Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
does not occur to him that the relationship between the rituals to which he refers and the
Gospels could be based on anything but a chance coincidence between events; he does not
take into account that there might be something much more profound on the level of the text
itself -- which could explain the way in which this religious and cultural document was
internally organized. If this possibility is discounted, how could we account for the striking
coincidence between the Saturnalia and the account that he gives to the "mock king of
Sacaea"?
Here we are confronted with a kind of prejudice that flourished in the epoch of positivism.
Although we are not going to succumb to the opposite prejudice, which is in the ascendant in
our own period, we should nonetheless pay some attention to the internal organization of the
text and, as a first stage, look at it independently of its potential reference.
Frazer's own thesis is not lacking in detailed observation. It is as ingenious as it is naïve. The analogies traced between religious forms are not by any means restricted to those which
ethnologists parade because they believe that they can explain them consistently with their
own views. These analogies extend to a whole group of religious phenomena -- the servant of
Yahweh, for example, not to mention a host of other Old Testament texts. An ethnological
critic in the Frazer style will
____________________
5. Frazer,
The Golden Bough
, part 6, "The Scapegoat," one-volume ed. ( New York:
Macmillan, 1963), 413-14.
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declare analogies of this kind to be ultimately inadmissable for the very reason that the
Gospels themselves claim a kinship with such texts. He will proclaim them to be nonexistent,
invented to serve the cause of religion, whereas in reality we are dealing with parallels very
close to ones he congratulates himself about drawing to our attention. It is simply that his
positivist spirit can tolerate only those analogies that he feels will discredit the claims of the
Gospels, and jibes at those the Gospels themselves invoke in order to buttress those same
claims.
For there to be an effective, sacralizing act of transference, it is necessary that the victim
should inherit all of the violence from which the community has been exonerated. It is
because the victim genuinely passes as guilty that the transference does not come to the fore
as such. This piece of conjuring brings about the happy result for which the lynching mob is
profoundly grateful: the victim bears the weight of the incompatible and contradictory
meanings that, juxtaposed, create
sacredness
. For the Gospel text to be mythic in our sense, it would have to take no account of the arbitrary and unjust character of the violence which is
done to Jesus. In fact the opposite is the case: the Passion is presented as a blatant piece of
injustice. Far from taking the collective violence upon itself, the text places it squarely on
those who are responsible for it. To use the expression from the "Curses," it lets the violence fall upon the heads of those to whom it belongs: "Verily I say unto you, All these things shall
come upon this generation."
G.L.:
You prove, I believe, that these words have nothing to do with the old primitive curses
that are designed to draw the vengeance of a violent god upon the cursed individual. In this
case, the effect is precisely the opposite. There is a complete "deconstruction" of the whole primitive system, which brings to light the founding mechanism and leaves men without the
protection of sacrifice, prey to the old mimetic conflict, which from this point onward will
acquire its typically Christian and modern form. Everyone will now seek to cast upon his
neighbor the responsibility of persecution, and injustice will become more and more
apparent; everyone will be reluctant to admit that they are involved.
R.G.:
There has to be a close connection between the revelation in words of the founding
murder and its revelation on the level of action; this murder is repeated, taking as its victim
the person who has revealed it -- whose message everyone refuses to understand. In the
Gospels, the revelation in words immediately stirs up a collective will to
silence
the speaker, which is concretized as a collective murder. In other words, the founding mechanism is
reproduced once again, and, by virtue of this, the speech it strives to stifle is confirmed as
true. The revelation is one and the same as the violent opposition to any revelation, since it is this lying violence, the source of all lies, that must first of all be revealed.
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The Martyrdom of Stephen
R.G.:
The process that leads directly from the "curses" to the Passion can be found again in a form both compact and striking in a text which is not strictly speaking from the Gospels, but
is as close as it could possibly be to at least one of the Gospel accounts in which the "curses"
figure -- that of Luke. I am talking about the Acts of the Apostles, which are presented, as
you know, as the work of Luke himself, and may well be his.
The text I have in mind reconstitutes the sequence formed by the "curses" and the Passion,
but does so in such a compact way, articulating its elements in so explicit a fashion, that we
can really envisage it as a genuine interpretation of the Gospel text. I am referring to
Stephen's speech and its consequences. The ending of this speech to the Sanhedrin is so
disagreeable to its audience that it immediately causes the death of the person who made it.
Stephen's last words, the ones that trigger murderous rage in his public, are no more than the
repetition, pure and simple, of the curses against the Pharisees. Obviously the murders
already named by Jesus are joined, in Stephen's speech, by a reference to the murder of Jesus
himself, which is by now an established fact and reenacts better than anything else the
founding murder.
So it is the whole formed by the prophecy and its fulfillment that the words of Stephen isolate
and underline. It is the relationship of cause and effect between the revelation that
compromises the community's basis in violence and the new violence that casts out the
revelation in order to reestablish that basis, to lay its foundation once again.
"You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit.
As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute? And
they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you
have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did
not keep it."
Now when they heard these things they were enraged, and they ground their teeth against
him. But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus
standing at the right hand of God; and he said, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the
Son of man standing at the right hand of God." But they cried out with a loud voice and
stopped their ears and rushed together upon him. Then they cast him out of the city and
stoned him. ( Acts 7:51-58)
The words that throw the violence back upon those who are really guilty are so intolerable
that it is necessary to shut once and for all the
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mouth of the one who speaks them. So as not to hear him while he remains capable of
speaking, the audience "stop their ears." How can we miss the point that they kill in order to
cast off an intolerable knowledge and that this knowledge is, strangely enough, the
knowledge of the murder itself? The whole process of the Gospel revelation and the
crucifixion is reproduced here in the clearest possible way.
It is worth pointing out that the Jews, like other peoples, reserve Stephen's method of
execution -- stoning -- for the most impure of criminals, those guilty of the most serious
crimes. It is the Jewish equivalent of the Greek
anathema
.
As with all forms of sacrifice, the execution must reproduce the founding murder in order to
renew its beneficial effects, in this case wiping out the dangers to which the blasphemer
exposes the community (cf. Deut. 17:7).
The repetition of this murder is a dangerous action that might bring about the return of the
crisis which it is designed to avoid. One of the first precautions against the pollution of
violence consists in forbidding any kind of ritual execution within the community. That is
why the stoning of Stephen takes place -- like the crucifixion -- outside the city walls of
Jerusalem.
But this initial precaution is not sufficient. Prudence dictates that there must be no contact
with the victim who pollutes because he is polluted. How is it possible to combine this
requirement with another important requirement, which is to reproduce as exactly as possible
the original murder? To reproduce it exactly implies unanimous participation by the whole
community, or at any rate by all those who are present. This unanimous participation is
explicitly required by the text of Deuteronomy (17:7). How can it be arranged for everyone to
strike the victim, while no one is soiled by contact with him? Obviously, stoning resolves this
delicate problem. Like all methods of execution from a distance -- the modern firing squad,
or the community's driving Takarau from the top of a cliff in the Tikopia myth -- stoning
fulfills this twofold ritual requirement.
The only person taking part in this event whose name figures in the text is Saul of Tarsus, the
future Paul. He is also, it would appear, the only person not to throw stones, although the text
assures us that his heart is with the murderers. "And Saul was consenting to his death." Thus Saul's presence does not break the unanimity. The text makes it clear that the participants
rushed upon Stephen "with one accord." This way of signaling the unanimity would have an
almost technical ritual significance if we were not dealing with something quite different
from a ritual. The unanimity that in ritual has a compulsory and premeditated character is
here achieved quite spontaneously.
The hurried aspect of this stoning and the fact that the procedures
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listed in the text of Deuteronomy are not all observed have led a number of commentators to
judge that the execution was more or less illegal and to define it as a kind of lynching.
Johannes Munck, for example, writes as follows in his edition of the Acts of the Apostles:
Was this examination before the Sanhedrin and the following stoning a real trial and a legal
performed execution? We do not know. The improvised and passionate character of the
events as related might suggest that it was illegal, a lync
hing. 6.
Munck compares Stephen's last words to "a spark that starts an explosion" (70). The fact that we are concerned here with a ritualized mode of execution and an irresistible discharge of
collective fury is extremely significant. For this twofold status to be possible, it is necessary
for the ritual mode of execution to coincide with a possible form of spontaneous violence. If
the ritual gesture can be to a certain extent deritualized and become spontaneous without
really altering in form, we can imagine that such a metamorphosis can also take place in the
other direction; the form of the legal execution is nothing more than the ritualization of a
spontaneous violence. If we look carefully at the martyrdom of Stephen, we inevitably come
up against the hypothesis of the founding violence.
This scene from Acts is a reproduction that both reveals and underlines the relationship
between the "curses" and the Passion. Stephen's death has the same twofold relationship to
the "curses" as the Passion itself. It verifies them because Stephen, like Jesus, is killed to forestall this verification. Stephen is the first of those who are spoken of in the "curses." We have already quoted from Matthew (23:34-35). Here now is the text from Luke that also
defines the precise function of this
martyrdom
which is indeed one of
witness
. Dying in the same way as Jesus dies, for the same reasons as he did, the martyrs multiply the revelation of
the founding violence:
Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, "I will send them prophets and apostles, some of
whom they will kill and persecute," that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the
foundation of the world, may be required of this generation.... ( Luke 11:49-50)
This particular text must not be interpreted in a narrow fashion. It does not say that the only
innocent victims, from now on, are to be the "confessors of the faith" in the dogmatic,
theological sense used historically by the Christian church. It means that there will be no
more victims from now on whose persecution will not eventually be recognized as unjust, for
no further sacralization is possible. No more myths
____________________
6. The Acts of the Apostles,
The Anchor Bible
( New York: Doubleday, 1967), 69.
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can be produced to cover up the fact of persecution. The Gospels make all forms of
"mythologizing" impossible since, by revealing the founding mechanism, they stop it from
functioning. That is why we have fewer and fewer myths all the time, in our universe
dominated by the Gospels, and more and more texts bearing on persecution.