Jesus

In this course

Jesus appears in the readings primarily through René Girard's anthropological theory of sacrificial violence and the scapegoat mechanism, where Christ's crucifixion exemplifies how societies ritually contain mimetic desire and social chaos through sacrificial expulsion. Girard uses Jesus as the historical and theological pivot point for understanding how violence is institutionalized and then potentially transcended in Western culture, making him essential to arguments about power, ritual, and social order in contexts where technology and systems replicating these mechanisms become relevant.

Background

Jesus, also referred to as Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and by various other names and titles, was a 1st-century Jewish preacher and religious leader in the Roman province of Judaea. He is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. Most branches of Christianity consider Jesus the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited Messiah or Christ. Accounts of Jesus's life are contained in the Gospels, especially the four canonical Gospels of the New Testament. Since the Enlightenment, academic research has produced various views on the historical reliability of the Gospels and the extent to which they reflect the historical Jesus, but virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed historically.

Mentioned in 1 reading