The merits and demerits of the Gospel witness are revealed in a particularly clear and contrasting form in the interpretation of the key concept for mimetic interpretation – the concept of "scandal".

All the most interesting cases of the use of the words skandalon and skandalidzein are put into the mouth of Jesus himself and appear in the form of fragments distributed more or less randomly. Important statements are not always given in a logical sequence and their order often changes from one Gospel to another. This order, as researchers have shown, can be determined by the presence of a word in a given phrase that entails another phrase solely because this word also occurs there. It can be assumed that we are dealing with the recitation of phrases learned by heart and interconnected by mnemotechnical techniques.

Therefore, in order to find out the explanatory value of the "scandal," we need to rearrange all these phrases, we need to treat them as pieces of a puzzle that will coincide with the mimetic theory once we find the right arrangement for them. This is what I tried to show in "The Innermost from the Creation of the World".

Thus, we have an extremely coherent whole, but this coherence could not be seen by the interpreters, because its constituent parts were mixed up, and sometimes even distorted, due to the lack of competence of the Gospel writers. Left to themselves, they do not know how to explicate this knowledge, although they make the general statement that Jesus "knew what is in man" (Jn 2:25). All the data are in their hands, but they are presented in a kind of disorder and littered with miracles, since the authors have only half of these data.

The Gospels have an irreducibly supernatural aspect, and I am not trying to deny or belittle it. For the sake of this supernatural aspect, however, we must not abandon the forms of understanding that are now available to us, and if they are indeed forms of understanding, they cannot but diminish the role of the miraculous. The miraculous, by definition, is incomprehensible; therefore, it is not a genuine work of the spirit in the Gospel sense. There is a greater miracle than a miracle in the narrow sense, and this miracle is in the fact that the previously incomprehensible becomes comprehensible, in the fact that mythological obscurity becomes transparent.

Faced with the Gospel text, all bigoticisms, both pro- and anti-Christian, want to see nothing but miracles and unreservedly condemn even the most legitimate attempts to show that the role of miracles may be exaggerated. But there is nothing anti-evangelical in such attempts: the Gospels themselves warn us against abusing the miraculous.

The rationality that I am discovering here, the mimeticism of human relations, is too systematic in its principle, too complex in its effects, and too clearly present, both in the "theoretical" passages about "scandal" and in the passages entirely subordinated to the idea of "scandal," to appear here by chance. And yet this rationality is not fully thought out, and therefore certainly not created by the people who placed it here. If they had fully understood it, they would not have placed the clumsy screen of the wonderful between the readers and the episodes interpreted above.

Under such circumstances, it is impossible to believe that the Gospels are the product of an exclusively internal development in the fervent environment of the early Christians. At the origin of this text there must indeed be someone who stands outside of this group and inspires its writings. It is the traces of this reason, and not the reflections of the disciples, that we find when we reconstruct the mimetic theory by shuttle movement between narrative passages on the one hand and theoretical passages (i.e., words put into the mouth of Jesus Himself) on the other.

Evangelists are our inevitable intermediaries between us and the one they call Jesus. But in the episode with Peter's denial and in the preceding ones, their very weakness is transformed into something positive. It enhances the credibility and power of their testimony. The inability of evangelists to understand certain things, combined with extreme accuracy, turns them into mediators who are in a sense passive. It is impossible not to count that through their comparative lack of understanding, we are directly touching someone's capacity for understanding that far exceeds their ability. Therefore, we have the impression of communication without intermediaries. But it is not the transcendence of our own discernment that provides us with this privilege, but two thousand years of history slowly shaped by the Gospels themselves.

This history was not to proceed in accordance with the principles of conduct proclaimed by Jesus; It did not need to become a utopia in order to make available to us those aspects of the Gospel text that were not accessible to the first disciples, but only that it was characterized by a slow but continuous awareness of the persecutory representation, which (and this is a fact) is constantly deepening without disturbing us—alas! – to practice persecution ourselves.

In these passages, which are now being explained, the text of the Gospel is like a password that has come down to us through the mediation of people who are not privy to the secret, and we, the addressees, receive this password with all the more gratitude because the ignorance of the messenger guarantees the authenticity of the message—we are happily sure that nothing essential could have been falsified. But my comparison is not very accurate, since any character is easily transformed into a password if one only agrees to change its meaning, whereas here the whole set of characters, formerly inert and faint, suddenly lights up and sparkles with intelligibility without any prior agreement. An entire illumination lights up around us to celebrate the resurrection of a meaning we didn't even know was dead.

Chapter XIII: The Gadarene Demons

The Gospels show us all kinds of human relations, which at first sight seem incomprehensible, profoundly irrational, but which can and must be reduced to the unity of one and the same factor: mimeticism, the primary source of all that torments people, the primary source of their desires, their rivalries, their tragic and grotesque misunderstandings, the primary source of all disorder, therefore, but also the source of all order through the scapegoats, the victims. leading to spontaneous reconciliation, because in the final paroxysm, still mimetic but unanimous, they gather against them those whom previous and less extreme mimetic effects have turned against each other.

Of course, it is this dynamic that underlies the genesis of all the mythologies and religions of the planet—a dynamic that other religions, as we have seen, have successfully concealed from themselves and from us, eliminating or camouflaging collective murder, weakening and erasing persecutory stereotypes in a thousand different ways, whereas the Gospels, on the contrary, reveal this same dynamic with rigorous and powerful power that is unparalleled.