Notes
143 Notes Preface 1. Bradley McLean, “On the Revision of Scapegoat Terminology,” Numen 37, no. 2 (1990), 168. 2. McLean, “Revision of Scapegoat Terminology,” 169. 3. McLean, “Revision of Scapegoat Terminology,” 169. 4. McLean, “Revision of Scapegoat Terminology,” 169. 5. McLean, “Revision of Scapegoat Terminology,” 169. 6. B. Hudson McLean, The Cursed Christ: Mediterranean Expulsion Rituals and Pauline Soteriology (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 66. 7. McLean, The Cursed Christ, 65. 8. McLean, The Cursed Christ, 70. 9. Mary Douglas, “The Go-Away Goat,” in The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception, vol. 3, ed. Rolf Rendtorff, Robert A. Kugler, and Sarah Smith Bartel (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2003), 121. 10. Douglas, “The Go-Away Goat,” 122. 11. Douglas, “The Go-Away Goat,” 124. 12. Douglas, “The Go-Away Goat,” 125. 13. Douglas, “The Go-Away Goat,” 121. 14. Douglas, “The Go-Away Goat,” 121. 15. Douglas, “The Go-Away Goat,” 124. 16. D. J. Stökl is even more combative. Like McLean and Douglas, he deplores the term’s generalized use, and he is similarly no fan of Girard’s: “The sacrificial theory of René Girard, presented in his books La violence et le sacré and Le bouc émissaire, has been a focus of attention, whether one agrees with his main theory, an amplification of the Freudian myth, or not. He surveys various 144 Notes rituals in various places and at various times that treat a victim similar to the Levitical scapegoat and with a similar atoning function. In the book of Leviticus, however, it is very clear that the ritual refers not to a human being but to an animal, a goat. Strangely enough, most of Girard’s scapegoats are not animals but human beings. Girard might have supposed that the appellation ‘scapegoat’ would be more easily understood by a modern Western audience than for example the Greek term pharmakos, which is concerned with human victims. He could be reasonably sure that the subsumption of human sacrifices under the scapegoat ritual would be acceptable to his readers, because ‘scapegoat’ has become a fixed term in Western thought. But since when? Given that Girard’s central chapter talks about Jesus as scapegoat, one would expect that the analogy between the death of a human being (Jesus) and the scapegoat ritual was first drawn in the New Testament and through this entered the Western imaginaire, its collective repertoire of motifs. However, as is well known, the Christian canon does not refer to Jesus as scapegoat. When and how did the scapegoat enter the Western imaginaire as a category connoting a type of human atonement sacrifice, if not in the New Testament?” “The Christian Exegesis of the Scapegoat between Jews and Christians,” in Sacrifice in Religious Experience, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten (Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2002), 208. This assessment is clearly more astute and Stökl deserves credit for seeing that Girard is only the inheritor of a term whose semantic field was staked out long before he began theorizing. He is, moreover, asking the highly pertinent question: when indeed and how did the term first acquire its generalized usage? The real culprits, according to Stökl, are the early Christian writers who, motivated by rivalry with Jewish tradition, pulled the “scapegoat” up by its biblical roots and bequeathed it to modern theorists in all its henceforth flaccid referentiality. It is “because of the Church Fathers,” he says, “[that] we consider in a single category the different phenomena pharmakos, Jesus’ self-sacrifice, and scapegoat rituals.” The tendency of religious studies people to compare these phenomena “without referring to the crucial difference between goat and man” begins with them. If the term “scapegoat” is widely deployed today to denote “a type of human atonement sacrifice,” Girard comes by this usage honestly enough. “Pharmakos would have been a more reasonable title for Girard’s book,” Stökl offers, “were not the ‘scapegoat’ the central term in our—i.e. the modern Western—imaginaire as a result of the Church Fathers’ propaganda.” Stökl’s formidable dissertation furnishes a compendious list of early Christian exegetes writing on the scapegoat, but the article from which the above comments were taken seriously overstates their influence on the word’s meaning and use today, something only a careful analysis of the relevant texts will allow us to see. Stökl, “Christian Exegesis of the Scapegoat,” 228. 17. David L. Jeffrey, A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in...
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