Rene Girard presents Jesus crucified as an innocent scapegoat, thereby revealing the process by which mimetic desire eventually drives humans to mistreat innocent people. Jesus made it possible for humans to understand their fundamental nature, and, for the first time in human history, move constructively towards peace. The heart of the book is the consensus contrast of “myth” and “gospel”: the Christian revelation, and only the Christian revelation, is founded on truth (with the Hebrew Scriptures pointing to that truth), and only a proper understanding of Christianity can save humanity. To understand their fundamental nature, and, for the first time in human history, move constructively towards peace.

Girard argues that mimetic desire is both archetypally and actually the means by which Satan seduces his willing victims. At first he may sound like a very progressive and likeable educator, and in imitating him “we may feel initially that we are ‘liberated’,” but our seduction proves to be a speed-trap on “the superhighway of mimetic crisis… the first of many transformations of Satan” by which the seducer is transformed suddenly into a roadblock, a forbidding adversary. This is to say that whether as a principle of disorder or of apparent order, Satan has no fixed or concrete being, but rather must act surrogatively as “a parasite upon God’s creatures.” Chimerical, effectively non-existent as an individual self, he is necessarily “the father of lies.” When mimetic contagion identifies a victim or scapegoat, it is the satanic principle that operates to form the accusation: as Nietzsche said in a different context, “the first lie is the lie one tells to oneself.”

But there is a fundamental difference between pagan myths and the Bible: “In the myth the expulsions are justified, each time. In the biblical account they never are.” In both the myths and the crucifixion of Jesus, “duping oneself is what characterizes the entire satanic process,” but “in revealing the self-deception of those who engage in violence, the New Testament dispels the lie at the heart of their violence.” Injustice in the first case is a kind of mass therapy that enslaves, while in the second it is a therapy that liberates. Christ does not achieve his victory through violence. Rather, he obtains it through a “renunciation of violence so complete that violence can rage … without realizing that by so doing, it reveals what it must conceal.”

Girard suggests that such myths arise from real victim histories, and that in the religious drama of the Greeks (e.g., that of Sophocles or Aeschylus), “the goal of tragedy is the same as sacrifice,” namely “a ritual purification or Aristotelian catharsis which is an intellectualized or ‘sublimated’ version of the original sacrificial effect.”

The murder of all the prophets “since the foundation of the world” is of this order. But there is a fundamental difference between pagan myths and the Bible: “In the myth the expulsions are justified, each time. In the biblical account they never are.” The Cross destroys the power of Satan as the ‘king of this world,’ meaning the power to unleash violence through the scapegoat mechanism. Christianity is a source of disruption in our world. Christianity constantly tells that our scapegoats are nothing but innocent victims. “Nietzsche aimed at a deconstruction of Christianity, which he understood correctly as the defence of victims. Our modern nihilists want to deconstruct everything except the defence of victims, which they espouse. Thus, they are a very special form of nihilist: they deny everything except the defence of the victim. In other words, they could not be more Christian than they are, against Christianity of course, but their self-contradiction is becoming obvious,” wrote Girard. In our day it happens to be that Christianity itself has become “the scapegoat of last resort,” while, again paradoxically, “our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love,” a force which may, Girard argues, be “unifying the world for the first time in history.” Whereas Hitler’s goal was to root out of European culture the concern for victims. “If our world were really to escape the influence of Christianity, it would have to renounce its concern for victims.” The acid test of the church to be with Jesus Christ it to stand with the victim.