christianity is a hijacking of judaism by paul. jesus’ religion was judaism and he was trying to get jews to the roots of their religion and away from cooperation with the roman occupation and paganization.

paul simply invented a new religion that had nothing to do with jesus and what he preached.

the best scholarly on this is the brillian “THE MYTHMAKER” by Maccobby.

I do not know whether he acquired US citizenship, but the evidence is that Girard is an american philosopher… since he developed his theories while living mostly in the USA for the last 61 years.

I had no opportunity to seriously read Girard, who is way out of my main scholarly interests, since I am a professional mathematician.

However, I had the dubious privilege of listening to his student Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who graced the french radio station “France-Culture” with an interview a few months ago. I thought he spoke total gobbledygook, mixing together the thery of complexity and everything else, including violence, technology and global warming, if my memory is correct. I even wrote a message to the host of the emission, and he kindly answered that unfortunately, he did not have the necessary scientific background to recognize this kind of hot air balloons. My main argument against Dupuy’s utterances was that there is no such thing as a theory of complexity. There are only disparate attempts to try to understand complexity.

Dupuy’s interview reminded me of Bricmont and Sokal’s pamphlet against the uncontrolled use of scientific metaphors among social scientists and philosophers, in the USA, France and a few other countries. Now, Dupuy is professor in Stanford, and one should not judge Girard by the silliness of one of his students.

Nevertheless, “on juge l’arbre à ses fruits”, (one judges a tree from its fruit), and I wonder whether, in a more subtle way, Girard somehow mixed his serious scientific knowledge in medieval history together with some other stuff.

After all, the scheme described by Sokal and Bricmont could also work between the more scientific parts of history and some much less scientific parts of history, sociology and philosophy, and it would not be as obvious as, say, the kidnapping of Goedel’s theorem by the french philosopher Alain Badiou to justify his continued devotion to the thought of Mao-Tse Tung (aka Mao Ze Dong).

What do you think, Professor Landes, of looking at Girard from the Sokal-Bricmont point of view, i.e. the criticism of this current, which enlists metaphors from serious science to support some not very serious endeavors.

Another question, which has to do with history of modern thought, is why justification by “hard” science looks so good to so many people?

Being a professional, the mathematics I know do not sound to me like gobbledygook *if* they are used to state or solve mathematical questions, or in a relevant model of reality. But they would undoubtedly become gobbledygook, if they were used to explain, who knows, scapegoating? After all, I did study equations whose limiting state was concentrated at a certain point of space, and this would be a very nice analogy of scapegoating. However, I doubt that the mechanism for scapegoating admits a mathematical model.

That there is an underlying current of antijewish attitude in the thought of Girard is fairly obvious. I motion that the behavior of Girard is worth scientific exploration - why isn’t he conscious of this blind spot in his vision of the world? Do we all have blind spots? How can we deal with our respective blind spots? Is discussion the main remedy that points our blind spots?

What do you think, dear readers of this blog?

A problem in some forms of Christianity is that Jesus must be seen as totally innocent and innocuous [despite the NT text which gainsays this view of Jesus], whereas Jews must be seen as cruel, unforgiving, violent — and sometimes are seen as incapable of reason. These views of Jews also existed in the thought of Kant, less so of Hegel, I believe.

Another phenomenon in the NT and its interpretation is the identity of Barabbas, called Jesus Barabbas in early manuscripts. Were Jesus and Barabbas one and the same historical person, with the Gospels dividing the personage conveniently in two?? Hayim Maccoby held this view, as did the American psychoanalyst/psychohistorian Bronson Feldman [in American Imago]. In the Gospels as used today, Barabbas is allegedly freed by cruel Pilate at the demand of the Jewish crowd which instead wanted Jesus to be crucified. I think that Maccoby’s works are quite important in understanding the NT.

Thank you for posting this. I read ‘The Scapegoat’ about ten years ago, and came to very much the same conclusion as I think you have here, namely that Girard brilliantly dismantles the sacred-ness of Jesus, only to resurrect it in a last minute turnaround which I couldn’t really understand. From the sublime to the ridiculous, it is a little reminiscent of Frodo arriving finally at the Crack of Doom only to refuse to throw the Ring away. Perhaps a better analogy is Einstein refusing to accept quantum physics, even though his own reasoning led him towards it.
I certainly found Girard’s work convincing and powerful, especially his analyses of episodes like the death of John the Baptist, and the killing of Baldur. It seems to me that the revelation of scapegoating as sacrifice, and the endless conflict of mimetic rivalry led directly to modern movements like activism for human rights, anti-racism, communism, and anti-sexism. All those movements needed to throw off their dependence on the figure of Jesus in order to become what they did, but are not the events of his life and death their source nonetheless, in a way that, as you point out, could never be the case with the life of Mohammed?
I also think though that while the direct sacralization of Jesus plays little part in these currents of politics, there still hangs about them some element of the holy. Try remarking at a dinner party that a society free of violence, inequality and racism is unachievable. People will usually not merely disagree. They get angry, in a way that shows you have committed a sacrilege, or ‘thoughtcrime’.
I cannot believe sacrifice is not fundamental to our social structure. Yet we have modified it greatly, both by legal and cultural structures of suppression, and by sublimation. When we watch a detective thriller, it is clear that we suffer death at the hands of the murderer, and resolve the crime in the person of the detective. I suspect some part of most of us also commits the murder too. In any case, each murder mystery is a sacrificial episode, resolved by the detective as a Vedic priest purifies the act of sacrifice. To consume this as entertainment may be some kind of prophylactic that enables us to avoid actually carrying out sacrifice. It may be that we generate great power, but also store up complex trouble for ourselves, such as wars, for example. This is my understanding of Roberto Calasso’s ‘The Ruin of Kasch’, which also concerns sacrifice.
I have rather gone off wandering here, since I am not qualified to criticise your account of the relation of Christianity to Judaism. You did say you would like our responses! At any rate, I welcome the digression from the normal course of your work, fascinating though it is.

Christianity defined itself in separation from Judaism, but not in opposition to it.

Furthermore, the narrative of the Gospels clearly identifies the enemies of Jesus as a faction among the Jews, not “the Jews” as a whole - since Jesus himself and his followers were all Jews as well.

If the origins of Christian anti-semetism are of interest and you have the time, you may want to have a look at Professor Barrie Wilson’s recently published “How Jesus Became Christian”. I’m only about half way through it (270 pages), and no great scholar, but find Wilson’s explanations and arguments that what is called Christianity today is in fact more truly “Paulism”, and hardly the set of beliefs and practices espoused by Jesus and his followers, during Jesus’s lifetime and a period thereafter.