Visible victim

Christian Century, March 14, 2001 by S. Mark Heim

Enthusiasts for myth, like Joseph Campbell, like to deride "Judeo-Christian religion" for its low symbolic quality and its crude moral literalism. They deplore the Bible's brutal representations of violence, its fixation on persecution and murder. The biblical tradition, they say, lacks the beauty and imaginative sophistication of great myth. The story of Jesus' death is a cut-rate version of the sacrifice of the corn king, flattened into something that belongs on a police blotter and not in high spiritual culture.

To Girard, this sort of critique gets things just backwards. Major myths are rooted in sacrificial violence, prescribe it, and shield us from awareness of our complicity in it. That is why they do not show it directly. The Bible, by contrast, makes the violence visible, and therefore makes the victims uncomfortably visible too.

Modern sensitivity to victims, which now makes people uneasy with the Bible, is rooted in the Bible. We would not be able to criticize the Gospels of encouraging victimization if we had not already been converted by them. We would not look for scapegoated victims in every corner of the world if the magnifying glass of the cross had not already helped us see them.

Campbell thinks that only spiritual philistines worry about whether an actual person was literally crucified. The Gospels, however, are of the opinion that what happened to an actual person on Golgotha is a religious concern of the first order.

The workings of mythical sacrifice require that in human society people "know not what they do." But in the Gospels, the process of sacrifice is laid out in stark clarity. Jesus says these very words from the cross. The scapegoat is revealed as a scapegoat. The point is made dramatically in Luke's account, when the centurion confesses at the moment of Jesus' death, "Surely this man was innocent."

Girard recounts the shock of recognition he experienced in coming to the New Testament after studying violence and the sacred in anthropology and the history of religion. He found in the Gospels all the elements he had come to expect in myths: the crowd coalescing against an individual, the charges of the greatest crimes and impurities. But he was startled to recognize that the reality of what was happening was explicit, not hidden. Here is the same mythic story, but this time told from the point of view of the victim, who is clearly accused unjustly and murdered wrongly. In the Gospels, the scapegoating process is stripped of its sacred mystery, and the collective persecution and abandonment are painfully illustrated so that no one, including the disciples, can honestly say afterward that they resisted the sacrificial tide.

The resurrection makes Jesus' death a failed sacrifice, but of a new kind. When mythical sacrifice succeeds, peace descends, true memory is erased and the way is smoothed for the next scapegoat. If it fails (because the community is not unanimous or the victim is not sufficiently demonized), it becomes just another killing, stoking the proliferation of violence, and the search intensifies for more and better victims.