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.

This is what we have stated in the examination of the denial of Peter, the murder of John the Baptist, and above all, of course, in re-examining the Passion itself, the true heart and center of all this revelation, the lines of force of which in the Passion are emphasized with a persistence which I would call didactic: the task here is to hammer into the heads of peoples who have been imprisoned from time immemorial in the dungeon of mythological and persecutory representations. a few crucial truths that should liberate them, preventing them from sacralizing their own victims.

In all the scenes we have examined, the Gospels make clear the religious genesis that must remain disguised in order to give rise to mythology and ritual. At the heart of this genesis is the same unanimous faith that the Gospels destroy forever — the belief in the guilt of the victim. What happens in the Gospels and what happens in mythologies – even (and above all) in developed mythologies – cannot be measured by a common yardstick. Later religions weaken, minimize, mitigate, and even completely eliminate sacralized guilt and all violence, but this is only an additional cover-up—it does not affect the system of persecutory representation itself. And in the Gospel universe, on the contrary, this system itself disintegrates. It is no longer a question of softening or sublimation, but of a return to truth through a process which we mistakenly consider primitive because it reproduces a violent principle, but this time it reproduces it only in order to bring it to light and thereby render it harmless.

Все разобранные нами тексты — примеры такого процесса. И они идеально соответствуют тому, как сам Иисус и, после него, Павел во всех своих посланиях определяют разрушительное действие Распятия на власти сего мира. Страсти делают видимым то, что должно оставаться невидимо для того, чтобы эти власти сохранялись, — то есть механизм козла отпущения.

Разоблачая этот механизм и весь окружающий его миметизм, Евангелия сооружают единственную текстуальную машину, которая способна прекратить заключение человечества в темнице систем мифологической репрезентации, основанных на ложной трансцендентности сакрализованной (поскольку единодушно признанной виновной) жертвы.

Эта трансцендентность прямо названа в Евангелиях и вообще в Новом Завете. У нее много имен, но главное ее имя — Сатана, который бы не мыслился одновременно как «человекоубийца от начала», «отец лжи» и «князь мира сего», если бы он не был един с ложной трансцендентностью насилия. И точно так же не случайно, что из всех пороков Сатаны очевиднее всего зависть и ревность. Можно было бы сказать, что Сатана воплощает миметическое желание, не будь это желание прежде всего развоплощением. Именно оно опустошает всякое бытие, все вещи и все тексты, изымая оттуда их содержание.

Когда имеется в виду ложная траснцендентность в ее фундаментальном единстве, Евангелия говорят «диавол» или «Сатана», но когда она же имеется в виду в ее множественности, то речь заходит о бесах и бесовских силах. Слово «бес» может быть и попросту синонимом Сатаны, но в первую очередь прилагается к низшим формам «властей мира сего», к вырожденным проявлениям, которые мы бы назвали психопатологическими. Уже потому, что эта трансцендентность предстает множественной и фрагментируется, она теряет часть силы и обычно впадает в чистый миметический беспорядок. Таким образом, в отличие от Сатаны, который воспринимается одновременно и как принцип порядка и как принцип беспорядка, бесовские силы упоминаются в тех случаях, когда преобладает беспорядок.

Поскольку Евангелия охотно обозначают «власти» теми именами, которые происходят из религиозной традиции и магических верований, они, вроде бы, по-прежнему видят в них автономные духовные сущности, наделенные индивидуальной личностью. Чуть ли не на каждой странице Евангелий мы видим, как бесы говорят, обращаются к Иисусу, умоляют оставить их в покое. В великой сцене искушения в пустыне, описанной в трех синоптических Евангелиях, Сатана лично вмешивается, чтобы искусить Сына Божьего обманчивыми обещаниями и отвратить его от его миссии.