Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
scandals must keep happening, the survival and the very existence of human society may be
dependent on periodical evacuations of scandals, on successful scapegoating.
We can understand now why, according to the Gospels, the foundation of the world should
coincide with the first collective murder of the type exemplified by the Passion. Human
culture and, no doubt, human religion are dependent on these murders. Jesus does not use the word "scapegoat," but he unquestionably refers to the process itself, and he identifies it as the founding mechanism of human society. He does this, I believe, when, right after the parable
of the vineyard, he asks his puzzled listeners to interpret a quote from Psalm 118: "Do you
understand what is said in this saying: The stone that the builders rejected has become the
keystone?" The stone is rejected not by one builder, or by a
-216-
few, but by all. Since nothing else is said about that stone, except that it is rejected, it can
only be the rejection that transforms the stone into the keystone, and those who reject it into
the builders that they might not be otherwise. The metaphor is transparent and made more so
by the proximity of the violent winemakers. The idea of the rejected stone applies not merely
to Jesus, as we are always told, but to all previous victims of the united winemakers. It
applies not to Christianity alone, therefore, but to all religious and cultural institutions of
humankind.
The Gospels clearly understand the key role of scapegoat expulsion in human society and in
countless religious cults, as well as in Jesus' death. Traditional Christians have not really
absorbed all implications of this teaching. We can well understand why. If Jesus is right, how
can the Christian religion be as unique as it claims? Is it not fundamentally the same as other
scapegoat religions?
At the end of the last century, comparative anthropologists showed that the overall scheme of
Christianity is very similar to the overall scheme of archaic religion. The rationalist
conception of Christianity as hardly less mythical than other religions seemed to be
confirmed. This conception began to spread, even inside the Christian churches, the
Protestant first and the Catholic later. It was the main cause of the modernist movement,
which has now expanded into the greatest crisis in the history of Christianity, a disintegration
of the faith more radical than the earlier rationalism since it incorporates the suspicion that
the Gospels might be not only mythical but belligerently so because of their alleged anti-
Semitism.
The resemblances are no doubt striking between the overall Christian scheme of collective
death and resurrection, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the sacred epiphany of many
cults that may or may not be labeled a resurrection but that is also rooted, as a rule, in a
collective murder. Primitive gods, primordial heroes, sacred kings, and founding ancestors
are certainly keystones, each one in his or her territory, as a result of being the stones that the
builders rejected.
The Gospel passages that I have discussed clearly confirm the structural similarities between
the Christian revelation and countless other cults. By restricting their significance to the Jews,
Christians have eluded this universal dimension, in an unconscious effort, perhaps, to
postpone the crisis of faith that must have threatened Christianity almost from the beginning.
In order to bolster the uniqueness of their religion, Christians have always exaggerated the
singularity of the Passion, its uniqueness as a violent event, and this tendency, inevitably,
leads to an emphasis on the exceptional ferocity of the Jews. This trend contradicts the spirit
and the letter of the Gospel texts discussed above. In the parable of the vineyard, the violence
against the son is singled out because the victim is the son,
-217-
but not because of the violence itself, which is the same as always. If Jesus himself says that
the Passion is one example among many similar murders, Christians must resign themselves
to this idea. They cannot be more Christian than Jesus Christ, more evangelical than the
Gospels.
If there is something genuinely unique about the Christian revelation, it will become visible
on the basis of the similarities between the Christian and non-Christian religions, on the basis
of the total Gospel, and not of a slightly rearranged or incomplete Gospel.
The Christian fear is suicidal nonsense. Far from leading to the end of all distinction, the
acknowledgment of the founding murder as something that all religions share, including
Christianity, is the real prerequisite for reaching the plane upon which Christian uniqueness
becomes a matter of immediate evidence, an incontrovertible fact. In order to reach this plane
we must go back to the moment when, in the aftermath of the Passion, the people involved
divide into two groups. On the one had, there is the large group of those united against Jesus:
the religious and political leaders, as well as the bulk of the crowd. On the other hand, there is
the small group of the first Christians.
Even though the Christian group is made up primarily of the original disciples, it is not some
previous association with Jesus that determines its composition. For a while, during the
Passion, it seemed that the mimetic consensus against Jesus was going to be unanimous. The
Christians are the people who break away from the scapegoat consensus. Their communion is
rooted in a passionate conviction that Jesus is innocent and was vindicated by God himself.
This conviction is not an acceptance but a rejection of the founding murder that is uncritically
espoused by the larger group.
Christianity, and prophetic Judaism, are the only examples of religions founded not on the
blind acceptance of the founding murder but on a lucid rejection of it. The Gospels are the
only example of a division of opinion regarding the founding murder. All other religions are
continuous with this murder, which, as a result, does not appear as such. The people cannot
distance themselves from it and challenge the justice of the victim's death. Everything we
know about scapegoating comes from the Bible and, above all, from the New Testament.
The Gospels alone enable us to understand that religious epiphanies everywhere are rooted in
scapegoat processes that must be spotted through indirect clues, such as the presumed guilt of
the victim. We must question and demystify this guilt, just as the first Christians questioned
and demystified the guilt of Jesus.
Whenever scapegoats truly function as scapegoats, they are seen as monsters of iniquity,
whose expulsion is indispensable to the survival of the community. If the scapegoats were not
unanimously feared and hated to start with, they could not sponge off the cesspool of
scandals in-
-218-
side the community; they could not restore the peace. As a result of this process, these same
scapegoats may arouse such gratitude and reverence that they are ultimately made divine. But
their peace-making power is always dependent on a previous belief in their power as
troublemakers.
Just as Jesus is guilty in the eyes of his persecutors, Oedipus is guilty in the eyes of his myth.
Greek heroes are guilty; primitive gods are guilty; sacred kings are guilty. Archaic sacrifice
runs parallel to myth. Before the immolation, the victims are regarded as malevolent and
dangerous, and this is why they are often reviled before being killed. Only after the
immolation do they become an object of reverence. This about-face reflects the effectiveness
of unanimous scapegoating, which all rituals try to recapture in a spirit of religious piety, not
of intersubjective manipulation.
Many myths and rituals conform to the pattern just outlined. Many others do not, and the
reason is that religions keep evolving. After a while, the malevolence of the scapegoat is
covered over by the benevolence of the god, which is retroactively extended to the
preimmolation period. For a long time, however, many traces of scapegoating remain. Then,
even these traces may disappear, except for two, I believe, that remain forever. The first is the
innocence of the sacrificers; and the second, inseparable from the first, is the idea that the
violence is necessary, justified by some higher good, even when it degenerates into political
opportunism. This is exemplified in another great Gospel definition of scapegoating,
Caiaphas's definition: "It is better that one man should die and that the whole nation not
perish."
In non-Christian religions, scapegoat effectiveness is misinterpreted as something divine
around which the people unite, but this "around" is necessarily preceded and determined by
an "against." Only the Gospels do away with the initial "against." Only the Gospels denounce the founding violence as an evil that should be renounced. Only the Gospels put the blame
not on the victim, but on the violent perpetrators. Only the Gospels do not regard the violence
as sacred and do not transfigure it. Only the Gospels portray this violence as the vulgar
scapegoat phenomenon that it is, the fruit of mimetic contagion. Only the Gospels reveal the
founding murder as a fruit of humanity's fallen state, a sin that God alone can absolve.
The same scapegoating that myth misunderstands and therefore reveres as sacred truth, the
Gospels understand and denounce as the lie that it really is. This denunciation is the alpha
and omega of all genuine deconstruction and demythification.
When Jesus is called "the lamb of God," it means that he is an innocent scapegoat. But the
expression is both more beautiful and more appropriate than scapegoat. The idea of vicarious
immolation is retained, but the ugliness of the goat is eliminated. The injustice of the
-219-
victim's death is made more obvious. Far from being the scapegoat religion par excellence,
Christianity is the only religion that explicitly rejects scapegoating as a basis for a religious
epiphany.
Many critics reject my views on the grounds that, being as visible as it is in the Gospels, the
scapegoat mechanism must be operational in them, whereas myth and ritual are ambiguous
about it and therefore one should wisely remain silent about their connection with
scapegoating. These critics do not realize that the word "scapegoat," in the modern usage,
which I make mine, defines a principle of collective self-deception, which, by definition,
cannot be formulated in the texts that it structures. They always think in terms of a scapegoat
"theme" or "motif." They find it extremely easy, therefore, to refute the mimetic theory, but the objections they brandish are misinterpreted evidence in its favor. They simply do not
understand what I mean by generative scapegoating.
I can now return to my original question about the presumed antiJewishness of the Gospels.
This accusation is false. The texts upon which it relies have a much vaster scope than New
Testament exegetes have realized: they reveal the violent origin of all human societies. The
antiJewish reading of these texts is the reason their real meaning is still generally
misunderstood. All misunderstanding of the Gospels inevitably triggers a relapse into
scapegoating, which occurs this time at the expense of the Jews. And another necessary
consequence is that some of the violent sacred is reinjected into the text of the Gospels, in the
violence of the Passion, which tends to be regarded as not quite human. In the Middle Ages,
it seemed superhuman, in the sense of the Homeric gods intervening in the battles between
the Greeks and the Trojans. With the waning of religious faith, this distortion turns into an
indictment of the Jews. The disintegration of a Christianity somewhat contaminated with the
spirit of scapegoating (sacrificial Christianity) is bound to generate Christian anti-Semitism.
The Gospels are not anti-Jewish, but as long as the significance of the founding murder in the
texts that have nourished Christian antiSemitism is not widely acknowledged, many
Christians will believe that the only choice is between an anti-Semitic Gospel and no Gospel
at all. What is needed is a critique of the narrowly anti-Jewish reading of the texts, not an
indictment of the Gospels. The critics who indict the Gospels take for granted that the
traditional reading is the good one, the only possible one. Their negative conservatism
exonerates Christians from any feeling of guilt regarding their own anti-Semitism, which is
quite real, of course, unlike the anti-Semitism of the Gospels.
The Christians can thus say to themselves: we are not responsible for scapegoating the Jews.
We were misled by our religion. We sincerely be-
-220-
lieved what the Gospels taught us and they made anti-Semites out of us. It is probably
inevitable that the relentless human effort to elude the substance of the Gospels should end up
with this remarkable new twist: a scapegoating of the very text that made scapegoating
intelligible to us by refusing it in all its forms.
-221-
Part VI The Challenge of Freud and
Nietzsche
-223-
[This page intentionally left blank.]
-224-
Chapter 15 Freud and the Oedipus Complex