Chapter 9: Casting Stones

The past few months have seen a steady stream of new subscribers to this Substack, so primarily for these new subscribers: I started posting in January, primarily to publicize a book project while I was seeking a publisher. The first post gives a brief summary of the book, and the second (from February) is the entire prologue, which will give a good sense of the scope of the book. (You can find these by going to tgates.substack.com, clicking on “Archive” at the top, and then scrolling down to the bottom to find the earliest posts.)

Subsequently, the book was accepted by Wipf and Stock Publishers, and was published in June as Turning Toward the Victim: The Bible, Sacred Violence, and the End of Scapegoating in Quaker Perspective. Since then, most of the posts have been summaries of various chapters. I hope the summaries are helpful—but there is no substitute for reading the book in its entirety. (The 40% discount from the publisher has expired, so it is $38 from Wipf and Stock. The cheapest option is Amazon Kindle, for $9.99.)

Up to now, the posts have largely consisted of summaries of various passages from the Hebrew Scriptures, our Old Testament. But this month, I am venturing into the Christian New Testament.

Casting Stones

Let any among you who is without sin cast the first stone at her. (John 8:7)

Death by stoning is the archetypal fate of scapegoats. When a mob kills by casting stones, everyone is responsible—and so no one is responsible.

The Gospel of John briefly alludes to two incidents where Jesus’s opponents “took up stones again to stone him” (10:31; see also 8:59), but he either “hid himself” (8:59) or “escaped from their hands” (10:39), because his “time had not yet come” (7:6). And in Luke 4, the townspeople in Nazareth, displeased with Jesus’s inaugural sermon, attempt to force him off a cliff—the equivalent of stoning.

In perhaps the best-known biblical incident of near-stoning, Jesus is not the target of a mob, but rather the one who intervenes to avert a stoning. The incident, recounted in John 8:2-11[1], is well known, but briefly, Jesus is teaching in the Temple when the authorities brought to him a woman “caught in the very act of adultery.” They pointed out that the law of Moses “commanded us to stone such women,” and, in order to test him, ask, “What do you say?” Jesus replies with one of the more memorable lines in the Gospels: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” One by one, her accusers drift away.

Feminist scholars have pointed out all kinds of problems with the way this story is told [2]. “The law of Moses commanded us to stone such women”; what the law of Moses actually says is that “both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death” (Lev 20:10, Deut 22:22). If the woman was truly “caught in the very act,” why was her co-adulterer not also brought forward? According to tradition, there must be two witnesses to a capital crime, and these two witnesses initiate the execution by throwing the first stones. It is not clear who the witnesses are, or even if they are present. Finally, this is a prominent example of the biblical text’s tendency to preferentially scapegoat women for perceived sexual crimes, over the transgressions of men (sexual or otherwise).

Even allowing for all this, what is clear is that there is a mob thirsting for blood. Jesus himself is in a difficult position; if he forbids the stoning, the authorities will accuse him of disobeying the law of Moses. On the other hand, one wrong move in such a highly charged atmosphere could signal for the stoning to commence. Girard says that at this point, “the first stone is the last obstacle that prevents the stoning”; once the first stone is cast, we can be sure that others will imitatively follow [3]. Jesus kneels and writes with his finger in the sand, deflecting the crowd’s attention away from the woman. When Jesus finally stands to speak, he explicitly calls attention to the first stone: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Jennifer Brashaw comments: “Jesus has shifted the accusations of the crowd away from the scapegoat and onto themselves. . . . The accusers, once united in a threatening mob, slowly disappear from view . . . no longer an intimidating force demanding death but now individuals distracted by their own guilt rather than obsessed with the guilt of another” [4].

Against all odds, Jesus has successfully defused a mimetic mob intent on scapegoating violence. Girard goes on to compare this incident from the Gospel with another incident described in ancient literature, an incident with a very different outcome.

Apollonius was a second century wandering sage and miracle worker. Most of what we know about him comes from Life of Apollonius of Tyana, a biography written in the following century by the Greek author Philostratus. Apollonius’s biographer clearly knows the Christian Gospels and thought the contrast between Apollonius and Christ was much to Apollonius’s advantage: “among the pagans, his miracles were viewed as superior to those of Jesus” [5]. In Philostratus’s telling, Apollonius’s birth was accompanied by “unusual divine signs in the heavens.” As an adult, he became an itinerant teacher and “gathered a number of followers around him who became convinced that he was no ordinary human, but the Son of God.” He performed many healing miracles, including casting out demons. Eventually, he aroused the opposition of the Roman authorities, was put on trial, and executed. After his death, he appeared to some of his followers, who were convinced that his soul had ascended to heaven [6].

Perhaps Apollonius’ most spectacular miracle was his healing of an unspecified plague in Ephesus. After their own attempts failed, the Ephesians summoned Apollonius. From Philostratus’ account:

“Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease.” And with these words he led the entire population to the theatre. . . . And there he saw what seemed an old mendicant artfully blinking his eyes as if blind, and he carried a wallet and a crust of bread in it; and he was clad in rags and was very squalid of countenance. Apollonius therefore arranged the Ephesians around him and said: “Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.” Now the Ephesians wondered what he meant, and were shocked at the idea of murdering a stranger so manifestly miserable; for he was begging and praying for them to take mercy upon him. Nevertheless Apollonius insisted and egged on the Ephesians to launch themselves on him and not let him go. And as soon as some of them began to take shots and hit him with their stones, the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a demon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him. After a little pause, Apollonius bade them remove the stones. . . . When therefore they had exposed the object which they thought they had thrown their missiles at, they found that he had disappeared and instead of him there was a hound who resembled in form and look a Molossian dog, but was in size the equal of the largest lion; there he lay before their eyes, pounded to a pulp by their stones and vomiting foam as mad dogs do [7].

Philostratus evidently expected his readers to be impressed by this wonder. We, however, are appalled at his “horrible miracle” [8]. Reading this story from the perspective of the Gospels, we see (even if unconsciously) something that the ancient pagans could not: collective “sacred violence” against an innocent victim, the use of good violence to drive out bad violence.

It is hard to imagine a more definitive description of a scapegoat incident than Philostratus’s account: a crisis (the plague), the identification of a marginalized victim (the blind beggar), the all-against-one violence of the mob (by stoning), and especially the overt dehumanization and demonization of an innocent victim. Furthermore, Girard comments that “the plague of Ephesus is not necessarily bacterial.” Philostratus’ account of the stoning is immediately preceded by a description of rampant rivalry and disorder in the city. “It is an epidemic of mimetic rivalries, an interweaving of scandals, a war of all against all, which, thanks to the victim selected by the diabolical cleverness of Apollonius, is transformed ‘miraculously’ into a reconciliation of all against one” [9]. The plague abates.

In comparing these two incidents, it is clear that Jesus in the encounter with the adulterous woman plays a role directly opposite that of Apollonius. “Apollonius’s achievement is to incite the throwing of the first stone, and thus the unanimous violence. Jesus’ achievement is to prevent it”[10]. But at a deeper level, both incidents are about mimesis, the power of contagious imitation. Once Jesus convinces the first elder to walk away without casting a stone, the spell is broken, and others follow suit. And once Apollonius convinces the reluctant Ephesians to throw the first stone, the others follow.

Everything depends on the model we choose to imitate.

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[1]According to the NRSV textual notes, the earliest manuscripts do not include the story, and other early manuscripts place it elsewhere in John, or even in Luke. It may represent an independent early oral tradition that simply was too good a story to leave out of the Gospels, even If none of the writers knew it. Again, in this work I am primarily concerned with the text as we have it, and less concerned with whether a specific text can reliably be traced back to the events of Jesus’ life.

[2] See for example, Bashaw, Scapegoats, pp. 65–78.

[3] Girard, I See Satan Falling, p. 56 (italics mine).

[4] Bashaw, Scapegoats, p. 74.

[5] Girard, I See Satan Falling, p. 49. For the comparison of Apollonius with Jesus, see Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, Kindle edition, location 242–69.

[6] Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, location 180–241. Ehrman uses the example of Philostratus to illustrate that in the ancient world the idea of the divine man was not unique to Jesus. Tellingly, he does not mention the stoning at Ephesus.

[7] Quoted in Girard, I See Satan Falling, pp. 49–50. Original text from Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Loeb Classical Library, I: 363–67. Molossian dogs were a mastiff-type breed, noted for their fierceness and associated with the Bronze Age Molossus tribe of Northwestern Greece.

[8] Girard, I See Satan Fall, p. 49. The title of chapter 4 is “The Horrible Miracle of Apollonius of Tyana.”

[9] Girard, I See Satan Fall, p. 53 (italics in the original).

[10] Heim, Saved from Sacrifice, p. 132.