In the later part of The One by Whom Scandal Comes, Rene Girard answers interview questions and seeks to respond to criticism and clarify his views.
He reads the whole Bible in the light of the gospels and the story of the murder of Christ. Some readers, he says, did not understand his theory because of a chronological problem. He had developed his theory of mimetic violence as an anthropological theory. But then he saw that the theory was already embedded in the Bible.
Anthropologically, mimetic violence proceeds on a time-line from the evolution of humans to the revealing of covetousness or mimetic desire to murder and war. All of what he calls the archaic cultures arose to deal with and control rivalry of this kind. They used forms of ritualized violence to protect order. In this chronology Jesus comes late.
But Girard reads the Bible in a different…
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