The Girard Reader (33 page)

no longer visible. This act of concealment is essential. The very murders in which the fathers

directly took part already resemble tombs to the extent that, above all in collective and

founding murders but also in individual murders, men kill in order to lie to others and to

themselves on the subject of violence and death. They must kill and continue to kill, strange

as it may seem, in order not to know that they are killing.

Now we can understand why Jesus reproaches the scribes and Pharisees for putting up tombs

for the prophets who have been killed by their fathers. Not to recognize the founding

character of the murder, whether by denying that the fathers have killed or by condemning

the guilty in the interests of demonstrating their own innocence, is to perpetuate the

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foundation, which is an obscuring of the truth. People do not wish to know that the whole of

human culture is based on the mythic process of conjuring away man's violence by endlessly

projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all religions are built on this foundation,

which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body that it conceals.

Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation of murder.

The tomb-religion amounts to nothing more or less than the becoming visible of the

foundations, of religion and culture, of their only reason for existence.

Woe to you! for you build the tombs of the prophets whom your fathers killed. So you are witnesses and consent to the deeds of your fathers; for they killed them, and you build their

tombs.

( Luke 11:47-48)

"For they killed them, and you build their tombs": Jesus at once reveals and unambiguously

compromises
the history of all human culture. That is why he takes to himself the words of

Psalm 78: "I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world --
apo

kataboles kosmou
" ( Matt. 13:35).

If the metaphor of the tomb applies to all forms of human order taken in their entirety, it can

also be applied to the individuals formed by that order. On the individual level, the Pharisees

are absolutely identified with the system of misrecognition on which they rely as a

community.

It would be foolhardy to call "metaphorical" our usage of the term "tomb," since we are so close to the heart of the matter. To speak of the metaphor is to speak of displacement, and yet

no metaphorical displacement is involved here. On the contrary, it is the tomb that is the

starting point of the constitutive displacements of culture. Quite a number of fine minds think

that this is literally true on the level of human history as a whole; funerary rituals could well,

as we have said, amount to the first actions of a strictly cultural type. There is reason to

believe that these rituals took shape around the first of the reconciliatory victims, on the basis

of the creative transference achieved by the first communities. This also brings to mind the

sacrificial stones that mark the foundation of ancient cities, which are invariably associated

with some story of a lynching, ineffectively camouflaged.

J.-M.O.:
We must turn back at this point to what we said the other day on all these subjects.

We must keep them continually in mind in order to grasp what is at once the simplicity of the

hypothesis and the endless wealth of applications to be drawn from it.

R.G.:
Archaeological discoveries seem to suggest that people were really building tombs for

the Prophets in Jesus' period. That is a very interesting point, and it is quite possible that a

practice of this kind suggested the "metaphor." However, it would be a pity to limit the sig-

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nificance generated in our text by the different uses of the term "tomb" to a mere evocation of this practice. The fact that the metaphor applies both to the group and to the individual clearly

demonstrates that much more is involved than an allusion to specific tombs, just as much

more is involved in the following passage than a mere "moral" indictment:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like white-washed tombs, which

outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.

( Matt. 23:27)

Deep within the individual, as within the religious and cultural systems that fashion the

individual, something is hidden, and this is not merely the individual "sin" of modern

religiosity or the "complexes" of psychoanalysis. It is invariably a corpse that as it rots spreads its "uncleanness" everywhere.

Luke compares the Pharisees not just to tombs but to underground tombs, that is to say,

invisible tombs -- tombs that are perfect in a double sense, if we can put it like that, since

they conceal not only death, but also their own existence as tombs.

Woe unto you! for you are like graves which are not seen, and men walk over them without

knowing it. ( Luke 11:44)

J.-M.O.:
This double concealment reproduces the way in which cultural differentiation

develops on the basis of the founding murder. This murder tends to efface itself behind the

directly sacrificial rituals, but even these rituals risk being too revealing and so tend to be

effaced behind postritual institutions, such as judicial and political systems or the forms of

culture. These derived forms give away nothing of the fact that they are rooted in the original

murder.

R.G.:
So we have here a problem of
knowledge
which is always being lost, never to be

rediscovered again. This knowledge certainly comes to the surface in the great biblical texts

and above all in the prophetic books, but the organization of religion and law contrives to

repress it. The Pharisees, who are satisfied with what seems to them to be their success in the

religious life, are blind to the essentials and so they blind those whom they claim to be

guiding:

Woe to you lawyers! for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter

yourselves and you hindered those who were entering. ( Luke 11:52)

Michel Serres first made me see the importance of this reference to the "key of knowledge."

Jesus has come in order to place men in possession of this key. Within the perspective of the

Gospels, the Passion is first and foremost the consequence of an intolerable revelation, while

being

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roof of that revelation. It is because they do not understand what he proclaims that Jesus'

listeners agree to rid themselves of him, and in so doing, they confirm the accuracy and the

prophetic nature of the "curses against the Pharisees."

They have recourse to violence, to expel the truth about violence:

As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard, and to

provoke him to speak of many things, lying in wait for him, to catch at something he might

say. ( Luke 11:53)

Human culture is organized around a more or less violent disavowal of human violence. That

is what the religion that comes from man amounts to, as opposed to the religion that comes

from God. By affirming this point without the least equivocation, Jesus infringes upon the

supreme prohibition that governs all human order, and he must be reduced to silence. Those

who come together against Jesus do so in order to back up the arrogant assumption that

consists in saying: "If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets."

The truth of the founding murder is expressed first of all in the words of Jesus, which connect

the present conduct of men with the distant past, and with the near future (since they

announce the Passion), and with the whole of human history. The same truth of the founding

murder will also be expressed, with even greater force, in the Passion itself, which fulfills the

prophecy and gives it its full weight. If centuries and indeed millennia have to pass before

this truth is revived, it is of little consequence. The truth is registered and will finally

accomplish its work. Everything that is hidden shall be revealed.

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 subgroups 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 had 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.

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It is necessary to have legal forms in a universe where there are legal institutions, to give

unanimity 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 honors 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 skepticism, 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."
 4. H
e 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 Sacaea. The

description of the mockery by St. Matthew is the fullest. It runs thus: "Then released

____________________

4. P. Wendland, "Jesus als Saturnalien-König,"
Hermes 33
( 1898): 175-79.

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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."
 5.

However suggestive it may be in certain respects, this type of hypothesis seems untenable to

us because of the conception of the Gospel text it takes for granted. Frazer persists in making

the Gospel no different from a historical account, or even a piece of on-the-spot reporting. It