Are the Gospels Mythical? by Rene Girard

Are the Gospels Mythical?

Beginning with some violent cosmic or social crisis, and culminating in
the suffering of a mysterious victim (often at the hands of a furious
mob), all these myths conclude with the triumphal return of the
sufferer, thereby revealed as a divinity. The kind of anthropological
research undertaken before World War II—in which theorists struggled to
account for resemblances among myths—is regarded as a hopeless
“metaphysical” failure by most anthropologists nowadays. Its failure
seems, however, not to have weakened anthropology's skeptical
scientific spirit, but only to have weakened further, in some
mysterious way, the plausibility of the dogmatic claims of religion
that the earlier theorists had hoped to supersede: if science itself
cannot formulate universal truths of human nature, then religion—as
manifestly inferior to science—must be even more devalued than we had
supposed.

This is the contemporary intellectual situation Christian thinkers face
as they read the Scriptures. The Cross is incomparable insofar as its
victim is the Son of God, but in every other respect it is a human
event. An analysis of that event—exploring the anthropological aspects
of the Passion that we cannot neglect if we take the dogma of the
Incarnation seriously—not only reveals the falsity of contemporary
anthropology's skepticism about human nature. It also utterly
discredits the notion that Christianity is in any sense mythological.
The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but
exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

Jesus does, of course, compare his own story to certain others when he
says that his death will be like the death of the prophets: “The blood
of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world may be
required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of
Zechariah” (Luke 11:50-51). What, we must ask, does the word like
really mean here? In the death most strikingly similar to the
Passion—that of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, chapters 52–53—a crowd
unites against a single victim, just as similar crowds unite against
Jeremiah, Job, the narrators of the penitential psalms, etc. In
Genesis, Joseph is cast out by the envious crowd of his brothers. All
these episodes of violence have the same all-against-one structure.

Since John the Baptist is a prophet, we may expect his violent death in
the New Testament to be similar, and indeed John dies because Herod's
guests turn into a murderous crowd. Herod himself is as inclined to
spare John's life as Pilate is to spare Jesus'—but leaders who do not
stand up to violent crowds are bound to join them, and join them both
Herod and Pilate do. Ancient people typically regarded ritual dancing
as the most mimetic
of all arts, solidifying the participants of a sacrifice against the
soon to be immolated victim. The hostile polarization against John
results from Salome's dancing—a result foreseen and cleverly engineered
by Herodias for exactly that purpose.

There is no equivalent of Salome's dancing in Jesus' Passion, but a
mimetic or imitative dimension is obviously present. The crowd that
gathers against Jesus is the same that had enthusiastically welcomed
him into Jerusalem a few days earlier. The sudden reversal is typical
of unstable crowds everywhere: rather than a deep-seated hatred for the
victim, it suggests a wave of contagious violence.

Peter spectacularly illustrates this mimetic contagion. When surrounded
by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. He obeys the
same mimetic force, ultimately, as Pilate and Herod. Even the thieves
crucified with Jesus obey that force and feel compelled to join the
crowd. And yet, I think, the Gospels do not seek to stigmatize Peter,
or the thieves, or the crowd as a whole, or the Jews as a people, but
to reveal the enormous power of mimetic contagion—a revelation valid
for the entire chain of murders stretching from the Passion back to
“the foundation of the world.” The Gospels have an immensely powerful
reason for their constant reference to these murders, and it concerns
two essential and yet strangely neglected words, skandalon and Satan.

The traditional English translation of stumbling block is far superior to timid recent translations, for the Greek skandalon
designates an unavoidable obstacle that somehow becomes more attractive
(as well as repulsive) each time we stumble against it. The first time
Jesus predicts his violent death (Matthew 16:21-23), his resignation
appalls Peter, who tries to instill some worldly ambition in his
master: Instead of imitating Jesus, Peter wants Jesus to imitate him.
If two friends imitate each other's desire, they both desire the same
object. And if they cannot share this object, they will compete for it,
each becoming simultaneously a model and an obstacle to the other. The
competing desires intensify as model and obstacle reinforce each other,
and an escalation of mimetic rivalry follows; admiration gives way to
indignation, jealousy, envy, hatred, and, at last, violence and
vengeance. Had Jesus imitated Peter's ambition, the two thereby would
have begun competing for the leadership of some politicized “Jesus
movement.” Sensing the danger, Jesus vehemently interrupts Peter: “Get
behind me, Satan, you are a skandalon to me.”

The more our models impede our desires, the more fascinating they become as models.
Scandals can be sexual, no doubt, but they are not primarily a matter
of sex any more than of worldly ambition. They must be defined in terms
not of their objects but of their obstacle/model escalation—their
mimetic rivalry that is the sinful dynamics of human conflict and its
psychic misery. If the problem of mimetic rivalry escapes us, we may
mistake Jesus' prescriptions for some social utopia. The truth is
rather that scandals are such a threat that nothing should be spared to
avoid them. At the first hint, we should abandon the disputed object to
our rivals and accede even to their most outrageous demands; we should
“turn the other cheek.”

If we choose Jesus as our model, we simultaneously choose his own
model, God the Father. Having no appropriative desire, Jesus proclaims
the possibility of freedom from scandal. But if we choose possessive
models we find ourselves in endless scandals, for our real model is Satan.
A seductive tempter who suggests to us the desires most likely to
generate rivalries, Satan prevents us from reaching whatever he
simultaneously incites us to desire. He turns into a diabolos (another word that designates the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry). Satan is skandalon personified, as Jesus makes explicit in his rebuke of Peter.

Since most human beings do not follow Jesus, scandals must happen
(Matthew 18:7), proliferating in ways that ought to endanger the
collective survival of the human race—for once we understand the
terrifying power of escalating mimetic desire, no society seems capable
of standing against it. And yet, though many societies perish, new
societies manage to be born, and quite a few established societies
manage to find ways to survive or regenerate. Some counterforce must be
at work, not powerful enough to terminate scandals once and for all,
and yet sufficient to moderate their impact and keep them under some
control.

This counterforce is, I believe, the mythological scapegoat—the
sacrificial victim of myth. When scandals proliferate, human beings
become so obsessed with their rivals that they lose sight of the
objects for which they compete and begin to focus angrily on one
another. As the borrowing of the model's object shifts to the borrowing
of the rival's hatred, acquisitive mimesis turns into a mimesis of
antagonists. More and more individuals polarize against fewer and fewer
enemies until, in the end, only one is left. Because everyone believes
in the guilt of the last victim, they all turn against him—and since
that victim is now isolated and helpless, they can do so with no danger
of retaliation. As a result, no enemy remains for anybody in the
community. Scandals evaporate and peace returns—for a while.

Society's preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies
in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing
limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an
example of this strange process. Before it begins, Jesus warns his
disciples (and especially Peter) that they will be “scandalized” by him
(Mark 14:27). This use of skandalizein
suggests that the mimetic force at work in the all-against-one violence
is the same violence at work in mimetic rivalries between individuals.
In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an
example of cathartic victimization. A fascinating detail in the gospel
makes clear the cathartic effects of the mimetic murder—and allows us
to distinguish them from the Crucifixion's Christian effects.

At the end of his Passion account, Luke writes, “And Herod and Pilate
became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had
been at enmity with each other” (23:12). This reconciliation outwardly
resembles Christian communion—since it originates in Jesus' death—and
yet it has nothing to do with it. It is a cathartic effect rooted in
the mimetic contagion.

Jesus' persecutors do not realize that they influence one another
mimetically. Their ignorance does not cancel their responsibility, but
it does lessen it: “Father, forgive them,” Jesus cries, “for they know
not what they do” (Luke 23:34). A parallel statement in Acts 3:17 shows
that this must be interpreted literally. Peter ascribes to ignorance
the behavior of the crowd and its leaders. His personal experience of
the mimetic compulsion that possesses crowds prevents him from
regarding himself immune to the violent contagion of victimization.

The role of Satan, the personification of scandals, helps us to
understand the mimetic conception of the Gospels. To the question How can Satan cast out Satan? (Mark 3:23), the answer is unanimous victimization.

On the one hand, Satan is the instigator of scandal, the force that
disintegrates communities; on the other hand, he is the resolution of
scandal in unanimous victimization. This trick of last resort enables
the prince of this world to rescue his possessions in extremis, when
they are too badly threatened by his own disorder. Being both a
principle of disorder and a principle of order, Satan is truly divided
against himself.

The famous portrayal of the mimetic murder of John the Baptist
occurs—in both Mark and Matthew—as a curious flashback. By beginning
with an account of Herod's eager seizing hold of the rumor of John's
resurrection, and only then going back in time to narrate John's death,
Mark and Matthew reveal the origin of Herod's compulsive belief in his
own decisive participation in the murder. The evangelists give a
fleeting but precious example of mythic genesis—of
the ordering power of violence, of its ability to found culture.
Herod's belief is vestigial, to be sure, but the fact that two Gospels
mention it confirms, I think, the evangelical authenticity of the
doctrine that grounds mythology in mimetic victimization.

Modern Christians are often made uncomfortable by this false
resurrection that seems to resemble the true one, but Mark and Matthew
obviously do not share their embarrassment. Far from downplaying the
similarities, they attract our attention to them, much as Luke attracts
our attention to the resemblance between Christian communion and the
unholy reconciliation of Herod and Pilate as a result of Jesus' death.
The evangelists see something very simple and fundamental that we
ourselves should see. As soon as we become reconciled to the
similarities between violence in the Bible and myths, we can understand
how the Bible is not mythical—how the reaction to violence recorded in the Bible radically differs from the reaction recorded in myth.

Beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible proclaims the
innocence of mythical victims and the guilt of their victimizers.
Living after the widespread promulgation of the gospel, we find this
natural and never pause to think that in classical myths the opposite
is true: the persecutors always seem to have a valid cause to persecute
their victims. The Dionysiac myths regard even the most horrible
lynchings as legitimate. Pentheus in the Bacchae
is legitimately slain by his mother and sisters, for his contempt of
the god Dionysus is a fault serious enough to warrant his death.
Oedipus, too, deserves his fate. According to the myth, he has truly
killed his father and married his mother, and is thus truly responsible
for the plague that ravages Thebes. To cast him out is not merely a
permissible action, but a religious duty.

Even if they are not accused of any crime, mythical victims are still
supposed to die for a good cause, and their innocence makes their
deaths no less legitimate. In the Vedic myth of Purusha, for instance,
no wrongdoing is mentioned—but the tearing apart of the victim is
nonetheless a holy deed. The pieces of Purusha's body are needed to
create the three great castes, the mainstay of Indian society. In myth,
violent death is always justified.

If the violence of myths is purely mimetic—if it is like the Passion,
as Jesus says—all these justifications are false. And yet, since they
systematically reverse the true distribution of innocence and guilt,
such myths cannot be purely fictional. They are lies, certainly, but
the specific kind of lie called for by mimetic contagion—the false
accusation that spreads mimetically throughout a disturbed human
community at the climax when scandals polarize against the single
scapegoat whose death reunites the community. The myth-making machine
is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.

There is nothing secret about the justifications espoused by myths; the
stereotypical accusations of mob violence are always available when the
search for scapegoats is on. In the Gospels, however, the scapegoating
machinery is fully visible because it encounters opposition and no
longer operates efficiently. The resistance to the mimetic contagion
prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the
Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that
unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.

This interpretation is reinforced by the optimistic endings of myths.
The conjunction of the guilty victim and the reconciled community is
too frequent to be fortuitous. The only possible explanation is the
distorted representation of unanimous victimization. The violent
process is not effective unless it fools all witnesses, and the proof
that it does, in the case of myths, is the harmonious and cathartic
conclusion, rooted in a perfectly unanimous murder.

We hear nowadays that, behind every text and every event, there are an
infinite number of interpretations, all more or less equivalent.
Mimetic victimization makes the absurdity of this view manifest. Only
two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an
enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting
crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous
self- deception we call mythology.

The second way is the road to the truth followed by the Bible.

Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it
on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible
reveals.

This difference is not merely “moralistic” (as Nietzsche believed) or a
matter of subjective choice; it is a question of truth. When the Bible
and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do
not merely “take pity” on them. They puncture the illusion of the
unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving
and reordering device of human communities.

When we examine myths in the light of the Gospels, even their most
enigmatic features become intelligible. Consider, for example, the
disabilities and abnormalities that seem always to plague mythical
heroes. Oedipus limps, as do quite a few of his fellow heroes and
divinities. Others have only one leg, or one arm, or one eye, or are
blind, hunchbacked, etc. Others still are unusually tall or unusually
short. Some have a disgusting skin disease, or a body odor so strong
that it plagues their neighbors. In a crowd, even minor disabilities
and singularities will arouse discomfort and, should trouble erupt,
their possessors are likely to be selected as victims. The
preponderance of cripples and freaks among mythical heroes must be a
statistical consequence of the type of victimization that generates
mythology. So too the preponderance of “strangers”: in all isolated
groups, outsiders arouse a curiosity that may quickly turn to hostility
during a panic. Mimetic violence is essentially disoriented; deprived
of valid causes, it selects its victims according to minuscule signs
and pseudo-causes that we may identify as preferential signs of
victimization.

In the Bible, the false or insignificant causes of mythical violence
are effectively dismissed in the simple and sweeping statement, They hated me without a cause
(John 15:25), in which Jesus quotes and virtually summarizes Psalm
35—one of the “scapegoat psalms” that literally turns the mob's
mythical justifications inside out. Instead of the mob speaking to
justify violence with causes that it perceives as legitimate, the
victim speaks to denounce the causes as nonexistent.

To explicate archaic myths, we need only follow the method Jesus recommends and substitute this without cause for the false mythical causes.

In the Byzantine Empire, I understand, the Oedipus tragedy was read as
an analogue of the Christian Passion. If true, those early
anthropologists were approaching the right problem from the wrong end.
Their reduction of the Gospels to an ordinary myth snuffed the
evangelical light with mythology.

In order to succeed, one must illuminate the obscurity of myth with the intelligence of the Gospels.

If unanimous victimization reconciles and reorders societies in direct
proportion to its concealment, then it must lose its effectiveness in
direct proportion to its revelation. When the mythical lie is publicly
denounced, the polarization of scandals is no longer unanimous and the
social catharsis weakens and disappears. Instead of reconciling the
community, the victimization must intensify divisions and dissensions.

These disruptive consequences should be felt in the Gospels and,
indeed, they are. In the Gospel of John, for instance, everything Jesus
does and says has a divisive effect. Far from downplaying this fact,
the author repeatedly draws our attention to it. Similarly, in Matthew
10:34, Jesus says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” If
the only peace humanity has ever enjoyed depends on unconscious
victimization, the consciousness that the Gospels bring into the world
can only destroy it.

The image of Satan-“a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44)—also
expresses this opposition between the mythical obscuring and the
evangelical revealing of victimization. The Crucifixion as a defeat for
Satan, Jesus' prediction that Satan “is coming to an end” (Mark 3:26),
implies less an orderly world than one in which Satan is on the loose.
Instead of concluding with the reassuring harmony of myths, the New
Testament opens up apocalyptic perspectives, in the synoptic Gospels
equally with the Book of Revelation. To reach “the peace that
surpasseth all understanding,” humanity must give up its old, partial
peace founded on victimization—and a great deal of turmoil can be
expected. The apocalyptic dimension is not an alien element that should
be purged from the New Testament in order to “improve” Christianity, it
is an integral part of revelation.

Satan tries to silence Jesus through the very process that Jesus
subverts. He has good reasons to believe that his old mimetic trick
should still produce, with Jesus as victim, what it has always produced
in the past: one more myth of the usual type, a closed system of
mythical lies. He has good reasons to believe that the mimetic
contagion against Jesus will prove irresistible once again and that the
revelation will be squelched.

Satan's expectations are disappointed. The Gospels do everything that
the Bible had done before, rehabilitating a victimized prophet, a
wrongly accused victim. But they also universalize this rehabilitation.
They show that, since the foundation of the world, the victims of all
Passion-like murders have been victims of the same mimetic contagion as
Jesus. The Gospels make the revelation complete. They give to the
biblical denunciation of idolatry a concrete demonstration of how false
gods and their violent cultural systems are generated. This
is the truth missing from mythology, the truth that subverts the
violent system of this world. If the Gospels were mythical themselves,
they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.

Christianity, however, is not reducible to a logical scheme. The
revelation of unanimous victimization cannot involve an entire
community—else there would be no one to reveal it. It can only be the
achievement of a dissenting minority bold enough to challenge the
official truth, and yet too small to prevent a near-unanimous episode
of victimization from occurring. Such a minority, however, is extremely
vulnerable and ought normally to be swallowed up in the mimetic
contagion. Humanly speaking, the revelation is an impossibility.

In most biblical texts, the dissenting minority remains invisible, but
in the Gospels it coincides with the group of the first Christians. The
Gospels dramatize the human impossibility by insisting on the
disciples' inability to resist the crowd during the Passion (especially
Peter, who denies Jesus three times in the High Priest's courtyard).
And yet, after the Crucifixion—which should have made matters worse
than ever—this pathetic handful of weaklings suddenly succeeds in doing
what they had been unable to do when Jesus was still there to help
them: boldly proclaim the innocence of the victim in open defiance of
the victimizers, become the fearless apostles and missionaries of the
early Church.

The Resurrection is responsible for this change, of course, but even
this most amazing miracle would not have sufficed to transform these
men so completely if it had been an isolated wonder rather than the
first manifestation of the redemptive power of the Cross. An
anthropological analysis enables us to say that, just as the revelation
of the Christian victim differs from mythical revelations because it is
not rooted in the illusion of the guilty scapegoat, so the Christian
Resurrection differs from mythical ones because its witnesses are the
people who ultimately overcome the contagion of victimization (such as
Peter and Paul), and not the people who surrender to it (such as Herod
and Pilate). The Christian Resurrection is indispensable to the purely
anthropological revelation of unanimous victimization and to the
demythologizing of mythical resurrections.

Jesus' death is a source of grace not because the Father is “avenged”
by it, but because Jesus lived and died in the manner that, if adopted
by all, would do away with scandals and the victimization that follows
from scandals. Jesus lived as all men should live in order to be united
with a God Whose true nature he reveals.

Obeying perfectly the anti-mimetic prescriptions he recommends, Jesus
has not the slightest tendency toward mimetic rivalry and
victimization. And he dies, paradoxically, because of this perfect
innocence. He becomes a victim of the process from which he will
liberate mankind. When one man alone follows the prescriptions of the
kingdom of God it seems an intolerable provocation to all those who do
not, and this man automatically designates himself as the victim of all
men. This paradox fully reveals “the sin of the world,” the inability
of man to free himself from his violent ways.

During Jesus' life, the dissenting minority of those who resist the
mimetic contagion is really limited to one man, Jesus himself—who is
simultaneously the most arbitrary victim (because he deserves his
violent death less than anyone else) and the least arbitrary victim
(because his perfection is an unforgivable insult to the violent
world). He is the scapegoat of choice, the lamb of God whom we all
choose unconsciously even when not aware of choosing any victim.

When Jesus dies alone, abandoned by his apostles, the persecutors are
unanimous once again. Were the Gospels trying to tell a myth, the truth
Jesus had tried to reveal would then be buried once and for all and the
stage would be set for the triumphal revelation of the mythological
victim as the divine source of the reordering of society through the
“good” scapegoating violence that puts an end to the bad mimetic
violence that had threatened the society.

If such a death-and-resurrection myth is not what happens this time—if
Satan in the end is foiled—the immediate cause is a sudden burst of
courage in the disciples. But the strength for that did not come from
themselves. It visibly flows from the innocent death of Jesus. Divine
grace makes the disciples more like Jesus, who had announced before his
death that they would be helped by the Holy Spirit of truth. This is
one reason, I believe, the Gospel of John calls the Spirit of God the Paraclete,
a Greek word that simply means the lawyer for the defense, the defender
of the accused before a tribunal. The Paraclete is, among other things,
the counterpart of the Accuser: the Spirit of Truth who gives the
definitive refutation of the satanic lie. That is why Paul writes, in 1
Corinthians 2:7-8: “We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God. . . .
None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they
would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty
victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which
comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication
mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent
cultures. Divine grace alone can explain why, after the Resurrection,
the disciples could become a dissenting minority in an ocean of
victimization—could understand then what they had misunderstood
earlier: the innocence not of Jesus alone but of all victims of all
Passion-like murders since the foundation of the world.