin" of modern
religiosity or the "complexes" of psychoanalysis. It is invariably a corpse that as it rots spreads its "uncleanness" everywhere.
Luke compares the Pharisees not just to tombs but to underground tombs, that is to say,
invisible tombs -- tombs that are perfect in a double sense, if we can put it like that, since
they conceal not only death, but also their own existence as tombs.
Woe unto you! for you are like graves which are not seen, and men walk over them without
knowing it. ( Luke 11:44)
J.-M.O.:
This double concealment reproduces the way in which cultural differentiation
develops on the basis of the founding murder. This murder tends to efface itself behind the
directly sacrificial rituals, but even these rituals risk being too revealing and so tend to be
effaced behind postritual institutions, such as judicial and political systems or the forms of
culture. These derived forms give away nothing of the fact that they are rooted in the original
murder.
R.G.:
So we have here a problem of
knowledge
which is always being lost, never to be
rediscovered again. This knowledge certainly comes to the surface in the great biblical texts
and above all in the prophetic books, but the organization of religion and law contrives to
repress it. The Pharisees, who are satisfied with what seems to them to be their success in the
religious life, are blind to the essentials and so they blind those whom they claim to be
guiding:
Woe to you lawyers! for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter
yourselves and you hindered those who were entering. ( Luke 11:52)
Michel Serres first made me see the importance of this reference to the "key of knowledge."
Jesus has come in order to place men in possession of this key. Within the perspective of the
Gospels, the Passion is first and foremost the consequence of an intolerable revelation, while
being
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roof of that revelation. It is because they do not understand what he proclaims that Jesus'
listeners agree to rid themselves of him, and in so doing, they confirm the accuracy and the
prophetic nature of the "curses against the Pharisees."
They have recourse to violence, to expel the truth about violence:
As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard, and to
provoke him to speak of many things, lying in wait for him, to catch at something he might
say. ( Luke 11:53)
Human culture is organized around a more or less violent disavowal of human violence. That
is what the religion that comes from man amounts to, as opposed to the religion that comes
from God. By affirming this point without the least equivocation, Jesus infringes upon the
supreme prohibition that governs all human order, and he must be reduced to silence. Those
who come together against Jesus do so in order to back up the arrogant assumption that
consists in 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."
The truth of the founding murder is expressed first of all in the words of Jesus, which connect
the present conduct of men with the distant past, and with the near future (since they
announce the Passion), and with the whole of human history. The same truth of the founding
murder will also be expressed, with even greater force, in the Passion itself, which fulfills the
prophecy and gives it its full weight. If centuries and indeed millennia have to pass before
this truth is revived, it is of little consequence. The truth is registered and will finally
accomplish its work. Everything that is hidden shall be revealed.
The Passion
R.G.:
Jesus is presented to us as the innocent victim of a group in crisis, which, for a time at any rate, is united against him. All the subgroups and indeed all the individuals who are
concerned with the life and trial of Jesus end up by giving their explicit or implicit assent to
his death: the crowd in Jerusalem, the Jewish religious authorities, the Roman political
authorities, and even the disciples, since those who do not betray or deny Jesus actively take
flight or remain passive.
We must remember that this very crowd had welcomed Jesus with such enthusiasm only a
few days earlier. The crowd turns around like a single man and insists on his death with a
determination that springs at least in part from being carried away by the irrationality of the
collective spirit. Certainly nothing has intervened to justify such a change of attitude.
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It is necessary to have legal forms in a universe where there are legal institutions, to give
unanimity to the decision to put a man to death. Nonetheless, the decision to put Jesus to
death is first and foremost a decision of the crowd, one that identifies the crucifixion not so
much with a ritual sacrifice but (as in the case of the servant) with the process that I claim to
be at the basis of all rituals and all religious phenomena. Just as in the "Songs" from Isaiah, though even more directly this hypothesis confronts us in the four Gospel stories of the
Passion.
Because it reproduces the founding event of all rituals, the Passion is connected with every
ritual on the entire planet. There is not an incident in it that cannot be found in countless
instances: the preliminary trial, the derisive crowd, the grotesque honors accorded to the
victim, and the particular role played by chance, in the form of casting lots, which here
affects not the choice of the victim but the way in which his clothing is disposed of. The final
feature is the degrading punishment that takes place outside the holy city in order not to
contaminate it.
Noticing these parallels with other rituals, certain ethnologists have attempted -- in a spirit of
hostile skepticism, as you can imagine, which does not diminish, paradoxically, their absolute
faith in the historicity of the Gospel text -- to attribute ritualistic motives to some of the actors
in the Passion story. In their view, Jesus must have served as "scapegoat" to some of Pilate's legionaries, who were caught up in some sort of saturnalia. Frazer even debated with some
German researchers the precise ritual that must have been involved.
In 1898, P. Wendland noted the striking analogies between "the treatment inflicted on Christ by the Roman soldiers and that which other Roman soldiers inflicted on the false king of the
Saturnalia at Durostorum."
4. H
e took the view that the legionaries would have clothed Jesus with the traditional ornaments of King Saturn in order to make fun of his pretensions to a
heavenly kingdom. In a long note added to the second edition of
The Golden Bough
, Frazer
declared that he had also been struck by these similarities but had not been able to take them
into account in the first edition because he was incapable of offering an explanation for them.
Wendland's article did not seem satisfactory to him, in the first place for dating reasons -- the
Saturnalia took place in December whereas the crucifixion took place at Easter -- but above
all because he had by this time come up with a better explanation:
But closely as the Passion of Christ resembles the treatment of the mock king of the
Saturnalia, it resembles still more closely the treatment of the mock king of Sacaea. The
description of the mockery by St. Matthew is the fullest. It runs thus: "Then released
____________________
4. P. Wendland, "Jesus als Saturnalien-König,"
Hermes 33
( 1898): 175-79.
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he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.
Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common hall, and gathered unto him the
whole band of soldiers. And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe. And when they
had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they
bowed the knee before him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews! And they spit
upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head. And after that they had mocked
him, they took the robe off from him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to
crucify him." Compare with this the treatment of the mock king of the Sacaea, as it is
described by Dio Chrysostom: "They take one of the prisoners condemned to death and seat
him upon the king's throne, and give him the king's raiment, and let him lord it and drink and
run riot and use the king's concubines during these days, and no man prevents him from
doing just what he likes. But afterwards they strip and scourge and crucify him."
5.
However suggestive it may be in certain respects, this type of hypothesis seems untenable to
us because of the conception of the Gospel text it takes for granted. Frazer persists in making
the Gospel no different from a historical account, or even a piece of on-the-spot reporting. It