Are tthe gospels mythical?

Are the Gospels Mythical?

Rene Girard

Copyright (c) 1996 First Things 62 (April 1996): 27-31.
From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels' resemblance to certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith. When pagan apologists for the official pantheism of the Roman empire denied that the death-and-resurrection myth of Jesus differed in any significant way fromthe myths of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, etc., they failed to stem the rising Christian tide. In the last two hundred years, however, as anthropologists have discovered all over the world foundational myths that similarly resemble Jesus' Passion and Resurrection, the notion of Christianity as a myth seems at last to have taken hold-even among Christian believers.
Beginning with some violentcosmic or social crisis, and culminating in the suffering of a mysterious victim (often at the hands of a furious mob), all these myths conclude with the triumphal return of the sufferer, thereby revealed as a divinity. The kind of anthropological research undertaken before World War II-in which theorists struggled to account for resemblances among myths-is regarded as a hopeless "metaphysical"failure by most anthropologists nowadays. Its failure seems, however, not to have weakened anthropology's skeptical scientific spirit, but only to have weakened further, in some mysterious way, the plausibility of the dogmatic claims of religion that the earlier theorists had hoped to supersede: if science itself cannot formulate universal truths of human nature, then religion-as manifestly inferiorto science-must be even more devalued than we had supposed.
This is the contemporary intellectual situation Christian thinkers face as they read the Scriptures. The Cross is incomparable insofar as its victim is the Son of God, but in every other respect it is a human event. An analysis of that event-exploring the anthropological aspects of the Passion that we cannot neglect if we take the dogmaof the Incarnation seriously-not only reveals the falsity of contemporary anthropology's skepticism about human nature. It also utterly discredits the notion that Christianity is in any sense mythological. The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.
Jesus does, of course, compare his own story tocertain others when he says that his death will be like the death of the prophets: "The blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah" (Luke 11:50-51). What, we must ask, does the word like really mean here? In the death most strikingly similar to the Passion-that of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah,chapters 52-53-a crowd unites against a single victim, just as similar crowds unite against Jeremiah, Job, the narrators of the penitential psalms, etc. In Genesis, Joseph is cast out by the envious crowd of his brothers. All these episodes of violence have the same all-against-one structure.
Since John the Baptist is a prophet, we may expect his violent death in the New Testament to be similar,and indeed John dies because Herod's guests turn into a murderous crowd. Herod himself is as inclined to spare John's life as Pilate is to spare Jesus'-but leaders who do not stand up to violent crowds are bound to join them, and join them both Herod and Pilate do. Ancient people typically regarded ritual dancing as the most mimetic of all arts, solidifying the participants of a sacrifice againstthe soon to be immolated victim. The hostile polarization against John results from Salome's dancing-a result foreseen and cleverly engineered by Herodias for exactly that purpose.
There is no equivalent of Salome's dancing in Jesus' Passion, but a mimetic or imitative dimension is obviously present. The crowd that gathers against Jesus is the same that had enthusiastically welcomed him into...