Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
says Girard, "is a critique of the narrowly anti-Jewish reading of the texts, not an indictment
of the Gospels."
The possibility of an anti-Jewish or even "anti-Semitic" bias in the Gospels is often discussed nowadays. In order to be significant this discussion should not focus on matters of speech,
such as the blanket substitution, in John, of the expression "the Jews" for the various religious groups mentioned under their specific names in the Synoptic Gospels. The real issue centers
upon the large body of texts that seem to accuse the Jews, before the Passion, of preparing to
kill Jesus in the same manner as they did many other victims. In the "Curses against the
Pharisees," Jesus says: "You have killed all the prophets." The Jews are singled out, it seems, as a uniquely bloodthirsty nation that makes a habit of killing its holy men.
The parable of the murderous winemakers is an allegorized rendition of the same idea. After
planting a vineyard on his own land, the owner entrusts it to tenants and departs for some
distant land. From time to time, he sends messengers to collect his share of the crop, but,
every time, all the winemakers get together and violently cast out these messengers,
wounding or killing them in the process. The winemakers always act together and then, all
together once again, they cast out and kill the last messenger, the owner's own son. This son
is Jesus and the messengers are the prophets.
In the debate about the possible anti-Jewishness of the Gospels, the main evidence consists of
this parable, plus the Curses against the Pharisees in the Synoptics, plus various texts in John,
especially the one in which Jesus accuses his listeners of being the sons not of Abraham, as
they claim, but of the devil 11 who was a murderer from the beginning."
Since I want to provide a global idea of my views, I must discuss all these texts; in the
interest of space, however, I will greatly streamline my observations. In the texts mentioned
above, the Jews are the foremost target of attack, but not the only one. In the statement about
the murdered prophets, for example, Luke speaks of the blood "shed from the foundation of
the world, the blood of Abel the just." There were no Jews at the time of Abel.
It can be objected that among both Jews and Christians, there is a tendency to regard the
whole of Genesis as Jewish history. True enough,
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but then, in the statement about the murdered prophets, how are we to interpret the expression
epi tēs gēs in both Matthew and Luke? It means on the earth, all over the earth. If the murders
at issue were committed all over the earth, how could the Jews alone be responsible for them?
This idea of worldwide murders interests me not because it spreads the guilt thinner, so to
speak, but because it makes us wonder why the Gospels should mention these murders at all.
As long as they seem exclusively Jewish, we read them as a rhetorical amplification of
Jewish ferocity. "No wonder these Jews killed Jesus; they indiscriminately massacre all their
holy men." This reading is certainly wrong, but, incredibly, it is still the only reading available, and that is why the question of an anti-Jewish bias in the Gospels has some
legitimacy.
If the Passion is only one example of a kind of murder that occurs all over the world, the
Gospels are saying something about human culture as such, something we still do not
understand. In order to discover what that is, we must ask: which features of the Passion are
characteristic of all these murders?
The parable of the vineyard suggests one feature: the murders are never individual but
collective, or collectively inspired. This is good to know but not yet enough. We need a
comparative analysis. Fortunately the Passion is not the only portrayal we have of one of
these murders. Two of the four Gospels, Mark and Matthew, contain an account of a second
murder, the beheading of John the Baptist. Since John is regarded as a prophet, his violent
death should conform to the principle formulated by Jesus. It should be
like
the Passion. And
indeed it is. In both accounts the main phenomenon is a polarization, or mobilization, of
many people against a victim who, until that moment, had not aroused the hostility of his
future murderers. As a matter of fact, a few days before the Passion, the people of Jerusalem
had greeted Jesus with enthusiasm.
In both instances, it all begins with a few instigators or even a single one: the religious
leaders in the case of Jesus, Herodias in the case of John. They are the only people whose
hostility to the victims predates the polarization that they do their best to trigger. They are not
essential. The polarization alone is essential. What is its cause? In the case of John, the
answer is disconcertingly obvious. Herod's guests and Herod himself are mimetically carried
away,
possessed
by the famous dance of Herodias's daughter. In pagan sacrifices the
immolation of the victim is often preceded by ritual dances. The effects of such dancing,
traditionally, are defined as mimetic. The purpose is to unite the participants against the
victim. This is what happens in the case of John.
The Passion contains no counterpart to Salome's dance, but all observable instances of
someone joining the hostile crowd are also mimetic. The most spectacular is the text
traditionally entitled Peter's
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denial. Like us moderns, Peter cannot stand the disapproval of his neighbors. In a Jerusalem
crowd, he feels like an outsider and he wants to become an insider. He wants to show the
people in the high priest's courtyard that he shares their feelings. He mimics what he
presumes is the crowd's contempt for Jesus. He is the individual with the greatest spiritual
investment in Jesus. If fidelity and steadfastness might be expected from anyone, they would
be expected from him. The purpose of Peter's denial is not to indict a specific individual but
to reveal how vulnerable even the best human beings are to mimetic polarizations such as we
have in both murders.
Since we have reason to believe that all the violent murders mentioned in the Gospels are
similar to the crucifixion and the beheading of John, we may also assume that they all result
from mimetic polarizations. When Jesus says that he will die like all prophets before him, he
means that his death will repeat a most ancient and worldwide pattern of mimetic violence.
The common essence of these murders is something that modern observers vaguely identify
as mob violence. Both the Passion and the death of John are sanctioned by a political
authority, but this legal disguise does not really change the nature of the murders.
It has been suggested that Pilate's handling of Jesus reflects a proRoman bias or rather, once
again, an anti-Jewish bias. The parallel handling of the Herod/ John the Baptist relationship
makes this interpretation most unlikely. There must be an intention common to both scenes,
and it is readily intelligible. The sovereign, each time, must make his subservience to the
crowd manifest. It will be manifest only if his personal desire differs from that of the crowd
and yet, in the end, the crowd has its way. Herod and Pilate would like to save John and
Jesus, but it cannot be done without antagonizing the crowd, and the two sovereigns yield to
mimetic pressure; they become part of the crowd. The purpose is to show that a crowd in a
lynching mood is the supreme power. For the Gospels, political power has been rooted in the
crowd
since the foundation of the world
.
The coupling of the foundation of the world (katabolē tou kosmou) with the first murder is
not a mere chronological coincidence. The importance of the idea is confirmed by the Gospel
of John, which also has it, and in completely different words: "He [the devil] was a murderer
from the beginning [
archē
]." Both statements refer not to divine creation, of course, but to the first human culture, which, in Genesis, is attributed to Cain. And Cain, indeed, has two titles
to fame. The first is Abel's murder and the second is the creation of the first civilization or
culture. A look at the text shows that the two events are one. The first law is the law against
murder, and it is rooted in Abel's murder. The name Cain stands not for a single individual,
but for the
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entire community cemented by the first collective murder analogous to the Passion.
Human society began and continued with mimetic murders similar to the Passion. In order to
explore this amazing idea, I will summarize everything in the Gospels that pertains to
mimetic contagion, mimicry, imitation.
Both Jesus and Satan are teachers of imitation and imitators themselves, imitators of God the
Father. This means that human beings always imitate God, either through Jesus or through
Satan. They seek God indirectly through the human models they imitate. When the model
determines his imitator's desire through his own acquisitive desire, they both desire the same
object. This is mimetic rivalry; once it is triggered, the two competing desires mutually keep
reinforcing each other and violence is likely to erupt.
Imitation must be intrinsically good, nevertheless, since Jesus recommends it. It will never
lead us into temptation as long as we imitate him, Jesus, who, in turn, imitates God in a spirit
of childish and innocent obedience. Since there is no acquisitive desire in God, this imitation
cannot cause mimetic rivalry. Mimetic rivalry is not sin but rather a permanent occasion of
sin. The sin occurs when our relentlessness makes the rivalry obsessive. Its name is envy,
jealousy, pride, anger, despair. For this satanic exasperation of mimetic rivalry, the Gospels
have a marvelous word,
skandalon
. The idea is biblical, and it means an obstacle against
which one keeps stumbling. The Greek word appears first in the Greek Bible and it comes
from a verb that signifies "to limp." The more we stumble against an obstacle, the easier it should be to avoid further stumbling, but, most frequently, the opposite happens: we stumble
so much that we seem to be limping.
Skandalon
designates the intersubjective process that results from a very general but not universal human failure to walk away from mimetic rivalry.
Skandalon
is the process through
which we are attracted to whatever or, rather, whoever treats us badly.
Skandalon
is
destructive addiction of all kinds: drugs, sex, power, and, above all, morbid competitiveness -
- professional, political, intellectual, spiritual.
Skandalon
is the aching tooth that we cannot stop testing with our tongue, even though it hurts more.
Scandals, Jesus says, must happen. When scandals start happening, their contagiousness
ensures their endless proliferation. The disorder becomes so pervasive that society, it seems,
should disintegrate. Since society more often than not endures, some counter-force must be at
work, not decisive enough to keep scandals from happening, which they must, but powerful
enough to moderate their effects, to keep them under some form of control.
Scandalized people, meaning all of us, feel that their scandals, their
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personal problems, their most intense conflicts express something genuinely personal and
unique in them, their innermost self. They are wrong. Being mimetic from the start, scandals
become more so as they multiply and intensify. They become impersonal, anonymous,
undifferentiated, and interchangeable. Beyond a certain threshold, they substitute for one
another, with little or no awareness on our part. Scandals begin small, with two or three
individuals, but, as they turn gregarious, they can grow very large.
People become so burdened with scandals that they desperately, if unconsciously, seek public
substitutes, collective targets upon whom to unburden themselves. All those who join a
belligerent crowd transfer their private scandals to some public target. As more and more
people join in, the common victim's attractiveness as a victim increases, and the process
becomes irresistible. This explains why Jesus uses the word scandal in connection with his
Passion. When he warns his disciples that he is about to become a scandal to them, it really
means that they will be affected by the mimetic tidal wave. In the case of Peter, we can
follow this contamination in great detail, and what is true of him is true up to a point of the
other disciples.
The violent unanimity of the Passion results from a snow-balling of scandals so powerful that
even the disciples cannot escape it. The notion of scandal bridges the gap between individual
and collective violence. When violence becomes unanimous, the victim has truly become the
collective embodiment of all scandals and his or her destruction is experienced by individual
participants as a destruction of his or her own scandal, a personal liberation. When this
happens, peace immediately returns and the mob is no more. After Pilate surrenders to the
crowd, all agitation subsides. The Cross becomes a spectacle at the end of which the mob
peacefully disperses.
The crowd is appeased at the expense of an innocent victim. For this vicarious relief, the
modern world has a word which, significantly, is borrowed from the Bible, "scapegoat." If