To set the scene: the first message was from a man who alluded to the lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine (as he often does) to express his deep yearning for a better world, a world without war:

Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too.

Imagine all the people, living life in peace.

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. . .

The second message, a few minutes later, was from our resident Buddhist-Quaker, who expressed the view (as he often does) that all our suffering comes from not accepting reality as it is. We need to accept what the past has given us, and not spend energy wishing the past, and therefore the present, to be different than what it is. To dream of something different only leads to more suffering.

The dissonance between these two messages was striking—yet both seemed to contain some truth. I had come to worship with no intention of speaking, but slowly, as sometimes happens, words began to take shape. After some time, I spoke (though now, with the leisure to reflect and write, I have elaborated, quoted, and added references—footnotes are not usually part of vocal minstry!):

The messages this morning have brought to mind words from the Quaker writer and activist Parker Palmer, who says that we are called to “live in the tragic gap,” the gap between what is and what should (or could) be, between our reality and our aspirations.^[1] It is tragic not just because it is sad, though it is that, but in the classical sense of tragedy as “an eternal and inescapable feature of our human condition.” He writes:

“Of all the tensions we must hold in personal and political life, perhaps the most fundamental and most challenging is standing and acting with hope in the “tragic gap.” On one side of that gap, we see the hard realities of the world, realities that can crush our spirits and defeat our hopes. On the other side of that gap, we see real-world possibilities, life as we know it could be, because we have seen it that way. We see a world at war, but we have known moments of peace. We see racial and religious enmity, but we have known moments of unity. We see suffering caused by unjust scarcities, but we have known moments of material and spiritual sharing in which abundance was generated. Possibilities of this sort are not wishful dreams or fantasies: they are alternative realities that we have witnessed in our own lives.”^[2]

It is hard to live in this gap; we desperately want to escape the tension, and so too often we “fall” to one side or the other. On one side is “corrosive cynicism,” which says the world will never change, nothing we do will ever make a difference, everything is broken beyond repair. On the other side, we can fall into “irrelevant idealism,” floating above the fray, in a fantasy world that is detached from the world as it is. Although cynicism and idealism might seem to be polar opposites, they have this in common: they both take us “out of the gap and out of the action, out of those places we might make a life-giving contribution if only we knew how to hold the tension.”^[3]

Life lived in the tragic gap requires faith; Palmer writes that here the metric of success is not effectiveness, but faithfulness.^[4]

Living in the tragic gap also requires hope, which nowadays can be in short supply. Hope is not the same as optimism--naively assuming that everything will somehow turn out okay, which ends up only reinforcing the status quo. Hope, as Norman Wirzba has pointed out, is not a thing that we can possess, not a shield or a security blanket, “not like a vaccine that renders people immune to suffering.”^[5] Rather, hope is a verb: it wants to be active. Hope, like love, is something we do. Hope in this sense is radical hope: seeing with clear eyes the world as it is, but also with the vision to see what could be, where “every kindness large or slight, shifts the balance toward the light.”^[6]

Finally, living in the tragic gap requires wisdom—the “wisdom to know the difference”:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things which should be changed,
And wisdom to know the difference.

–Attributed to Reinhold Neibuhr

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^[1] Parker Palmer, “The Broken-Open Heart: Living with Faith and Hope in the Tragic Gap.” Weavings, XXIV: 2 (2009), 1-12.

^[2] Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy (Jossey-Bass, 2011), 191.

^[3] Palmer, “The Broken-Open Heart,” 8-9.

^[4] Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy, 193.

^[5] Noman Wirzba, Loves Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis (Yale, 2024), 16.

^[6] Carrie Newcomer, “Lean in Toward the Light.”

Those of you in the more liturgical churches (which would not include Quakers!) know that Easter is not a single day, but a season: the 50 days between Easter Sunday and Pentecost. The lectionary readings during this season of Easter include accounts of the post-Easter appearances of the risen Christ, this year mostly from the Gospel of John.

I am struck by how the disciples and other witnesses consistently refer to the risen Christ as “Lord.” Mary Magdalene, having encountered Jesus in the Garden on Easter morning, tells the disciples, “I have seen the Lord” (Jn 20:18). Later, after Jesus has appeared to the disciples (minus “doubting Thomas”) in the upper room, they tell Thomas, “We have seen the Lord” (20:25). And a week later, when Jesus shows him the wounds in his hand and the hole in his side, Thomas declares, “My Lord and my God!” (20:28). Later still, in Galilee, the disciples from their boat see Jesus on the shore, and the disciple whom Jesus loved said “It is the Lord!” (21:7).

Quakers, let it be said, are not much given to this “Lord” language. No doubt that is partly due to the general confusion about Christology; what can it possibly mean to say that someone is “fully human and fully divine”? But partly I wonder if our reluctance might be a remnant of the strong anti-hierarchical stance that Quakers have taken from their beginnings in 17^th century England. During a time of marked social stratification, Quakers consistently refused to bow, doff their hats, or use titles (“my Lord”) when addressing their social superiors—which often landed them in jail.

What I have come to understand over the last several years is that every time the New Testament says “Jesus is Lord” or “Christ is Lord,” what is not written but implied is this: if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not. It is not only possible but necessary to read the New Testament through the lens of anti-imperialism. In the first century, the Roman Emperor was considered (and considered himself) to be divine. John Dominic Crossan puts it succinctly:

There was a human being in the first century who was called ‘Divine,’ ‘Son of God,’ ‘God,’ and ‘God from God,’ and whose titles were ‘Lord,’ ‘Redeemer,’ ‘Liberator,’ and ‘Savior of the World.’ . . . Most Christians probably think that those titles were originally created and uniquely applied to Christ. But before Jesus ever existed, all those terms belonged to Caesar Augustus [and subsequently, to his successors]. To proclaim them of Jesus the Christ was thereby to deny them of Caesar the Augustus. Christians were not simply using ordinary titles applied to all sorts of people at that time, or even extraordinary titles applied to special people in the East. They were taking the identity of the Roman emperor and giving it to a Jewish peasant. Either this was a peculiar joke and a very low lampoon, or it was what the Romans called majestas, and we call high treason.[1]

All of this has recently become quite relevant; it seems we still have our aspiring Caesars. On Orthodox Easter (the Eastern Church celebrates Easter a week after the Western Church), President Trump posted on Truth Social an AI-generated image of himself, dressed in flowing robes and a mantle, with a healing light emanating from his hands, surrounded by adoring subjects, with mixed religious and patriotic symbols in the background. Although Trump claimed that he was just pretending to be a doctor, the overwhelming consensus was that this crossed the line into blasphemy. It was certainly over-the-top hubris and narcissism, worthy of those Roman Emperors. If nothing else, the image should reinforce the anti-imperial significance of Jesus is Lord.

The post in question came shortly after another post, where Trump pointedly criticized Pope Leo for doing what Popes are supposed to do: advocate for peace. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and all that. This in turn was followed by an unprecedented public discussion of the heretofore arcane “just war theory.”

Quakers, being one of the historic “peace churches,” have never been much for that line of thinking; we have a hard time thinking of any war as something other than sinful. In practice, it seems to us, “just war theory” has functioned through history mostly as a moral fig-leaf from the Church, to give legitimacy to any and every war the state chooses to engage in. It is thus especially significant that several American archbishops have publicly stated that our Iran “excursion” does not satisfy the conditions necessary to just war theory.

As has been widely noted, before becoming Pope, Leo was head of the Augustinian order and wrote his PhD thesis on the moral thought of Augustine—yes, the same Augustine who first articulated just war theory. But who are you going to listen to: Pope Leo, or JD Vance?

In the religious rhetoric from the government about this war, we are seeing the logical conclusion of “Christian nationalism”—and it is ugly. (I put the term in scare quotes because I consider the two words incompatible.) The glorification of violence, the puerile chest-thumping, the routine threats of war crimes, the unexamined assumption that God is on “our” side.

Toward the beginning of the war, Marco Rubio said that we could not possibly negotiate with Iran, because it is “run by a bunch of religious fanatics, with an apocalyptic world view.” Sounds like a pretty accurate description of our own ‘secretary of war,’ who seems to believe that his mission in this world is to cheer on the Apocalypse.

Perhaps we will never quite agree on what “Jesus is Lord” might mean; a diversity of understandings is to be expected. But can we at least agree that Caesar is not Lord?

[1] John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (2007), p. 28.

“There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.”

–A. J. Muste

[This is an expanded version of vocal ministry I gave at Lancaster Friends Meeting on March 1^st, the day after our country embarked on “military operations” against Iran.]

When events in the Middle East became known yesterday, my first thoughts—unexpectedly—turned to A.J. Muste. In the early months of World War II, Muste wrote a little pamphlet, War Is the Enemy. [1] That title captures what I have felt now for many decades. Our discourse around wars usually centers on “the enemy” and their alleged evils. We ask questions about whether this war is legal, or not; whether this particular was is just, or unjust; whether war crimes may have been committed, or not; or even whether genocide may have been committed, or not. But the logic of war is inexorable; once you have decided that killing those who disagree with you is acceptable, war will escalate. War itself becomes the enemy. When Muste wrote in 1942, no one in America could have possibly foreseen that within three short years, America would firebomb (and destroy) Dresden and Tokyo, or obliterate Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. War has a way of making you into the very evil you are fighting. “For all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Mt 26:52).

A.J. Muste’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Holland when he was a young child. He grew up in the strict confines of the Dutch Reformed Church, and in 1909 was ordained as a minister in that denomination. Eventually he found its theology too confining, and he left in 1914 to become a Congregational minister, with a local church in suburban Boston. But during World War I, his sermons became increasingly critical of the war, and he was forced out of his local congregation. By 1918, under the influence of Rufus Jones (among other things, co-founder of the American Friends Service Committee), he began attending a Quaker Meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, and late in 1918 was accepted into membership in the Religious Society of Friends, one of the so-called “Historic Peace Churches.”

As a consequence of the Lawrence Textile strike, Muste was drawn into the radical labor movement in the early 1920s. Influenced by “the social gospel,” he worked for many years as a labor organizer, eventually flirting with the Trotskyite politics of the Workers Party. But after a profound religious experience in Paris in 1936, he returned to his roots as a Christian pacifist. He began more and more clearly to see that the peaceable kingdom would never come by violent revolution. Thus his well-known aphorism: “There is no way to peace; peace is the way.” He recognized that means and ends cannot be separated; a good result cannot come by evil means. No one has said this better than 17th century Quaker William Penn:

A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we do evil, that good may come of it. . . . To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals. [2]

A.J. Muste went on to become the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, which he had co-founded with other clergy in 1916. From the late 1930s until his death in 1967, he was one of the most visible and articulate spokesmen for religious opposition to war.

Toward the end of his life, Muste was part of a small demonstration and vigil protesting the Vietnam war outside of the White House. Someone approached him to ask, “What are you doing? Do you really think you can change the country?” Muste is said to have replied: “I am not doing this to change my country; I am doing this to prevent my country from changing me.”

Muste’s words strike me as an appropriate response for a person living under the conditions of Empire. And make no mistake: we are now living under the conditions of Empire. Our government now feels empowered to start wars without even the pretense of seeking Congressional approval; abduct and even assassinate foreign leaders; conduct extra-judicial killings in international waters; send masked paramilitary forces into our cities, to arrest even legal immigrants and shoot citizens; and threaten to take over our elections.

O God of all the Nations: We have long been persuaded that your ways are the ways of peace and of reconciliation, and not the ways of violence. But we also confess that we have not been able to change our country. In these dark times, grant us the steadfast faithfulness to at least not be changed by our country. May we have the courage to continue to proclaim: There is no way to peace; peace is the way.

[1] A.J. Muste, War is the Enemy, Pendle Hill Pamphlet #15 (1942), Wallingford PA.

[2] William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude (1693).

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To review: Rene Girard’s “mimetic theory” and the related “scapegoat mechanism” is an attempt to explain the emergence of archaic religion. [See my Substack post of March 26, 2025 for a more extensive discussion; or chapter 1 in the book.] In brief, primitive human groups above a certain size were constantly threatened by internal anarchy and mimetic rivalry (i.e., we want what others want, simply because they want it). They “solved” this problem by stumbling onto “the scapegoat mechanism,” whereby (completely unconsciously) a single “scapegoat” was identified, blamed for all the community’s problems, and killed by mob violence (classically by stoning, where everyone and therefore no one is responsible). What had been all-against-all rivalry was thereby transformed into all-against-one solidarity (but at the expense of the unfortunate scapegoat).

The Hebrew Scriptures show that, for whatever reason, the ancient Hebrews were uniquely sensitive to the plight of victims. Girard summarizes the biblical narrative as a slow and gradual shift from the guilt of scapegoats in archaic religion, to the innocence of victims. This process culminated in the passion and crucifixion of Jesus, which unveiled for all time that this scapegoat mechanism was not about “sacred violence” (i.e., violence sanctioned by God) but human violence projected into the heavens.

This shift took the Hebrew people many centuries to accomplish, but this past weekend we saw the shift from the guilt of the scapegoat to the innocence of the scapegoat unfold in real time in Minneapolis. Within two hours of the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old VA nurse, administration propagandists began to label him as “a domestic terrorist” who was “brandishing a gun,” intent on causing “maximum damage” by “massacring” law enforcement agents, who then responded by firing “defensive shots.” In a word, Pretti was being made into a classic scapegoat, blamed for his own death.

Within a matter of a very few hours, bystander videos emerged that forcefully contradicted the government’s narrative. Alex Pretti was not brandishing a gun, but a cell phone. When he paused to help a woman whom agents had pushed to the ground and pepper-sprayed, Pretti himself was pepper-sprayed at close range and then tackled and subdued by at least six masked agents. In the ensuing scuffle, one agent apparently removed a handgun (properly registered and legal under Minnesota law) from Pretti’s waistband or holster, at which point agents executed—I use that word deliberately—him by firing at least ten rounds at close range, all within five seconds. A sworn statement by a physician who came upon the scene within a minute or two and who requested to evaluate and attempt resuscitation, said that the border patrol agents were not attempting to render first-aid, but at that point “just counting bullet holes.”

In the two days since the murder, administration officials have only doubled down on their rhetoric of vilification and demonization. The whole world can see that these are lies (the timeline and substance of these lies is documented in today’s Guardian, in an article under the headline “Trump officials continue to push lies after fatal shooting of Alex Pretti”).

In the ancient world, the scapegoat mechanism could successfully produce group cohesion (albeit at the expense of an innocent victim), because the process was unanimous and remained totally unconscious. That is no longer possible in today’s world. In modern usage, we know what a scapegoat is, in a way the ancient world did not: an innocent person unfairly singled out and blamed for something they did not do. Today, the scapegoating process no longer produces unanimity. Someone is bound to name what is really happening—or produce a cell phone video that demonstrates the truth.

In Girard’s view, scapegoating in the modern world has become less and less effective as a direct result of the Christian Gospel, now universalized and secularized in what he calls “the modern concern for victims.” But just because the scapegoating mechanism is no longer very effective does not mean that it has disappeared; in fact, those intent on scapegoating flail about with more and more ineffective attempts to blame their victims, and claim that they are the victims. Girard says we have now arrived at a point where we compete to determine who is the more genuine and deserving victim, giving rise to “the virtually universal feeling of being victimized. . . [with] each person vehemently insisting that he is the victim.”[1]

Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino (dressed as always in his brown-shirt uniform, which seems intended to evoke Hitler’s brown-shirt paramilitary thugs) went so far as to claim that it was his border patrol agents who were “the real victims.” This makes the following comment by Girard seem prescient:

One can persecute today only in the name of being against persecution. One can only persecute persecutors. You have to prove that your opponent is a persecutor in order to justify your own desire to persecute.[2]

I think this explains the administration’s otherwise inexplicable and dehumanizing rhetoric about “domestic terrorists,” “violent anarchists,” and an “invasion by violent aliens,” and that their efforts to deport only involve “the worst of the worst,” “heinous criminals” (two phrases of which they are especially fond), despite the evidence of our eyes. They seek to persuade us that they (or we?) are the real victims, and so claim license to deploy roving bands of masked paramilitary agents to randomly apprehend immigrants (and even citizens who look like they “might be immigrants”) off the streets, breaking car windows, deploying pepper spray and tear gas against legal protestors, arresting and deporting mostly those with no criminal record, breaking into homes without a warrant, arresting five-year old children, and reacting with unrestrained violence to citizens exercising their first amendment rights.

It will not work. For all with eyes to see, we can see who the victims are. It is not the masked men with guns, but the citizens with whistles and cell phone cameras—and, let us not forget, the immigrants being arrested and deported, with little or no attempt at due process.

[1] Rene Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, p. 73.

[2] Girard, Evolution and Conversion, p. 184.

At this point, it seems time to venture off strict adherence to the subject of the book, and post on related subjects (which I have done with a couple recent posts). This month’s post is an elaboration of vocal ministry I gave at my local Quaker meeting last month, and it seems important enough to develop and disseminate more widely.

For those of you who are not familiar with the tradition of so-called unprogrammed Quaker worship, we meet in silence, or what we prefer to think of as “expectant waiting,” in the expectation that words appropriate to our condition will be given to us. In a typical hour of worship at my meeting, there might be anywhere from two to eight or ten “messages” given: generally short, spontaneous, and unprepared, though usually on a subject to which the speaker has given some previous thought.

At the meeting that day, the first message was from one of our members, who observed that early Friends (i.e., 17th century) often spoke about truth, but to her frustration they never said what the truth was. She observed that in science, truth changes according to the evidence. She added that the evidence she saw was that love is truth.

After an interval of several more minutes of silence, I offered the following contribution, again here somewhat expanded and with some elaboration, in the interest of coherence. [Note that chapter 26 in the book deals at some length with the issue of truth and “the lie.”]

“What is Truth?”

The question of “what is truth” is a very old one. In the Gospel of John (chapter 18), Jesus, on trial before Pilate, says that “for this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth.” And Pilate’s reply, dripping with cynicism: “What is truth?”

It is true that early Friends spoke frequently of truth, sometimes referring to themselves as “Friends of Truth” or “Publishers of Truth.” But the truth they spoke of was not the truth of a philosophical proposition, or a religious creed, or a scientific theory. It was the truth of their own lives, what the Psalmist calls “truth in the inward parts” (Ps 51:6, KJV). In this understanding, the opposite of this truth is not falsehood, but deceit, and specifically self-deceit, what we might call denial. When early Friends looked around, they saw everywhere (including in the established church) a society based on systematic greed, exploitation, and violence . They were “convicted” of their own complicity in these institutions—and as they faced this truth, they also experienced the power to rise above what they saw. When they exhorted one another to “be valiant for the truth,” they were saying, in modern parlance, “Get real; look at the reality of your lives—and find a surer foundation on which to base your life: the Truth. [1]

A few months ago, I had reason to revisit an essay from 1978, “The Power of the Powerless,” by Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and political dissident. In it, he argued that even in the most authoritarian societies, the powerless always have the power to choose to “live in the truth” rather than “live within a lie.”

He gives the example of a small-scale greengrocer who, like everyone else, was expected to post in his shop window whatever inane slogan the party was currently parroting (“workers of the world, unite. . .”). No one reads the slogan; no one pretends to believe the slogan. It is just what is expected.

But one day, the greengrocer “snaps.” He quietly takes down the sign; he begins to say what he really thinks in political meetings; he stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He “breaks the rules of the game. . . and steps out of living within the lie. . . his revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.” His neighbors notice; some might quietly sympathize with him. But in short order, “the system” also notices. The greengrocer loses his job, his status, and whatever small privileges he had, and begins to be ostracized. His life spirals downward. Havel comments:

If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.

—Vaclav Havel

Havel himself spent a couple of years in prison for writing this essay. But it circulated underground, and eventually enough people chose to “live in the truth” that, with the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the communist regime collapsed in the face of massive nonviolent protests, and Havel, by popular acclamation, became president of Czechoslovakia. That is “the power of the powerless,” the power to choose to live in the truth.

We live in a time when we are surrounded by lies. There is “the big lie” about the election of 2020 being stolen (still a bedrock belief for a large majority of self-identified Republicans, despite the total lack of evidence).

But increasingly, there are the little lies fed to us every day. That Venezuela is about democracy or drugs (as the President himself as made abundantly clear, it’s about oil). That the immigration crackdown targets only “heinous criminals” and “the worst of the worst” (the large majority of those detained and deported have no criminal record, other than crossing the border without permission, which is a civil and not a criminal offense). That anyone who is willing to confront ICE on behalf of their neighbors is a “domestic terrorist.” That anyone opposing current administration policy is a “radical left lunatic” or a “communist.” That there are now ten separate “national emergencies” that justify unprecedented expansion of presidential power. That tariffs are not paid for by American consumers. That there is a genocide against Christians in Nigeria, justifying American cruise missiles (most of which apparently either didn’t explode or fell harmlessly in empty fields). That all expenditures lawfully appropriated by Congress, but which Russell Vought doesn’t like, are characterized by “waste, fraud, and abuse.” That dead people and undocumented immigrants are voting in vast numbers. That white men are “the real victims of discrimination” in this country. That the economy, which is marginally but demonstrably worse now than a year ago, was then “a disaster” and is now the strongest in history. That veterans who remind the military that they should not obey unlawful orders are committing “sedition” and even “treason.”

It is not given to any of us as mere mortals to know the final, ultimate, eternal and unchanging truth. But despite our human limitations, we can choose to live toward the truth, and to refuse to live within the lie. That is the “power of the powerless.” We can choose, as was once said of Dorothy Day, “to live as though the truth is actually true.” We can choose to say: “For this I was born, and this I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth.”

May it be so.

Take truth for authority—not authority for truth.

—Lucretia Mott, 19th century Quaker abolitionist and reformer

Be valiant for the truth upon the earth. . .

—George Fox, co-founder of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)

___________________________________________________________________________

[1] See Rex Ambler, The Light Within: Then and Now, Pendle Hill Pamphlet # 425, and Ambler, Truth of the Heart.

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The past few months have seen a steady stream of new subscribers to this Substack, so primarily for these new subscribers: I started posting in January, primarily to publicize a book project while I was seeking a publisher. The first post gives a brief summary of the book, and the second (from February) is the entire prologue, which will give a good sense of the scope of the book. (You can find these by going to tgates.substack.com, clicking on “Archive” at the top, and then scrolling down to the bottom to find the earliest posts.)

Subsequently, the book was accepted by Wipf and Stock Publishers, and was published in June as Turning Toward the Victim: The Bible, Sacred Violence, and the End of Scapegoating in Quaker Perspective. Since then, most of the posts have been summaries of various chapters. I hope the summaries are helpful—but there is no substitute for reading the book in its entirety. (The 40% discount from the publisher has expired, so it is $38 from Wipf and Stock. The cheapest option is Amazon Kindle, for $9.99.)

Up to now, the posts have largely consisted of summaries of various passages from the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament. But this month, I am venturing into the Christian New Testament.

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Casting Stones

Let any among you who is without sin cast the first stone at her. (John 8:7)

Death by stoning is the archetypal fate of scapegoats. When a mob kills by casting stones, everyone is responsible—and so no one is responsible.

The Gospel of John briefly alludes to two incidents where Jesus’s opponents “took up stones again to stone him” (10:31; see also 8:59), but he either “hid himself” (8:59) or “escaped from their hands” (10:39), because his “time had not yet come” (7:6). And in Luke 4, the townspeople in Nazareth, displeased with Jesus’s inaugural sermon, attempt to force him off a cliff—the equivalent of stoning.

In perhaps the best-known biblical incident of near-stoning, Jesus is not the target of a mob, but rather the one who intervenes to avert a stoning. The incident, recounted in John 8:2-11[1], is well known, but briefly, Jesus is teaching in the Temple when the authorities brought to him a woman “caught in the very act of adultery.” They pointed out that the law of Moses “commanded us to stone such women,” and, in order to test him, ask, “What do you say?” Jesus replies with one of the more memorable lines in the Gospels: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” One by one, her accusers drift away.

Feminist scholars have pointed out all kinds of problems with the way this story is told [2]. “The law of Moses commanded us to stone such women”; what the law of Moses actually says is that “both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death” (Lev 20:10, Deut 22:22). If the woman was truly “caught in the very act,” why was her co-adulterer not also brought forward? According to tradition, there must be two witnesses to a capital crime, and these two witnesses initiate the execution by throwing the first stones. It is not clear who the witnesses are, or even if they are present. Finally, this is a prominent example of the biblical text’s tendency to preferentially scapegoat women for perceived sexual crimes, over the transgressions of men (sexual or otherwise).

Even allowing for all this, what is clear is that there is a mob thirsting for blood. Jesus himself is in a difficult position; if he forbids the stoning, the authorities will accuse him of disobeying the law of Moses. On the other hand, one wrong move in such a highly charged atmosphere could signal for the stoning to commence. Girard says that at this point, “the first stone is the last obstacle that prevents the stoning”; once the first stone is cast, we can be sure that others will imitatively follow [3]. Jesus kneels and writes with his finger in the sand, deflecting the crowd’s attention away from the woman. When Jesus finally stands to speak, he explicitly calls attention to the first stone: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Jennifer Brashaw comments: “Jesus has shifted the accusations of the crowd away from the scapegoat and onto themselves. . . . The accusers, once united in a threatening mob, slowly disappear from view . . . no longer an intimidating force demanding death but now individuals distracted by their own guilt rather than obsessed with the guilt of another” [4].

Against all odds, Jesus has successfully defused a mimetic mob intent on scapegoating violence. Girard goes on to compare this incident from the Gospel with another incident described in ancient literature, an incident with a very different outcome.

Apollonius was a second century wandering sage and miracle worker. Most of what we know about him comes from Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a biography written in the following century by the Greek author Philostratus. Apollonius’s biographer clearly knows the Christian Gospels and thought the contrast between Apollonius and Christ was much to Apollonius’s advantage: “among the pagans, his miracles were viewed as superior to those of Jesus” [5]. In Philostratus’s telling, Apollonius’s birth was accompanied by “unusual divine signs in the heavens.” As an adult, he became an itinerant teacher and “gathered a number of followers around him who became convinced that he was no ordinary human, but the Son of God.” He performed many healing miracles, including casting out demons. Eventually, he aroused the opposition of the Roman authorities, was put on trial, and executed. After his death, he appeared to some of his followers, who were convinced that his soul had ascended to heaven [6].

Perhaps Apollonius’ most spectacular miracle was his healing of an unspecified plague in Ephesus. After their own attempts failed, the Ephesians summoned Apollonius. From Philostratus’ account:

“Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease.” And with these words he led the entire population to the theatre. . . . And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore arranged the Ephesians around him and said: “Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.” Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying for them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause, Apollonius bade them remove the stones. . . . When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molossian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do [7].

Philostratus evidently expected his readers to be impressed by this wonder. We, however, are appalled at his “horrible miracle” [8]. Reading this story from the perspective of the Gospels, we see (even if unconsciously) something that the ancient pagans could not: collective “sacred violence” against an innocent victim, the use of good violence to drive out bad violence.

It is hard to imagine a more definitive description of a scapegoat incident than Philostratus’s account: a crisis (the plague), the identification of a marginalized victim (the blind beggar), the all-against-one violence of the mob (by stoning), and especially the overt dehumanization and demonization of an innocent victim. Furthermore, Girard comments that “the plague of Ephesus is not necessarily bacterial.” Philostratus’ account of the stoning is immediately preceded by a description of rampant rivalry and disorder in the city. “It is an epidemic of mimetic rivalries, an interweaving of scandals, a war of all against all, which, thanks to the victim selected by the diabolical cleverness of Apollonius, is transformed ‘miraculously’ into a reconciliation of all against one” [9]. The plague abates.

In comparing these two incidents, it is clear that Jesus in the encounter with the adulterous woman plays a role directly opposite that of Apollonius. “Apollonius’s achievement is to incite the throwing of the first stone, and thus the unanimous violence. Jesus’ achievement is to prevent it”[10]. But at a deeper level, both incidents are about mimesis, the power of contagious imitation. Once Jesus convinces the first elder to walk away without casting a stone, the spell is broken, and others follow suit. And once Apollonius convinces the reluctant Ephesians to throw the first stone, the others follow.

Everything depends on the model we choose to imitate.

[1]According to the NRSV textual notes, the earliest manuscripts do not include the story, and other early manuscripts place it elsewhere in John, or even in Luke. It may represent an independent early oral tradition that simply was too good a story to leave out of the Gospels, even If none of the writers knew it. Again, in this work I am primarily concerned with the text as we have it, and less concerned with whether a specific text can reliably be traced back to the events of Jesus’ life.

[2] See for example, Bashaw, Scapegoats, pp. 65–78.

[3] Girard, I See Satan Falling, p. 56 (italics mine).

[4] Bashaw, Scapegoats, p. 74.

[5] Girard, I See Satan Falling, p. 49. For the comparison of Apollonius with Jesus, see Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, Kindle edition, location 242–69.

[6] Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, location 180–241. Ehrman uses the example of Philostratus to illustrate that in the ancient world the idea of the divine man was not unique to Jesus. Tellingly, he does not mention the stoning at Ephesus.

[7] Quoted in Girard, I See Satan Falling, pp. 49–50. Original text from Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Loeb Classical Library, I: 363–67. Molossian dogs were a mastiff-type breed, noted for their fierceness and associated with the Bronze Age Molossus tribe of Northwestern Greece.

[8] Girard, I See Satan Fall, p. 49. The title of chapter 4 is “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana.”

[9] Girard, I See Satan Fall, p. 53 (italics in the original).

[10] Heim, Saved from Sacrifice, p. 132.

For those not familiar with the practice of “unprogrammed” Quaker worship, “messages” (aka “vocal ministry”) are generally short, spontaneous, and unwritten—and so committing this to writing departs from our usual practice.

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A Message Given in Worship, Lancaster Friends Meeting, 10th August

This past week, my wife Liz and I were “Friends in Residence” at the Quaker House at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York. For those not familiar with Chautauqua, it has for 150 years functioned as a venue for interfaith dialogue around issues of the day. Each week there is a different theme, with several speakers addressing from various perspectives. The theme for our week was “The Global Rise of Authoritarianism,” and “The Role of Religion in Violence and Extremism.” Not the most uplifting of topics in these troubled times.

One of the speakers was Paige Alexander, director of the Carter Center in Atlanta. She identified seven characteristics or strategies that authoritarian leaders have commonly used, the so-called authoritarian playbook. It was sobering to realize that all seven are in evidence in varying degrees in the United States. Near the top of the list was the strategy of identifying and scapegoating “the other,” some internal enemy. Immigrants, “heinous criminals, rapists, and murderers,” minorities, LGBQT folks, universities, the press, “the lunatic left,” and now the homeless. It is a long list.

It occurs to me that scapegoating “the other” often involves building walls: literal walls, whether on the border or around the detention camps springing up all over the country; or symbolics walls.

Why We Build the Wall

Some of us this past weekend went to the Playhouse in Mount Gretna to watch a production of the musical Hadestown. We went because the granddaughter of two of our members had the lead role, but what we found was that Hadestown is not the usual lighthearted romance, but a very thought provoking reworking of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The residents of Hadestown (loosely modeled after the Greek underworld) are given the endless task of building a wall—although we never actually see the wall, and never know exactly what it is supposed to be for. One song in particular has haunted me all this week, “Why We Build the Wall.” These are not the complete lyrics, but will give you the gist:

Why do we build the wall?

My children, my children

Why do we build the wall?

We build the wall to keep us free,

That’s why we build the wall.

We build the wall to keep us free.

How does the wall keep us free?

. . . The wall keeps out the enemy.

What do we have that they should want?

We have a wall to work upon!

We have work and they have none

And our work is never done. . .

Because we have and they have not,

Because they want what we have got!

. . .And the wall keeps out the enemy

And we build the wall to keep us free

That’s why we build the law

We build the wall to keep us free.

—lyrics by Anais Mitchell (2010) copyright Treleven Music

A Different, and Better, Story About a Wall

Here is a different, a better, story about a wall. It comes from the Quaker Douglas Steere (1901–1995); I must have read it decades ago and had not thought about it for years, but while pondering walls and scapegoats, it came back to memory during the quiet of worship.

It seems that in the years after the First World War, there were many Quakers doing relief and reconstruction work in war-torn Europe. One of these workers was a young woman serving in a village in rural Poland. Over the course of many months, she had through her service endeared herself to the local villagers. During the course of her service, she caught epidemic typhus and succumbed to the disease, like thousands of others in Eastern Europe in those difficult years. The villagers went to the local priest and asked permission to bury her body in the village’s one cemetery, which surrounded the parish church. But the priest informed them that since she had never been baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, canonical law forbid her burial in the consecrated ground of the parish cemetery. And so, the villagers laid her to rest just outside the wall.

That night, under the cover of darkness, the villagers returned, took down the section of wall, and rebuilt it so that the wall now took in her grave. Steere comments on the story: “God is always revising our boundaries outwards.”

Postscipt:

After I spoke those words in worship, I began to wonder if I had remembered the story accurately, after all the years that had passed. Maybe I made it up? So the next day, I tried to find where I might have read it; I was initially unsuccessful but eventually found Steere’s original account (Prayer in the Contemporary World, Pendle Hill Pamphet #391, p. 21). Amazingly, my memory of the story was accurate.

Steere gave no reference or source for the story, but according to his biography, he himself had helped organize post-war relief work in Finland, Norway, and Poland, so quite likely he had personal knowledge of the events. His words were originally published in 1966 (republished by Pendle Hill in 1990), and after relating the incident, he follows with an observation that seems even more relevant today:

The moral capital of every state is continually running down. It can only be restored again by the tender consciences of its vigilant citizens. Carl Schurz once declared, “My country: when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be set right.” By daring ventures and pilot projects that cross boundaries and serve people everywhere, by vulnerable concern for need wherever it may be found, by speaking for the silent ones, and by the courage not to be cowed by the state’s demand for approval but to press to the end for the state “when wrong to be set right,” Christians live always between their duties as citizens and the unlimited liability for all people laid upon them by the Gospel.

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The publisher (Wipf and Stock, Eugene OR) is making a substantial discount of 40% available for any version of the book (hardcover, paperback and ebook), available until August 31.

Click on the “40% Discount” below, which will take you to Wipf and Stock website, click on ‘buy,’ and at checkout, under discounts, click on the box “add coupon” and enter ‘TURNING’ [all caps] in the box. [Take care to note the number of copies you are ordering; sometimes the site seems to revert to my last order.] This will access a 40% discount. Also note that the book is available on Kindle for $9.99; not sure how long that will last.

40% Discount

If you have been reading these posts, you will have a good idea of what the book is about, but I am pasting below the Table of Contents, which will give you the full scope of the book. I am hoping this helps convince you to purchase the book!

Table of Contents

Prologue: Scapegoating, the Cross, and the Lynching Tree

Introduction: Conviction, Convincement, and Conversion in Quaker Context

Part I: Conviction

1. Mimetic Theory in a Nutshell

2. Three Murders

3. A Murder Averted: Abraham’s (non)Sacrifice of Isaac

4. Joseph and His Brothers: Deconstructing Myth

5. Job: A Failed Scapegoat

6. The Suffering Servant

7. Jonah: A Reluctant Prophet

8. “The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me”: How Jesus Read Scripture

9. Casting Stones

10. Casting Out Demons

11. Crucifixion as Revelation

12. The Gospel of—and for—the Disinherited

13. Conviction in the Experience of Early Friends

14. Conviction Today

Excursus I. God in Process: The Slow Work of God

Part II: Convincement

15. The Road to Emmaus

16. Paul and the Road to Damascus

17. Convincement in the Experience of Early Friends

18. Convincement Today

Excursis II: New Light on Atonement

Part III: Conversion of the Heart

19. The Scandal of—and in—the Gospels

20. The Transformation of Desire

21. Discipleship as Imitation

22. “In Christ”: Paul’s Gospel of Participation

23. Two Seeds and the Refiner’s Fire

24. The Way of the Cross

25. The Lamb’s War

26. Truth in the Heart

27. Scapegoats, Sacrifice, and Victims

28. Conversion of the Heart for Friends Today

Epilogue: An Easter Reckoning

Turning Toward the Victim: The Bible, Sacred Violence, and the End of Scapegoating has been published by Wipf and Stock Publishers, as of three weeks ago.

It is available through WipfandStock.com ($38, but you can get a onetime discount of 40% if you sign up for their newsletter); Amazon (same price for paperback but $9.99 on Kindle); and the Pendle Hill Bookstore. Most of what you have been reading on Substack are excerpts from the book—so if you are intrigued by what you have read and want to know more, you will find more in the book.

Here are some links:

https://wipfandstock.com/9798385246052/turning-toward-the-victim/

https://pendlehill.org/product/turning-toward-the-victim-the-bible-sacred-violence-and-the-end-of-scapegoating-in-quaker-perspective/

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Jonah: A Reluctant Prophet

In the last post (“Joseph and His Brothers”), we saw how that story represents a “subversion from within” of sacred violence, violence that is somehow seen to be instigated or approved by God. There are many other examples in the Hebrew Scriptures: Abraham’s non-sacrifice of Isaac, Job, the Suffering Servant in Isaiah. Mostly this “subversion from within” seems to be an unconscious groping toward a nonviolent concept of God.

In the story of Jonah we have the one book that gives every evidence of having been consciously composed “with the express purpose of challenging sacred violence. . . written for the purpose of criticizing a theology that represents God as a lover of vengeance.”[1] The book of Jonah accomplishes this through a fable that is filled with irony, a parody of other prophetic texts, “a comedy if not a farce. . . hilarious from start to finish,”[2] an “outrageously tall tale,” a “fireworks display of irony,” a “semiotic transformation. . . a deliberate manipulation of biblical DNA to produce a remarkable new mutation.”[3] And it is a story on which Jesus seems to have deeply meditated.

This generation. . . asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Ninevah, so the Son of Man will be to this generation. . . . Behold, something greater than Jonah is here!

–Luke 11:29-30, 32

The book of Jonah comes to us with no clues as to when, where, or why it was composed. The actual historical figure of “Jonah son of Amittai” (1:1) warrants only a single verse in the history of Israel (2 Kings 14:25), with no mention there of a fish or a mission to Ninevah. The book has multiple allusions to other prophetic texts, with a particularly strong connection with the book of Nahum, the prophet who denounces Ninevah as the “city of bloodshed,” offering the gruesome prophecy that the Lord’s vengeance will produce “piles of dead, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end” (Nahum 3:1-7). One commentator says that

it is difficult to negate the impression that the writer of Jonah has deliberately constructed Jonah as a parody of Nahum, both a representation of his bitter spirit and a hilarious turning-it-on-its head. [4]

The book begins with Jonah attempting to flee far from “the word of the Lord,” but quickly turns into a straightforward scapegoat tale: a crisis (the storm), identification of an arbitrary “guilty” party by lot, a confession by the designated scapegoat (Jonah), and a plan to save the group by sacrificing the one. However, the sailors are reluctant and half-hearted persecutors. First they throw cargo overboard, then attempt to row harder to bring the boat to shore, and finally plead not to be made “guilty of innocent blood” (1:14). Despite these attempts, the storm intensifies, and the sailors in desperation “picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea” (1:15).

The sailors’ attempt at scapegoating sacrifice fails when “the Lord provided a large fish to swallow Jonah” (1:17). Jonah is angry at God, and in this type of story, the raging forces of nature are often a stand-in for human rage. The sea is quieted not by the sailors’ reluctant attempt at sacrifice, but when Jonah’s rage is quite literally “swallowed.” The fish evokes images of the primeval monster Leviathan (Job 41:1, Psalm 74:13-14, Isaiah 27:1) but here the sea monster is not an instrument of chaos and destruction, but of redemption. In the abyss of the great fish’s belly, “an enduring mythic image of violence and death. . . [is transformed into] one of hope and deliverance.” God has given Jonah “an eruptive insight of nonviolence”[5]—but Jonah will prove to be a slow learner.

After three days in the belly of the fish, a chastened but still ambivalent Jonah is once again directed to Ninevah, where he delivers his terse message of judgement: “Forty days more, and Ninevah shall be overthrown!” (3:4). The Ninevites might be expected to respond by offering the usual sacrifices to their own protector gods, but instead the Ninevite King decrees that all residents—even the animals—must fast, don sackcloth and ashes, and “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind” (3:8-9). It seems that it is not Jonah’s minimalist, still hostile proclamation that causes Ninevah to repent, but the manner of Jonah’s deliverance from the great fish, which is why the king focuses on the issue of violence. The Ninevites “sudden transformation is all one with the revelatory nonviolence of the great fish.”[6]

With the Ninevites dramatic repentance, “God changed his mind (!) about the calamity that he had said he would bring down upon them; and he did not do it” (3:10). Anthony Bartlett says the Hebrew text is even clearer: when God “saw they turned from the evil, relented God of the evil.” Violence is the evil from which both Ninevah and God relented. “We cannot avoid the impression that the meaning and identity of God are changed, from violence to nonviolence, by the equivalent change in humans.”[7]

This turn of events “was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry” (4:1). He now claims that his initial flight to Tarshish was because he knew that YHWH is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (4:2). From the beginning, he had feared being sent to warn Ninevah of its coming destruction, only to have God relent—exactly what has now happened. Jonah is here quoting Exodus 34:6-7, but he has added the phrase about God being “ready to relent from punishing.”[8] Again, Bartlett says the Hebrew text is literally “ready to repent from the evil,” using the same verb previously used to describe the Ninevites’ repentance, and the same noun previously used to describe the evil of violence [9]. Especially from the original Hebrew, we are left with the distinct impression that God, like the Ninevites, is repenting of the evil of violence.

God may have changed his mind, but despite his deliverance from the great fish, Jonah is still stuck in the paradigm of sacred violence. A sulking Jonah retreats to the outskirts of the city, still nursing his anger with God, “to see what would become of the city” (4:5). Jonah builds a booth for shade, but God upstages Jonah’s work by “appointing a bush” to give Jonah better shade, which made Jonah “very happy.” But the following day “God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered” (4:7). Jonah was already angry with God for sparing the great city of Ninevah, but with the loss of shade from his bush, Jonah is now really angry.

In the remarkable final scene, God asks, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” Jonah, his ego wounded, replies, “Yes, angry enough to die” (4:9). YHWH then points out, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow. . . Should I not be concerned about Ninevah, that great city, in which are more than a hundred twenty thousand persons. . . and also many animals?” (4:10-11). The scene hearkens back to Genesis 18, where Abraham bargains with YHWH about the potential injustice of destroying all of Sodom, “the righteous along with the wicked.” Abraham urges YHWH to spare the city for the sake of even a few righteous, gradually bargaining YHWH down from the presence of fifty righteous, to ten. In Genesis, it is Abraham arguing for mercy, for the sake of even ten righteous. But here it is YHWH advocating for mercy, not for the sake of a few righteous, but for the sake of all Ninevah—even the animals.

The book of Jonah, nowhere more than in this final episode, undermines the idea of sacred violence by making it look ridiculous. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole business about destroying Ninevah is “little more than a pretext for teaching Jonah about mercy and compassion.”[10] There could hardly be a more dramatic illustration of the Hebrews’ changing conception of their God; Jonah is “preparing the way for an eventual undermining of the entire sacred-violent concept of God.”[11]

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[1] James Warren, Compassion or Apocalypse, 166-167.

[2] Warren, p.167

[3] Anthony Bartlett, Signs of Change, 207, 195, 199.

[4] Bartlett, Signs of Change, 197.

[5] Bartlett, Signs of Change, 204.

[6] Bartlett, Signs of Change, 204.

[7] Bartlett, Signs of Change, 205.

[8] Joel 2:13 also alludes to Exodus 34:6-7, with the same addition as in Jonah, “. . . and relents from punishing.” Since neither the books of Jonah or Joel can be accurately dated, it is impossible to say which was written first.

[9] Bartlett, Signs of Change, 206.

[10] Warren, Compassion or Apocalypse, 168, 167.

[11] Warren, Compassion or Apocalypse, 169.

In previous posts, we have seen how “the scapegoat mechanism,” the spontaneous violence of a group directed against one of its own, could account for a group achieving internal cohesion, and how there are traces of this in the Hebrew Scriptures (Gen 4, Lev 24, Joshua 7). We also saw how these episodes of spontaneous violence evolved into ritual sacrifice—and how Abraham’s non-sacrifice of Isaac brought into question the logic of human sacrifice, and how the later prophets questioned the whole sacrificial enterprise.

One of Rene Girard’s most important insights is to see how the Bible, in addition to reflecting these archaic mechanisms of scapegoating and sacrifice, also works to actively undermine them, a kind of “subversion from within.” A clear example of this is the story of Joseph and his brothers, which is told in Genesis, chapters 37–50. It is a very human story; other than vague assertions like “the Lord was with Joseph” (39:3), no action is attributed to the intervention of God or the gods, which makes it virtually unique in the canon of ancient literature.

The story is well-known, and it is impossible for me to summarize the entire chapter. But let me highlight three aspects.

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Joseph as Scapegoat

At the beginning of the story, the sons of Jacob are immersed in a full-fledged mimetic crisis, consumed with envy and rivalry. They have already been implicated in a horrifically violent act of revenge against Shechem (34:25-31), and Judah has had a sordid encounter with Tamar, his own daughter-in-law (chapter 38). Joseph has made the mimetic rivalry worse by relating a dream that implied that he, the second youngest, would come to rule over his brothers. The brothers plot to kill Joseph, (Gen 37:17-20). In the end, Reuben pleaded with his brothers not to harm Joseph, if only because their father would not be able to bear it. Instead, Judah persuaded them to sell him to a passing caravan of Ishmaelites, and from there into slavery in Egypt. To make the “scapegoat” connection explicit, they then slaughtered a goat, dipped Joseph’s “coat of many colors” with the goat’s blood, and presented it to their father Jacob, who mistakenly concluded that his favorite son had been devoured by a wild animal.

Joseph, on the one hand, is a “typical” scapegoat: identified by his brothers’ as the cause of their crisis of mimetic rivalry. But on the other hand, Joseph does not suffer the usual fate of scapagoats; he is not killed. And, in a recurrent theme throughout the Bible, the God who has nothing to do with violence is revealed through the scapegoated victim.

Deconstructing Mythology

[The Bible] is a text in which occurs the change from mythology to the biblical view, which is really the change from the guilt of the victim to the innocence of the victim. . . .The Bible deconstructs mythology.

–Rene Girard [1]

Girard helpfully compares of the story of Joseph with the Greek myth of Oedipus. At first reading, the two stories seem to have little in common, but Girard points out some striking structural similarities. Both start with a crisis of family rivalry that is “solved” by an expulsion: Oedipus by his parents as an infant, Joseph by his brothers as a boy. Both then rise to prominence, Oedipus as son to the King and Queen of Corinth, Joseph as the overseer of Potiphar’s household. Both then suffer a second expulsion: Oedipus to self-exile from Corinth, and Joseph to prison. Both are then redeemed by demonstrating extraordinary abilities: Oedipus by solving the Sphinx’s riddle, Joseph by interpreting dreams. Both rise again to positions of great authority, Oedipus as King of Thebes, and Joseph under Pharaoh. Both subsequently confront a crisis, a plague in Thebes and a famine in Egypt. Finally, both are accused of horrific crimes, Oedipus of parricide and incest, Joseph of the equivalent of incest (Potiphar being “like a father” to him, an attempted rape of his wife would be comparable to actual incest).

Despite these structural similarities, Girard points to “an irreducible difference, an impassable gulf between the biblical story and the myth.” In the myth, told from the perspective of the crowd, Oedipus is guilty of terrible crimes and is therefore the cause of the plague; no one, not even Oedipus, questions his guilt. In the biblical story, told from a perspective sympathetic to the victim, Joseph is unquestionably innocent.

Both stories begin with rivalry and a mimetic crisis, resulting in collective violence and expulsion of a victim. The myth sides with the crowd against Oedipus; the Bible sides with Joseph as the innocent victim. Girard’s insight is that the myth functions to cover up the truth: that Oedipus was in fact “scapegoated” by the mob, in a misguided effort to rid the city of the plague. This is a powerful example of Girard’s main point: humans deal with their own internal rivalries and violence by projecting them on to a single victim, and expelling or killing the scapegoat—and then concealing the evidence through a myth. It is worth emphasizing this by quoting James Warren at length:

What is significant is that we allow the structural equivalence of the two stories to highlight the crucial difference between them, which is that the two stories are told from completely different perspectives. Oedipus is told from the perspective of the persecutors. It blames Oedipus for horrendous crimes. It even has Oedipus admitting to them himself, gouging out his eyes and accepting expulsion. Oedipus is therefore a quintessentially “mythical” story, for this is precisely what myth does, according to Girard: justify (albeit unconsciously) the scapegoating murders and expulsions that form the basis of community solidarity. The Bible, on the other hand, portrays Joseph as innocent. Joseph is decidedly not guilty of the crimes of which he is accused by Potiphar’s wife. . . . With the story of Joseph, Genesis brings to a grand climax the rehabilitation of the victim. . . . Not only is the victim given voice and shown innocent, but Joseph forgives his persecutors. . . . It is precisely Joseph’s refusal to avenge himself that allows the scapegoat mechanism to be exposed. . . . This story is therefore one of the Hebrew Scriptures greatest triumphs over mythology and its power of illusion over all ancient peoples.[2]

Role Reversal and “Perfect Repentance”

The climax of the story of Joseph and his brothers comes when the brothers return to Egypt a second time, again in search of food, and this time with their youngest brother, Benjamin. Joseph, still unrecognized, treats them with lavish hospitality (in contrast to their first visit), astonishing the brothers by providing them with a banquet, and then the requested grain. But Joseph inexplicably hides a precious silver cup in Benjamin’s grain bag. After their departure, Joseph’s men pursue and overtake the brothers, demanding to search their bags, where they find the “stolen” silver cup. The brothers are ignominiously brought back to Joseph, expecting to all be thrown into prison. With feigned indignation, Joseph accuses Benjamin of stealing, but announces that “only the one in whose possession the cup was found shall be my slave; but as for [the rest], go up in peace to your father” (44:17).

What is going on with all these twists and turns of the plot, and with Joseph’s seeming cruelty, toying with his brothers and keeping them ignorant of his identity? On closer reading, we see that Joseph has engineered a moral test for his brothers. Benjamin has been unfairly accused; will the brothers abandon him to save themselves, just as they had abandoned Joseph those many years ago? Judah passes the test: in an eloquent speech, he offers himself as a slave in place of the innocent Benjamin (44:33). Only now can Joseph reveal his true identity to his incredulous brothers: “I am your brother, Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. . . God sent me before you to preserve life” (45:4-5).

We have in the story of Joseph and his brothers a narrative long recognized for its immense moral significance regarding scapegoats, innocent victims, forgiveness, and repentance. Perhaps no one has articulated this significance better than Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, whose reading is influenced by Girard but also by the deep well of Jewish wisdom:

The source of violence lies in our need to exist in groups, which leads to in-group altruism and out-group hostility. The pathological form of this . . . is the dualism that divides humanity into children of light and children of darkness, the one all-good, the other all-evil. It follows that the most profound moralizing experience, the only one capable of defeating dualism, is to undergo role reversal. There can be no more life-changing trial than finding yourself on the other side. . . . That, in essence, is what Joseph is forcing his brothers to do. He is putting them through the intensely painful yet morally transformative ordeal of role reversal. They suspected him of ambition. Now they learn what it is to be under suspicion. They planned to sell him as a slave. Now they know what it feels like to face enslavement. They made Jacob go through the grief of losing a son. Now they must witness that grief again, this time through no fault of their own. Above all, they treated their brother as a stranger. Now they must learn that the stranger, Zaphenath-Paneah, ruler of Egypt, is actually their brother.[3]

Sacks continues by reflecting on Judah’s action in the context of the Jewish concept of “perfect repentance,” the idea that true repentance can only be demonstrated when one has an opportunity to repeat the original offense but chooses not to. “Judah has exactly fulfilled the requirements of perfect repentance. . . . The way we learn not to commit evil is to experience an event from the perspective of the victim. Judah’s repentance—showing that he is his brother Benjamin’s keeper—redeems not only his own earlier sin, but also Cain’s.[4]

[1] Girard, Reading the Bible with Rene Girard, 64. Fundamental to understanding Girard is to realize that he uses the term myth in a way that is contrary to much of modern thought. Influenced by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, we think of myth positively, as something not literally but symbolically true, a reflection of timeless wisdom or universal archetypes. In stark contrast, Girard sees myth as a culture’s attempt to hide the scapegoating violence against innocent victims. Girard says: “Not long ago in our society the word ‘myth’ was a synonym of ‘lie.’ Our intelligentsia has done everything it could since then to rehabilitate the myths at the expense of the Bible, but in ordinary speech ‘myth’ continues to mean lie. Ordinary speech is right.” Girard, I See Satan Falling, 115.

[2] James Warren, Compassion or Apocalypse: A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard, 207.

[3] Rabbi Jonathon Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, 152.

[4] Sacks, Not in God’s Name, 155, 158. Italics in the original.

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Progress on the book continues; we have just completed the copy-editing phase. Still no publication date.

I did not set out to write a book about current events, but recently I heard reference to a 2003 paper by the scholar of authoritarianism, Lawrence Britt, “The 14 Characteristics of Fascism.” #3 on his list is the “Identification of Enemies / Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause” (behind #1, “Powerful and Continuing Nationalism” and #2, “Disdain for Human Rights”). Identification of scapegoats aims to rally the people “into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists. . . etc.” And now of course we can add immigrants to the list of those scapegoated.

In the previous post, we explored Girard’s theory that in archaic groups, internal group cohesion is achieved through an act of spontaneous violence against a “scapegoat,” often in the form of stoning, and I provided three illustrations from the Hebrew scriptures (“Three Murders”). In today’s post, I want to show how those spontaneous acts of violence then evolve into ritual sacrifice. This is a brief synopsis of chapter 3 in the book.

A Murder Averted: The (non)Sacrifice of Isaac

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If spontaneous acts of scapegoating violence helped archaic groups to achieve internal cohesion, then predictably, when the next crisis arrives, the group naturally seeks to reproduce that internal cohesion with a repeat performance. Thus, ritual sacrifice arose in many archaic cultures, as the most effective way to maintain this internal cohesion in an ongoing way. There are definite traces of such a practice in the Hebrew scriptures: “The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me” (Exod 22:29).

Israel’s long struggle with child sacrifice is exemplified in the story of “the binding of Isaac” in Genesis 22. In the traditional interpretation, Abraham is praised for being willing to do what he did not in fact do: killing his son (truly abhorrent to modern ears), but its real significance is in Abraham not doing what he almost did. Gil Bailie underlines its central importance:

Far more than we moderns generally realize, human sacrifice was a fact of life among the peoples in the ancient Near East [indeed, in archaic cultures worldwide], in tension with whom Israel first achieved cultural self-definition. Israel’s renunciation of the practice of human sacrifice took place over a long period of time, during which periodic reversions to it occurred. No biblical story better depicts how the Bible is at cross-purposes with itself on the subject of sacrifice than does the story of Abraham and Isaac. . . . Abraham did the quintessentially biblical act: he renounced a form of sacrifice that had become morally intolerable, and he did so in the name of the God whom his contemporaries thought was requiring them to perform the outmoded sacrifice.[1]

The story as it comes to us in Genesis 22 gives indication of an earlier and later version; some have surmised that in the original version, Abraham did indeed sacrifice his son, but that was later edited out. Regardless, the story as we now have it indicates a clear transition from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. This change is so momentous that it even requires changing the name of God: it is Elohim who commands Abraham to climb the mountain and sacrifice his son, but it is Yahweh (or the Angel of Yahweh) who intervenes to prevent the act by substituting the ram.

Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, there is a tension between the priests, who are concerned with the proper performance of sacrifices, and the prophets, who see the whole temple enterprise as at best a distraction, and at worst, an abomination. “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord. I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats” (Is 1:11–17).

Jesus of Nazareth will enter into this longstanding debate about the place of sacrifice—and choose sides. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus twice quotes the prophet Hosea (Hos 6:6): “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (“go and learn what this means,” Matt 9:13, 12:7).

René Girard emphasizes this centrality of sacrifice in archaic religion:

“Religion starts with sacrifice; sacrifice is the main thing about religion, because sacrifice saves the community from its own violence.” [2] “Sacrifice does this by using ‘good’ violence to cast out ‘bad’ violence. The violence of reciprocal vengeance is to be cast out of the community through the violence done to a single victim.”[3]

As we will see, the Bible will come to reject this logic, and it does so by first lifting up the voice of the victim. We will turn next to the story of Joseph.

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[1] Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled. 140, 141–42.

[2] Girard, Reading the Bible with René Girard, 36. Italics mine.

[3] James Warren, Compassion or Apocalypse, 107.