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 sub-groups 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 has 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.

It is necessary to have legal forms in a universe where there are legal institutions, to give unaniminity 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 honours 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 scepticism, 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.' ⁽⁵⁾ He 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 the Sacaea. The description of the mockery by St Matthew is the fullest. It runs thus: 'Then released 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.' ⁽⁶⁾

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 naive. 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 declare analogies of this kind to be ultimately inadmissible for the very reason that the Gospels themselves claim a kinship with such texts. He will proclaim them to be non-existent, 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 onwards will acquire its typically Christian and modern form. Everyone will now seek to cast upon his neighbor the responsibility for persecution and injustice, and, though the universality 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.
 

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 re-enacts 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 re-establish 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, who 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).

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. Deuteronomy 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 Tikarau from the top of a cliff in the Tikopia myth -- stoning fulfils this two-fold 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 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 legally performed execution? We do not know. The improvised and passionate character of the events as related might suggest that it was illegal, a lynching. ⁽⁷⁾

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 died, 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).

The Scapegoat Text

J.-M. O.: If I understand you rightly, the process of misunderstanding that is defined in the text must also be reproduced once again in the restrictive interpretations that have always been given of it -- first and foremost, of course, in the interpretations that try to limit its application to those for whom it is immediately destined.

To read the material in this way is to take an attitude full of consequences. The reading will tend to reproduce, in circumstances which are historically and ideologically different but structurally invariant, a violent transference upon the scapegoat, the very form of transference that has been in force since the dawn of humanity. So it is by no means a fortuitous or innocent reading. It transforms the universal revelation of the founding murder into a polemical denunciation of the Jewish religion. So as not to have to recognize that they are themselves involved in the message, people will claim that it only involves the Jews.
 

R. G.: This kind of restrictive interpretation is indeed the only way out for a type of thought that is in principle made over to 'Christianity' but is firmly resolved to divest itself of any form of violence, and so inevitably, brings with it a new form of violence, directed against a new scapegoat -- the Jew. In brief, what happens again is what Jesus reproached the Pharisees for doing, and since Jesus has been accepted, it can no longer be done directly to him. Once again, the truth and universality of the process revealed by the text is demonstrated as it is displaced toward the latest available victims. Now it is the Christians who say: If we had lived in the days of our Jewish fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of Jesus. If the people whom Jesus addresses and who do not listen to him fulfil the measure of their fathers, then the Christians who believe themselves justified in denouncing these same people in order to exculpate themselves are fulfilling a measure that is already full to overflowing. They claim to be governed by the text that reveals the process of misunderstanding, and yet they repeat that misunderstanding. With their eyes fixed on the text, they do once again what the text condemns. The only way of transcending this blindness consists in repudiating -- as is done today -- not the process that is revealed in the text and can maintain itself, paradoxically, in its shade, but the text itself; the text is declared to be responsible for the acts of violence committed in its name and actually blamed for not, up to now, mastering the old violence except by diverting it to new victims. There is at present a general tendency among Christians to repudiate this text or at any rate never to take any account of it, concealing it as if it were something to be ashamed of. There is one last trick, one last victim, and this is the text itself, which is chained to a fallacious reading and dragged before the tribunal of public opinion. It is the ultimate irony that the gospel text should be condemned by public opinion in the name of charity. Face to face with a world that is, as we well know, today overflowing with charity, the text appears to be disconcertingly harsh.

There is actually no contradiction between the choice of the Jews, as it is reaffirmed in the Gospels, and texts like those of the 'curses'. If anywhere in the world a religious or cultural form managed to evade the accusation made against the Pharisees -- not excluding those that confess Jesus himself -- then the Gospels would not be the truth about human culture. In order for the Gospels to have the universal significance Christians claim for them, it is necessary for there to be nothing on earth that is superior to the Jewish religion and the sect of the Pharisees. This absolute degree of representativeness is part and parcel of the status of the Jews as the chosen people, which is never disavowed by the New Testament.

Nor is there any contradiction between a revelation of violence made on the basis of biblical texts and the veneration that the New Testament never ceases to show for the Old. As we saw earlier, when we were considering the texts of Genesis and Exodus, the revelation of the founding murder and of its generative power in regard to myth become increasingly apparent in these texts. That implies that even at this early stage the inspiration of the Bible and the prophets is at work on the myths, undoing them in order to reveal their truth. Instead of invariably displacing the responsibility for the collective murder toward the victim, this form of inspiration takes a contrary path; it looks once again at the mythical elaborations and tends to deconstruct them, placing the responsibility for the violence upon those who are really responsible -- the members of the community. In this way, it paves the way for the full and final revelation.
 

J.-M. O.: To understand that the Gospels really do reveal all this violence, we have to understand first of all that this violence engenders the mythic meanings. Now I can appreciate why you decided to place our initial discussions on Judeo-Christian texts after the section on basic anthropology. You wanted to show that we are now in a position to get to the truth about all non-Christian religious phenomena by means of purely scientific and hypothetical procedures. Then the shift to the Judeo-Christian texts confirms the analysis and makes it more compelling.
 

R. G.: What you say seems quite right to me. In fact, that is exactly why I wrote Violence and the Sacred in the way that I did. I am well aware of the blemishes in that work, as I am of the blemishes in what we have been saying here.

The thesis of the scapegoat owes nothing to any form of impressionistic or literary borrowing. I believe it to be fully demonstrated on the basis of the anthropological texts. That is why I have chosen not to listen to those who criticize my scientific claims and have determined to try to reinforce and sharpen the systematic character of my work, and to confirm the power of the scheme to reveal the genesis and structure of cultural phenomena.

In effect, all that I did in Violence and the Sacred was to retrace, with all its hesitations, my own intellectual journey, which eventually brought me to the Judeo-Christian writings, though long after I had become convinced of the importance of the victimage mechanism. In the course of this journey, I remained for a long period as hostile to the Judeo-Christian texts as modernist orthodoxy could wish. But I came to the conclusion that the best way of convincing my readers was not to cheat on my own experience and to reproduce its successive stages in two separate works, one of which would deal with the universe of sacred violence, and the other with the Judeo-Christian aspect.

In the 'modern' period, Judeo-Christian writings have become more and more alien to modern philosophy and all our 'sciences of man'. They now seem more foreign than the myths of the Ojibwa and the Tikopia. But our intellectual life is being influenced by forces that, far from taking the Judeo-Christian scriptures further and further away, in fact bring them closer by a process whose circularity the 'sciences of man' still fail to grasp.

We can no longer believe that if it is we who are reading the Gospels in the light of an ethnological, modern revelation, which would really be the first thing of its kind. We have to reverse this order. It is still the great Judeo-Christian spirit that is doing the reading. All that appears in ethnology, appears in the light of a continuing revelation, an immense process of historical work that enables us little by little to catch up with texts that are, in effect, already quite explicit, though not for the kind of people that we are -- who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not.

Trusting ever more numerous and precise analogies, ethnological research has been trying for centuries to demonstrate that Christianity is just one more religion like the others and that Christianity's pretensions to absolute singularity are merely founded on the irrational attachment of Christians to the religion within which they chanced to be born. It might appear, at first sight, that the discovery of the mechanism that produces religion -- the collective transference against a victim who is first reviled and then sacralized -- would bring with it the final and most essential stone in the structure of 'demystification' to which this present reading, quite obviously, presents a sequel. Yet the discovery contributes, not just one more analogy, but the source of all analogies, which is situated behind the myths, hidden within their infra-structure and finally revealed, in a perfectly explicit way, in the account of the Passion.

By an astonishing reversal, it is texts that are twenty or twenty-five centuries old -- initially revered blindly but today rejected with contempt -- that will reveal themselves to be the only means of furthering all that is good and true in the anti-Christian endeavors of modern times: the as-yet-ineffectual determination to rid the world of the sacred cult of violence. These texts supply such endeavors with exactly what is needed to give a radically sociological reading of the historical forms of transcendence, and at the same time they place their own transcendence in an area which is impervious to any critique by placing it in the area from which a critique would derive.

Of course the Gospels also speak tirelessly of this reversal of all interpretations. After telling the parable of the laborers in the vineyard who all came together to drive out the envoys of the Master and then finally to kill his son so that they would be the sole proprietors, Christ offers his audience a problem in Old Testament exegesis:

But he looked at them and said, 'What then is this that is written: "The very stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner"' (Luke 20:17).

If we accept that all human religions and all human culture come down to the parable of the murderous laborers in the vineyard -- that is, come down to the collective expulsion of the victim -- and if this foundation can remain a foundation only to the extent that it does not become apparent, then it is clear that only those texts in which this foundation is made apparent will no longer be built upon it and so will be genuinely revealing. The words from Psalm 118 thus have a remarkable epistemological value; they require an interpretation for which Christ himself ironically calls, knowing very well that he alone is capable of giving it in the process of having himself rejected, of himself becoming the rejected stone, with the aim of showing that this stone has always formed a concealed foundation. And now the stone is revealed and can no longer form a foundation, or, rather, it will found something that is radically different.

The problem of exegesis Christ puts to his audience can only be resolved, in short, if we see in the words that he quotes the very formula for the reversal, at once an invisible and an obvious one, that I am putting forward. The rejected stone is the scapegoat, who is Christ. By submitting to violence, Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.

The text alerts us, in short, to its own functioning, which eludes the laws of ordinary textuality, and by virtue of this fact the warning itself eludes us, as it eluded Christ's audience. If such is indeed the movement of the text, then the claims of Christianity to make Christ the author of a universal revelation are far more securely founded than even its defenders would imagine. They fall back inevitably into ordinary textuality, blotting out once again the true point of origin, which is nonetheless clearly inscribed in scripture; they reject all over again, in a final and paradoxical form of expulsion, the stone that is Christ, and they still fail to see that this selfsame stone continues to serve them as a concealed cornerstone.

If you read the commentaries customarily written about phrases of this kind, not only by Christians but also by so-called 'scientific' exegetes, you will be amazed by the universal inability to recognize meanings that are for us by now so obvious that we are hesitant to repeat the train of reasoning which would make them explicit.

The exegetes are aware, obviously, that Christ identifies with the stone rejected by the builders, but they fail to see the formidable reverberations of this phrase on the anthropological level, and the reason why it is already present in the Old Testament.

Instead of reading myths in the light of the Gospels, people have always read the Gospels in the light of myths. In comparison with the astonishing work of demystification effected by the Gospels, our own exercises in demystification are only slight sketches, though they may also be cunning obstacles that our minds erect against the gospel revelation. But from now on the obstacles themselves must contribute to the invisible but ineluctable advance of revelation.

Notes

5. P. Wendland, 'Jesus als Saturnalien-Konig', Hermes XXXIII, 175-179.

6. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Pt VI (The Scapegoat) pp. 413-414.

7. The Acts of the Apostles, 69 (Anchor Bible).