Jesus sees that this enthusiasm is fraught with subsequent desertion. He clearly sees that after his arrest his worldly prestige will collapse, and he will cease to provide his students with the type of model that he has provided them with until now. From then on, they will receive all mimetic stimuli from individuals and groups hostile to his personality and his mission. The disciples, and above all Peter, are too subject to the influence of others not to fall under it again. The Gospel text has clearly demonstrated this to us in the passages just examined. The fact that Jesus himself serves as a model does not mean anything in itself, since the disciples imitate him in a mode of victorious greed, always essentially identical with the alienation of desire.

Peter's first change in itself is certainly not blameworthy, but it is not free from mimetic desire, and this is what Jesus evidently observes. He sees here a harbinger of a new change on the part of Peter, which, given the impending catastrophe, will inevitably take the form of renunciation. Thus, Peter's denial is rationally foreseeable. Foreseeing it, Jesus only draws conclusions from his observations for the near future. In short, Jesus does the same analysis that we ourselves have done: he compares Peter's successive reactions to the prediction of the Passion and from this deduces the possibility of betrayal. The proof is that the prophecy of denial is a direct response to Peter's second mimetic speech, and the reader has the same data as Jesus to form his judgment. If we understand mimetic desire, we inevitably come to the same conclusions. Thus, we are forced to conclude that the character named Jesus himself understands this desire in the same sense as we understand it. It is this understanding that reveals the rationality of the connection between all the elements of the chain of episodes formed by the two proclamations of the Passion – the prophecy of renunciation and the renunciation itself.

It is precisely the mimetic desire that is shown from Jesus' point of view, for it is the term for this desire, "scandal," that Jesus uses whenever to describe Peter's reactions, including his denial: "Then Jesus said to them, 'You will all be offended in me [literally, 'You will all be scandalized about me,' 'I will be a scandal to all of you.'" And you will be scandalized all the more surely because you are already victims of a scandal. Your confidence that you are not, your illusion of your invulnerability speak eloquently about your real state and about the upcoming future. The myth of individual difference, which Peter defends here by saying "and I," is itself mimetic. Peter considers himself the most authentic of all the disciples, the most capable of becoming a true competitor of Jesus, the only true owner of his ontological model.

The evil daughters of King Lear, competing in theatrical affection before his eyes, convince their father of their passionate love. The unfortunate man imagines that their rivalry is nourished by pure affection, whereas the opposite is true: pure rivalry excites the phantom of affection. Jesus never falls into cynicism, but he never succumbs to illusions of this kind. Without confusing Peter with Lear's daughter, we must nevertheless recognize in him a puppet of a similar desire, of which he is not conscious of his obsession, because he is obsessed with it; he perceives the truth too late, after renunciation, when he bursts into weeps at the thought of the Master and his prediction.

In this marvellous scene, when Peter and the disciples show a false zeal for participation in the Passion, the Gospels offer us a satire on that particular religious fervor which must be recognized as specifically "Christian." The disciples invent a new religious language, the language of the Passion. They reject the ideology of happiness and success, but they transform suffering and defeat into a very analogous ideology, a new mimetic and social machine that functions just like the old triumphalism.

All types of commitment that people in a group may have for an enterprise have been declared unworthy of Jesus, and these are precisely the attitudes that have followed one another endlessly throughout historical Christianity, especially in our age. The manner of the disciples is reminiscent of the triumphant anti-triumphalism of some modern Christian circles, their invariably clerical anti-clericalism.

The fact that positions of this kind are already stigmatized in the Gospels clearly demonstrates that we should not confuse the highest Christian inspiration with its psychological and social by-products.

* * *

The only miracle in the prediction of renunciation is the knowledge of desire that is manifested in Jesus' words. It is only because of their inability to fully understand this knowledge that the evangelists themselves turn it into a miracle in the narrow sense.

"Thou shalt deny Me three times this night, before the crows twice" (Mk 14:30). Such miraculous precision in the prophetic proclamation overshadows the higher rationality that the analysis of these texts can reveal. Does it follow from this that in fact this rationality is not there and I simply invented it? I don't think so—the data that speak for it are too numerous and too well consistent. The coincidences between the essence of this narrative and the theory of "scandalon", that is, the theory of mimetic desire, cannot be accidental. Therefore, the question must be asked whether the Gospel writers themselves fully understand the springs of desire that are exposed by their own texts.

The extreme importance attached to the rooster first by the evangelists themselves, and then by all the others, indicates a lack of understanding. It is this comparative misunderstanding, I think, that turns the rooster into a kind of animal fetish, around which a certain "miracle" crystallizes.

In Jerusalem at that time, the first and second crowing of the rooster, scholars tell us, simply meant a certain hour of the night. Consequently, the original reference to the rooster probably had nothing in common with the real animal that sings in the Gospels. In his Latin translation, Jerome even makes this rooster sing one more time than in the Greek original. One of the two cries provided for in the prediction was not mentioned in the story of the renunciation, and on his own initiative the translator corrects the omission, which seems to him intolerable and scandalous.

Three other evangelists suspect, I think, that Mark gives the rooster too much importance. In order to put this rooster in its place, they let it sing only once, but they do not dare to eliminate it completely. Even John mentions it, although he completely eliminated the prediction of renunciation, without which the rooster has no reason to appear in the text at all. There is no need to regard as miraculous a prediction that is rationally explained if we understand correctly the invariably mimetic reasons for the renunciation and the actions that preceded it in Peter's conduct.