Scapegoats: The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims

by Jennifer Garcia Bashaw

Overview

Scapegoats are innocent victims who have experienced blame and violence at the hands of society. René Girard proposes that the Gospels present Jesus as a scapegoat whose innocent death exposes how humans have always created scapegoats. This revelation should have cured societal scapegoating, yet those who claim to live by the Gospels have missed that message. They continue to scapegoat and remain blind to the suffering of scapegoats in modern life.

Christians today tend to read the New Testament as victors, not as victims. The teachings and actions of Jesus thus lose much of their subversive significance. The Gospels become one harmonized story about individual salvation rather than distinct representations of Jesus's revolutionary work on behalf of victims. Scapegoats revisits the Gospel narratives with the understanding that they tell scapegoats' stories, and that through those stories the kingdom of God is revealed. Bashaw goes beyond Girard's arguments to show that Jesus's whole public ministry (not only his death) combats the marginalization of victims. These scapegoat stories work together to illuminate an essential truth of the Gospels--that Jesus modeled a reality in which victims become survivors and the marginalized become central to the kingdom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781506469379
Publisher:	1517 Media
Publication date:	05/24/2022
Pages:	286
Sales rank:	676,724
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jennifer Garcia Bashaw is assistant professor of New Testament and Christian ministry at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina. She is an ordained minister and has served a variety of Baptist churches and ministries across the country.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xi

1 Scapegoats and Scapegoating 1

Part I Scapegoating Women

2 Women in the Christian Past 21

3 Mary the Mother, Mary the Prophet 33

4 The Widow and the Whore 45

5 The Woman Saved from Stoning 65

6 Women in the Christian Present 79

Part II Scapegoating the Poor and Infirm

7 The Poor and Infirm in the Christian Past 103

8 Jesus, Illness, and Disability 117

9 Jesus and the Poor 157

Part III Scapegoating the Outsider

10 Outsiders in the Christian Past 193

11 Revealing and Reversing the Scapegoat 201

12 The Woman at the Well and Jesus 219

13 Simon the Gyrene and the Black Scapegoat 243

Conclusion: Following Jesus toward a World without Scapegoats 271

Index 283