How Jesus Confronts Scapegoating
Jennifer Garcia Bashaw is Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian Ministry at Campbell University in North Carolina. She has a passion for teaching the Bible on a lay level and contributes social media content to outlets such as Baptist News Global and The Bible for Normal People, where she is a nerd-in-resident. Dr. Bashaw is an ordained American Baptist minister who enjoys preaching as well training and resourcing pastors. She is the author of Scapegoats: The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims and John for Normal People: A Guide through the Drama and Depth of the Fourth Gospel.
On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long went on a rampage in Atlanta, killing eight people in three different spas across the city.
Six of the people murdered were women of Asian descent.
The twenty-one-year-old shooter, who had been raised in a Southern Baptist Church, admitted that he targeted his victims because he wanted to eliminate the women who were a temptation to him.
The people who died that day suffered because Long, influenced by his church tradition and cultural patterns, made women his scapegoats.
Instead of admitting his own destructive desires and recognizing his objectification of women, he blamed women for his feelings.
His scapegoating actions were not an anomaly; they revealed some of the more sinister tendencies plaguing American society.
In addition to the anti-Asian bias that had been escalating since the COVID pandemic started, Long also acted out the long-standing Christian tradition of blaming women for being sexual temptations.
His shooting spree displayed the destructive effects of scapegoating, that when we shift the blame for our own wrongs onto those who are innocent, violence grows and the marginalized in society suffer.
For me, the shooting also raised a question that people have pondered throughout history—how do we stop the scapegoating violence that unravels societies from the inside out?
Believe it or not, this is the question addressed in a brief but powerful passage from John 8, a story that describes a scapegoating incident AND offers solutions to the human problem of blame shifting.
John 8 Describes Two Scapegoats
Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him, and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and, making her stand before all of them, 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him.
Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground.
When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”
She said, “No one, sir.”
And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
It may not seem obvious to all who read this passage that this is a scapegoat story, but in fact there are two scapegoats in the story.
One could read it as simply another attempt to trap Jesus, or an example of what happens when keepers of the law hold a criminal to the letter of the law.
But such a reading would ignore the nagging questions that rise to the surface with just a bit of scrutiny.
For example:
What are the scribes and Pharisees trying to accomplish by trapping Jesus?
Why do they bring an accused person, a woman, before Jesus to test him?
Why do they choose a sexual act like adultery rather than a religious offense, like blasphemy?
Why is the man involved in this alleged crime not arrested, or accused, or even mentioned?
The first and easiest “why” to answer is why the scribes and Pharisees are bringing an accused person before Jesus.
The passage gives us a clear answer: “They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him.”
They are trying to trap Jesus so that they can charge him with something.
The implication here is that there is nothing that Jesus has done to warrant condemnation.
He is innocent.
So, in order for any blame to be attached to him, some leaders of society have to manipulate a scene and get a charge to stick.
How Scapegoating Works
One of the most foundational truths about scapegoating is that the people with power—those in the center of society—single out people on the periphery in order to lay unsubstantiated blame on them.
René Girard, who developed scapegoat theory over his many years as a scholar of religion, argues that scapegoating is a practice that almost all societies since ancient times have practiced.
It is a hidden, even unconscious ritual that focuses the violence of a society onto a singular victim.
When a community accuses that victim, turns against him, and eventually kills or expels him, it brings peace.
More often than not, scapegoats are innocent of the crimes they are accused of but the community does not realize it.
They believe the guilt of the scapegoat because to accept the victim’s innocence would make them face the evil and violence in their own hearts, at the heart even of human society.
Jesus as Scapegoat
Over the course of his ministry, Jesus was accused of many wrongs that he was innocent of—he was called a blasphemer, he was charged with being in league with the devil, and he was accused of breaking God’s law.
Here, we see the religious leaders trying to set up a scenario where they could accuse him yet again, but this time in a very dramatic, very public way.
This story is part of a larger theme in the Gospels—the opposition of the religious and political leaders to Jesus.
Jesus became a scapegoat for these powerful men because he challenged them and pointed out their own sins to the people.
If they could get rid of him, not only would it maintain the status quo, it would keep Jesus from continuing to be a thorn in their side.
So, this story shows us that the religious leaders sought to make Jesus a scapegoat.
But Jesus is not the only scapegoat in the passage.
As the questions I raised suggest, the accused woman also serves in this role.
Women as Scapegoats
Women have been scapegoats for all of human history.
Ancient peoples who practiced human sacrifice killed women in far larger numbers than men.
But the scapegoating of women does not always involve ritual killing.
Religious societies have often made women sexual scapegoats, laying the blame for sexual sin on women rather than on their male counterparts.
This still happens today, as in the Atlanta shooting.
When people respond to victims of violence with questions like, “But did you see what was she wearing?” or “What did she do to provoke him?,” we are shifting the blame for evil acts from those who perpetrate them to the women who suffer them.
This is a covert form of scapegoating, as sinister as it is destructive.
Notice that when the Pharisees drag an adulterer before Jesus, it is just the woman, not the man involved in the alleged act.
There are two reasons for this.
First, the leaders understood that a woman is often a religious community’s go-to object of blame. She is considered a seducer, a temptress.
The accusation would stick better to her.
The Pharisees also knew that it was a woman, not a man, who would arouse the murderous rage of a religious people.
The bystanders in the Temple that day were more likely to turn on a woman.
Two More Features of Scapegoating: The Crime & the Crowd
That brings us to two other features in this scene that make it a scapegoat story—the chosen crime and the power of a crowd.
Scapegoats are often accused of a society’s taboos. Shocking offenses tend to rouse the anger of a mob much more easily than a common wrongdoing.
One more modern example can be seen in the protests over Drag Story Hour.
Right-wing groups have protested at these LGBTQ community events, blaming the organizers for “grooming” or sexualizing children.
Violence has erupted in several of these instances.
In Jesus’s context, nothing was more enraging to good religious folks than an adulterous woman.
The Pharisees were quite cunning in their choice of the accused and the accusation.
They drag a woman before Jesus whom they purposely describe as “caught in the very act of adultery.”
They are trying to scandalize the crowds in the Temple.
We don’t even know if the woman is guilty of what they accuse her of.
They have produced no evidence and no partner in crime.
The passage has already told us that they wanted to trap Jesus so we probably shouldn’t trust them to tell the truth about the woman.
And even if she had been “caught in the act,” as they said, in their first-century Jewish context, this crime could have been talking to a man in public that wasn’t her husband or walking around without a veil.
The laws in the society made it easy to scapegoat a woman, especially sexually.
But the Pharisees don’t really care about her guilt.
They want to rabble rouse.
In the story, they question Jesus relentlessly, surely allowing more people to gather.
The tension among the religious crowds grows.
A murderous mob is about to form at the instigation of these indignant religious leaders—a scapegoating mob.
And Jesus has to decide how to respond.
How Jesus Handles a Scapegoating Mob
Well, his initial reaction to the Pharisees’ question, “Now what do you say?” is to say, nothing.
And then he bends and writes in the dirt.
Many scholars and preachers have tried to guess what Jesus wrote here because it is the only time we see Jesus writing in the Gospels.
Your guess is as good as mine.
But it doesn’t matter what he wrote.
It is his action here that is important—he draws the attention of the scapegoating crowd away from their object of judgment.
Jesus’s actions break the spell of collective violence and give the crowd and the accusers time to calm down.
Jesus quiets the scene and then, finally, he speaks—“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
With these words, he prods the people to contemplate their own part in the conflict, to consider the sin and blame they themselves may carry.
He deescalates the mob violence by uncovering the scapegoat process for his audience—he shows them that they are the guilty ones, not the one they have dragged before him as a scapegoat.
Jesus does not merely deescalate the contagion of violence in this incident, he also provides a key that will help prevent future scapegoats.
He systematically removes all the qualities that make the “adulterous” woman a scapegoat.
First, the scribes and Pharisees have singled the woman out as a horrific sinner, caught in a crime considered shocking in eyes of their society.
Jesus levels the playing field between the leaders, the crowd, and the woman by forcing everyone to examine their own sins.
By disqualifying any sinner from stoning the woman, Jesus insinuates that either all sins warrant the death penalty or no sins do.
The sexual sin they accuse her of is no more deserving of punishment than any of their sins.
It is certainly not a sin that separates her out from the rest of them or justifies her being stoned.
After Jesus directs the accusers to look at their own sins, they slowly walk away.
The crowd that was out for blood has now disintegrated.
It is at this point that Jesus turns his attention to the woman and speaks the first words actually addressed to her in the story:
“Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She says, “No one, sir.” And Jesus says, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.”
In other words, keep your head down and don’t give them another chance to accuse you of anything.
I might not be there next time to calm the mob.
beyond shifting the crowd’s focus, Jesus Humanizes and Dignifies
This story is a short narrative, with few words exchanged between the characters but over the course of these nine verses, the author has told a story with great impact.
With Jesus’s subtle actions of deflection, we see him calming a scapegoating storm, soothing the crowd, and thwarting the prosecutors.
With his words about throwing the first stone, he removes the scapegoat target from the woman’s back and focuses attention where it belongs—on the wrongs of the accusers.
Lastly, with his words to the woman, Jesus frees the woman from blame and treats her like a human being made in the image of God.
He refuses to acknowledge her inferior position, the position that had prompted the religious leaders to scapegoat her in the first place.
There are many qualities introduced in the story that illustrate the woman’s inferior position in first-century Jerusalem—she is a woman with no one to stand up for her, she is an “adulteress” accused of a sexually shaming act, she is nameless (identified only by her sin), and she is unimportant enough to be dragged before Jesus as a criminal worthy of death.
By the end of the episode, however, Jesus has stood up for her, pardoned her, and treated her as a valuable human being on equal moral ground with the crowds and religious leaders.
Jesus’s acknowledgment and acceptance of the woman does more than just save her life. It lifts her out of that place of otherness and isolation from which scapegoats are plucked.
Jesus gives us a glimpse into how to create a future without scapegoating, a future where we turn our gazes to our own sins as Jesus encourages the crowd to do and where we treat those who are marginalized and targeted for blame not as scapegoats but as moral and social equals.
Interested in Hearing More?
Dr. Bashaw spoke with The Collective+ last week about scapegoating. Join now to catch the recording and glean her insights and the insights of other guests.