6
Anthony K. Jensen
With his Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (1835–36), David Friedrich Strauss revolutionized nineteenth-century biblical historiography. While the previous century saw battle between historical supernaturalists who took the miraculous character of the New Testament for literal fact and Enlightenment historiographers who read the miracles as prescientific interpretations of natural phenomena, Strauss argued that early Christian writers added the miraculous events as myths to satisfy Jewish Messianic prophecies.1 Although respected among professional historians, Anthony Ashley-Cooper Earl of Shaftesbury voiced the popular reaction to this ‘mythicist’ reading, naming Strauss’s Life of Jesus “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.”2
By 1906, the rather less pestilential Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus would syncretize the debates arising from Strauss’s ‘mythicist’ thesis with Christian Gottlob Wilke’s revival of the “Markan priority” thesis3 and the “two-source” or “Q” hypothesis of Christian Hermann Weisse and Heinrich Julius Holtzman.4 Schweitzer’s own interpretation involved a psychological analysis of the earliest historiographers of Jesus and their anxiety about an approaching apocalypse; later, as Christianity merged with the empire through what became a written tradition, the image of Jesus shifted for the purpose of establishing imperial authority; and by the twentieth century, Schweitzer could look back at the history of the Jesus figure as the product of hundreds of historians, each interpreting into a “Christ” their own interests and motivations.
Just a few years later, Schweitzer’s psychology of historical interpretation would be challenged by the more radical Arthur Drews (1865–1935). In his Die Christusmythe (1909), which marks the end of what is now called the ‘Old Quest’,5 Drews held the New Testament to be the construction of early Christians who relied upon a dangerously antiquated mode of mythologizing. Later historians applied ‘Great Man’ romantic presumptions, foregoing the naturalist vision of Jesus himself for an idealized Messiah, the idolatry of whom retarded both the spiritual and social progress of humanity for centuries. The thesis of a historically real Jesus Christ, according to Drews, “is not only superfluous, but mischievous. It loads the religious consciousness with doubtful historical ballast; it grants the past an authority over the religious life of the present, and it prevents men from deducing the real consequences of their Monistic religious principles. Hence I insist that the belief in the historical reality of Jesus is the chief obstacle to religious progress . . .”6 The quest for the historical Jesus thus reached the conclusion that there was in fact no ‘Jesus’ worth searching for.
What this brief historical excursus shows is that, despite his sister’s worry that it would violate blasphemy laws,7 Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist was thematically quite at home in German historical and theological debates.8 Its doubts about the historical accuracy of the Gospels’ and Paul’s portrayal of Jesus were among the reigning theses of biblical historiography. Nietzsche shares entirely Strauss’s skepticism about the historical reliability of the New Testament, Schweitzer’s tendency toward psychologism in examining the motivations of New Testament writers, and especially Drews’s conviction that Jewish Messianic prophecies were grafted upon a mythical framework.9 Granted, no other professional academic could have pulled off the shrilly exaggerated rhetoric of this ‘curse’ against Christianity, Nietzsche’s ‘mythicist’ interpretation of the historical Jesus—compared to Drews—isn’t even the most radical.
The purpose of this chapter, then, is to elucidate and analyze Nietzsche’s own ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’ by using the comparative framework of contemporary historiography. With it, we will be in better position to analyze two of Nietzsche’s central positions, namely, the character of the historical Jesus and the process by which the historical Jesus was turned into the Christ of the New Testament. Doing so makes clear that, while Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the historical tradition about Jesus and St. Paul is mostly consistent with the ‘historical quest’ in theme and focus, his positive attributions of their ‘real’ motivations involve a historiographical method that wildly oversteps the boundaries of scholarship.
1 The historical Jesus
Nietzsche never comes to question the existence of a historical person named Jesus, as does, for example, Drews.10 But Nietzsche does think that the entirety of Christian historiography has fundamentally obfuscated who Jesus was as an historical person. “Christianity soaked up doctrines and rites from all the subterranean cults of the imperium Romanum and bits of nonsense from all kinds of sick reason” (A 37). As a result of this ‘mythic’ covering over, “[e]ven the word ‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding—there was really only one Christian, and he died on the cross” (A 39). Worse still, “people have constructed the church out of the opposite of the evangel” (A 36). We will address ‘how’ the image of Jesus became so corrupted in the next section; for now, we will examine the ‘who’. Nietzsche’s argument takes two roads: a negative criticism of the depiction of Jesus inherited from the textual tradition and a positive or attributive reconstruction of who Jesus ‘really’ was. The negative strategy bears four theses that stand within the thematic debate of the ‘Historical Quest’ tradition: (1) that Jesus did not have doctrines, (2) that he could not have held any metaphysical positions, (3) that he was no hero or genius, and (4) that he was not a revolutionary. Nietzsche’s positive strategy—which plainly oversteps the ‘Historical Quest’ tradition—will attribute to Jesus (5) a hyperbolic aversion of pain and (6) a parabolic-symbolic pattern of speech. His overarching claim in the quotations above—that Christianity constructed a church as the antithesis of the historical Jesus—depends on these two strands of argument.
From the start (1), Nietzsche distrusts most of the descriptions of Jesus’s words and teachings, certainly those found in any works later than the Gospels. Consistent with other ‘Historical Questers’, two thousand years of church interpretation is also ruled out insofar as it is a roughly philosophical attempt to explicate the kind of normative code Nietzsche thinks would have been entirely foreign to Roman Judea. If Nietzsche is right, then any attempts to parse the true doctrines from heretical beliefs will falsify a priori the meaning of Jesus (A 38).11 This thesis is concluded from two different arguments. Nietzsche holds both that philosophical-theological doctrines were superfluous to the affect Jesus had intended and that Jesus could not have issued doctrines due to a characteristic failing. The latter argument, which involves the positive attributions mentioned above (5 and 6), will be discussed below. With respect to superfluity here, Nietzsche writes: “What was called ‘evangel’ after that was the opposite of what he had lived: a ‘bad tidings’, a dysangel. It is false to the point of absurdity to think that Christians are characterized by their ‘beliefs’, like a belief in salvation through Christ: only the practice of Christianity is really Christian, living like the man who died on the cross” (A 39). Somewhat like Socrates or Diogenes, Jesus was a practical example of how to live.12 Doctrines proving this or that moral principle were thus superfluous for living the kind of ‘Verhalten’ or behavior Jesus exemplified: a life that hallowed the name of ‘our father’, showed gratitude for our gifts, resisted temptation, and forgave trespasses.
This bearer of “glad tidings” died the way he lived, the way he taught—not “to redeem humanity” but instead to show [zeigen] how people need to live. The practice [Die Praktik] is what he bequeathed to humanity: his behavior [Verhalten] towards the judges, towards the henchmen, the way he acted in the face of his accusers and every type of slander and derision—his behavior [Verhalten] on the cross. (A 35)
Jesus therefore did not need the sacred mystical “formulas” or “rites for interacting with God—or even prayer” (A 33). Consequently, “only the evangelical practice leads to God, in fact it is ‘God’” (A 33). The person who could ‘follow Jesus’ in example if not in the letter of his ‘doctrines’, would live a fortunate life, a life characterized as ‘blessed’. Since the disciples would never have needed doctrine beyond what they witnessed, any doctrinal attributions would have been superfluous. So far, though, that is all that Nietzsche is claiming. The stronger position, that doctrine would have been not only superfluous but impossible, will require Nietzsche to attribute the two positive characteristics, which, again, must be saved for below (5 and 6).
If possessing at least some kind of doctrine is the condition for erecting the kind of metaphysics needed to establish God’s eternality, the age of the world, the immortality of the soul, the ontologically pregnant Jewish version of sin, then what falls out with them is the entire metaphysics of resurrection and redemption (2). Absent doctrinal metaphysics, Nietzsche thinks that Jesus’s ‘Verhalten’ would have been a model for the blessed natural life, not a sort of entry ticket into the afterlife. What such a life entailed was asceticism to the extent it cultivated health, embracing friends as brothers, affecting a gentleness toward women, not resisting those who wrong them, not distinguishing between foreigners and natives, or Jews and Gentiles, not getting angry, not condescending or belittling (A 33), and—perhaps the two most important for Nietzsche—understanding ‘truths’ as the expression of an inner reality (A 34) and ability to forgive (A 35). “What precisely was beneath him?—The feelings of blame, revenge, ressentiment” (A 40). This highest aspect of the blessed life is illustrated by Nietzsche’s interpretation of Jesus’s words to the thief on the cross. Typically construed as the promise of a supranatural salvation for the dying man, Nietzsche instead interprets Jesus’s ‘promise’ as a naturalist description of the state of blessedness inherent in the one who could resist ressentiment and blame, who could forgive his trespassers. “‘That was a truly divine man’, a ‘child of God’, said the thief. ‘If this is how you feel’, the redeemer replied, ‘then you are in paradise this day, then you too are a child of God. . . .’ Not to defend yourself, not to get angry, not to lay blame. . .” (A 35). So, there is certainly an ethic of sorts in Jesus, though not one that rests on appeal to either rational argument or special insight into an objective moral order. His moral code was based in what he intuited to be a naturally healthy personal psychological state, which when satisfied led to the unencumbered feeling of blessedness.
If the historical Jesus held no doctrines and served only as a personal exemplar, then he could not have been—as had been claimed by the greatest of the French ‘Historical Questers,’ Ernst Renan—any sort of romanticized hero (3).13 Renan, with what Nietzsche names an “odious sort of psychological thoughtlessness,” attributes to Jesus “the concept of genius and that of hero” (A 29). Renan’s argument, or what Nietzsche makes of it,14 was that whereas most New Testament stories were fabricated, the historical Jesus himself must have been a sort of ‘cult of personality,’ a Carlyle-styled ‘Great Man,’ in order to have inspired so many millions to his cause. To Nietzsche, on the contrary, Jesus was precisely the opposite of Renan’s hero. A hero stands out from and above the crowd insofar as he is adversarial and becomes an enemy of the status quo by attempting to overcome it. But Jesus didn’t attack or stand out—he “does not get angry, does not lay blame, does not defend itself: [he] does not brandish ‘the sword’” (A 32)—so much as encourage others to see value in themselves. “Everyone is a child of God—Jesus did not claim any special privileges . . .” (A 29). As to his influence, Nietzsche denies Renan’s romantic assumption that only great figures have the power to move history. GM features nameless protagonist ‘herds’, priests, or slaves altering the course of history dramatically by their sheer numbers and not any individual heroism. Here, too, Jesus need not to have been anyone particularly important for a mass of others to make something out of him.
This leads to the next criticism of the inherited tradition: Jesus could not have been a Jewish revolutionary trying to subvert the power of the Roman Empire (4). Indeed, Nietzsche thinks the historical Jesus would have been entirely ignorant of the global political order. The Gospels say precious little about the political machinations of Rome beyond the occasional mention of a Caesar, even though the Old Testament is filled with political intrigue. Nietzsche’s point is emphatic: “[Jesus] doesn’t know anything about culture, even in passing, he does not need to struggle against it—he does not negate it. . . . The same is true about the state, about the whole civic order and society, about work, about war—he never had any reason to negate ‘the world’, the ecclesiastical concept of ‘world’ never occurred to him . . .” (A 30). Unable to revolt and ignorant of the wider global political situation, Jesus was nevertheless still a great danger. While his ‘Verhalten’ would have been no threat to the power of Rome at all—it certainly would have been a threat to that of the Jewish Sanhedrin.
This rebellion that Jesus has been understood or misunderstood to have caused—I cannot imagine what it was direct against if not the Jewish church. . . . It was a rebellion against the “good and the just,” against the “saints of Israel,” against the social hierarchy—not against its corruption, but rather against caste, privilege, order, formula; it was a refusal to believe in “higher men,” a no said to everything priestly or theologian-like. (A 27)
Jesus’s way of life represented the greatest threat to the established order of ressentiment, and to the entire Jewish revaluation of values that instilled into millions the conviction that they are, from their birth, blameworthy for their sins and destined for damnation should they fail to live in the manner which they alone were prescribed. Jesus never preached anarchy, but lived without needing to rule or be ruled. Jesus’s life was free of anything “belligerent, no-saying, no-doing” (A 40). His freedom from morality, economics, legal institutions, ‘higher men’: that was the subversion. He never had to wage war to overcome, just stand upright as an individual. He felt superior to “every feeling of ressentiment” (A 40), and, not unlike Socrates, freely gave his life to those who hated him rather than resist. Jesus’s contemporary Jews were not nearly so high-minded. “Revenge resurfaced, the most unevangelical feeling of all” (A 40). Out of the one they had judged, they paradoxically made the eternal judge. With Jewish cunning, Nietzsche surmises, the example found so threatening to their way of life was ironically turned against an enemy Jesus never would have thought to challenge: the Romans. They turned a phenomenon they could not grasp on its own terms into a familiar type (A 31). Thus was a Messiah almost immediately conceived in order to be the avenger who would punish the more powerful nonbelievers and give the true-believers their eternal reward. “Only at this point did people take all the contempt and bitterness against the Pharisees and theologians and put it into the master’s type—and in doing so, make him [namely, Jesus] into a Pharisee and theologian!” (A 40). The Jews made a revolutionary out of Jesus for the sake of their revenge (A 40), seeing in his message of love the weapon to sow blame, enmity, and the fear of judgment of their God (A 28). “The fact that humanity knelt down before the opposite of the origin, the meaning, the right of the evangel, the fact that in the concept of ‘church’, humanity canonized the very thing the ‘bearer of glad tidings’ felt to be beneath him, behind him—you will not find a greater example of world-historical irony” (A 36).
So much for what Jesus was not. Once all the doctrines have been removed, once all allusions to an afterlife have been omitted, once the romanticism of the hero, and revolutionary ressentiment has been purged of the depiction of Jesus, we finally reach the positive aspect of Nietzsche’s characterization of the ‘historical Jesus’. The first positive characteristic (5), hinted at above, is ‘idiocy’ (A 29).15 This does not involve an intellectual failing so much as paralyzing hypersensitivity in the face of aversion. “The consequence of an extreme over-sensitivity and capacity for suffering that does not want to be ‘touched’ at all because it feels every contact too acutely” (A 30). This hypersensitivity, Nietzsche thinks, would have precluded the kinds of heroism Renan ascribes and revolutionary tendencies interpolated by later writers. Every feeling of rebellion would have been perceived as intolerable pain. Happiness would have followed only “when it stops resisting everyone and anything” (A 30). By illustration, Jesus’s overturning the money tables would have been the sort of tantrum at the first sensation of irritation we see in emotionally underdeveloped children, not some heroic rebellion against Jewish monetary policy. ‘Giving unto Caesar’ would have been an act of appeasing the powerful, not some condescension toward earthly success. Jesus’s ‘turning the other cheek’ would express his inability to resist or struggle against those that would hurt him, not magnanimity. “The fear of pain, even of infinitesimal amounts of pain—this could end up only as a religion of love . . .” (A 30).
The second positive attribution involves Jesus being the ‘symbolist of internal truths’ (6). “If I understand anything about this great symbolist [diesem grossen Symbolisten], it is that he accepted only inner realities as realities, as ‘truths’—that he considered everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial, historical to be just a sign [Zeichen], an excuse for similies [Gleichnisssen]” (A 34).16 While Nietzsche denies many of the parables ascribed to Jesus on the grounds of psychological incongruity, he claims that many of the transcendent-sounding phrases he used—‘Son of God,’ ‘Kingdom of Heaven,’ ‘immaculate conception,’ and so on—were really spoken symbolically rather than as an allusion to some supranatural referent. This returns us to the earlier deconstruction of Jesus’s alleged doctrines. Earlier, it was shown that Jesus would not have needed doctrines for the meaningful affect he inculcated through his followers. Here, Nietzsche makes a stronger claim, namely, that Jesus could not have uttered doctrines. The reason is that his mode of linguistic expression was limited to the realm of the symbolic. This linguistic mode, Nietzsche thinks, follows from the psychological type of ‘idiot’ described above. As hyperbolically nonconfrontational, Jesus expressed only what was inside him in a language all his own, without the plain, direct reference that most people use to communicate. That is to say, Jesus was so introverted that his words were not intended even to have an external reference, were never intended to convince anyone of anything about that world. “[T]he experience of ‘life’ as only he knew it, repelled every type of word, formula, law, faith, or dogma. He spoke only about what was inside him most deeply: ‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’ are his words for the innermost, he saw everything else, the whole of reality, the whole of nature, language itself, as having value only as a sign, a parable” (A 32).
The most important symbols that have been systematically misunderstood, according to Nietzsche, are the notions of ‘Son’ and ‘Father.’ “[T]he word ‘son’ expresses the entrance into a feeling of the total transfiguration of all things (blessedness), and the word ‘father’ expresses this feeling itself, the feeling of eternity, of perfection” (A 34). Similarly, “The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a state of heart—not something lying ‘above the earth’ or coming ‘after death’” (A 34). Jesus was misunderstood here to be speaking about some supernatural realm imbued with supernatural entities, when really the words were merely symbolic expressions of his own feelings about different states of happiness.
If these negative deconstructions and positive attributions are the totality of Nietzsche’s ‘historical Jesus,’ then the question arises as to its validity. It is true that Nietzsche’s criticism of early testimony is consistent with the general trend of later-nineteenth-century historical theology. With meticulous text criticism, D. F. Strauss was able to show that the Gospel stories are riddled with inconsistencies. Several others in Nietzsche’s day came to refine the thesis as to which aspects of the Gospels could and could not be trusted. Wilhelm Wundt, no stranger to psychological interpretation, thinks the only historically demonstrable bits of Jesus’s life are the “sayings and discourses.”17 Johannes Weiss would reject Wundt on the grounds of social-historiography, claiming, “By means of the sayings we do not at once reach Jesus, but the community. [. . .] [W]e learn from the source what seemed to the community the characteristic, distinctive, and indispensable thing in Jesus.”18 Half a century of further research allowed Arthur Drews to characterize those inconsistencies as a summary falsification.19 Locations are wrong and many names confused. Jesus’s hometown may have been confused with a Jewish sect east of the Jordan River: the Nazoraeans. Specific dates are rarely given, and when they are, they are almost always incorrect. Even Luke, who self-references as a learned man, misdates King Herod by at least four years, misdates the governorship of Cyrenius by seven years, and the tetrarchy of Lysanias by at least thirty-four. Luke asserts a relationship between Herod and Pilate, which would have been scarcely possible. No one even seems sure who the emperor at the time was: Augustus or Tiberius? And even Jesus’s own name may have been a confusion from Joshua or else taken from the pre-Christian sect known as the Jesseans. Like Nietzsche, Drews believes Jesus’s alleged ‘doctrines’ have all-too-convenient precursors in earlier Jewish literature. Isaiah, Wisdom, and Psalms clearly influenced the depiction in obvious ways: Jesus takes on clear echoes of Isaiah’s ‘servant,’ Wisdom’s ‘just man,’ and Psalm 22’s ‘sufferer.’20 Isaiah is most likely the source for most of the Messianic material. Jesus’s preferential treatment for the poor and sick has strong resonance throughout the Old Testament, and many phrasings in the Gospels appeared cribbed from earlier Talmudic sources. Even the Sermon on the Mount has clear rhetorical precedents in the Psalms (e.g., Psalm 66, 13 and Psalm 37, 11).21
This negative side of Nietzsche’s account of Jesus (1–4) was therefore sufficiently central to the contemporary historical paradigm to merit academic consideration. And this variety of what may be called the ‘mythicist’ interpretation of Jesus—that Jesus was a real person, though the words and deeds attributed to him are a matter of legend—remains a significant interpretation today.22 Admittedly, Nietzsche’s interpretation was partly derived from Strauss and Renan, almost immediately overshadowed by Schweitzer and Drews, and, in comparison to these other ‘questers,’ poorly defended from a historical standpoint. It is also viciously circular. For one example: Jesus could not have been a metaphysician because all of his metaphysical claims were just symbols; and he must have been a symbolist because he never would have intended a metaphysics. For another: because Jesus was pathologically averse to pain, he could never have resisted authority; and the evidence that he was pathologically averse to pain is his never having resisted authority. Too often in The Antichrist, intuition and rhetoric subvert evidence and argument. But admitting these flaws, Nietzsche’s negative conclusion was at least consistent with the dominant scholarly interpretation.
The attributive side—that Jesus only spoke in symbols and was hypersensitive to pain—is far more original, but totally speculative. Worse, it must remain mere speculation because of Nietzsche’s own arguments. That is, if Nietzsche contends that the texts about Jesus were maliciously corrupted, then no amount of reinterpretation of those same texts will bring us to a ‘truer’ picture of what kind of person Jesus was—any more than a meticulous interrogation of a fraudulent map will eventually yield the right path. Moreover, the thought of disciples following around a hypochondriacal hyper-introvert as he muttered cryptic symbols about his own feelings genuinely stretches credulity. If Nietzsche’s project is conventional historiography—where value is measured by accuracy, exhaustiveness, evidence, and so on—then this positive side of The Antichrist is a total failure. If, however, he is aiming at something else, then the value of his account may come to look rather different.
2 From Jesus to Christ
Apart from deciphering the character of the historical Jesus, the second most prominent feature of the ‘historical quest’ is the reconstruction of New Testament historiography.23 Nietzsche stands in their keeping here, too, in both positing a three-stage development of textual corruption and in doubting large swathes of especially the Gospels and the authorship of St. Paul. As with his portrait of Jesus, there is also an attributive psycholgical thesis about “why” the texts were corrupted. And again, this attributive side remains original but wholly speculative.
The first stage of the textual shift is signaled by different and indeed antithetical messages between Jesus the man and the so-called First Congregation, something which can only be seen if we read the Gospels themselves as instantiated records of a slightly earlier tradition. “The Gospels are invaluable testimony to the already inescapable corruption within the First Congegration. [. . .] they are the opposite of naive corruption, they are refinement par excellence, they are psychological corruption raised to art. [. . .] We are among Jews: the first thing to note, so as not to lose the thread completely” (A 44).
As we saw, the meaning of the historical Jesus of Nazareth was essentially that of the symbol-making hypersensitive naturalist who encouraged his followers to see the value-creating power within themselves in opposition to the Jewish political structures that would impose values externally. Jesus’s immediate followers, the First Congregation, would have hardly been indifferent to their Jewish culture and so began to frame his role as the fulfillment of the prophecies with which they were intimately familiar. “The prophet, the Messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morality, the miracle worker, John the Baptist—all so many opportunities for mistaking the type. . .” (A 31). Even before the Gospels were formally composed the legend begins to grow. Thus grew the rumor that Jesus appeared with Elijah and Moses; thus are numerological symbols assigned to otherwise mundane actions; thus do his deeds begin to echo Old Testament heroes. Jesus’s message of innocence is made into what Nietzsche thinks is the quintessential Jewish characteristic: the desire for revenge. “Do not be fooled: they say, ‘judge not!’ but then send to hell everything that gets in their way. By letting God be the judge, they themselves are the judge: by exalting God, they exalt themselves [. . .]” (A 44). Section 45 of The Antichrist offers a list of passages that, due to their vengeful message, must have been the work of the First Congregation rather than the words of Jesus himself. “‘And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea’ (Mk 9:42)—How evangelical!” And again, “‘But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses’ (Mt. 6:15)—Very compromising for the above-mentioned ‘Father’ . . . ” (A 45). The threat that God will wreak vengeance upon those who believe or act wrongly is as contrary to the message of the historical Jesus as it is consistent with the ressentiment of Jews.
Nietzsche’s second stage begins when a self-identifying Christian sect began to gain popularity between the First Congregation and the formal publication of the Gospels. These Christians assumed the early elements of the Jewish Christ myth and adopted the pre-Jesus Jewish devaluation of nature. “Christianity grew up on this sort of false soil, where every nature, every natural value, every reality ran counter to the deepest instincts of the ruling class; accordingly, Christianity assumed the form of a deadly hostility to reality, a hostility unsurpassed to this day” (A 27). In these respects at least, early Christianity and first-century Judaism walked in lockstep. “Christianity can only be understood on the soil where it grew—it is not a countermovement to the Jewish instinct, it is its natural consequence, a further conclusion drawn by its terrifying logic” (A 26). The ‘further conclusion’ further disfigured Jesus, transforming him from the political weapon of the Jews against Rome into the metaphysical salvation of humanity from sin. “The second proposition is: the psychological type of the Galilean is still recognizable, but it had to assume a completely degenerate form [. . .] before it came to be used as a redeemer of humanity” (A 26). To ‘redeem’ humanity, in Nietzsche’s derogation, meant to denigrate whatever flourished naturally—earthly power—in dereference to some made-up divine power. Thus did these early Christians, alongside the Jews, come to revile the Romans. But in another ironic twist, their ressentiment turned its attention to the other earthly authority: the Jewish aristocracy. The Gospels thus took up the very same weapon against Judaism that it learned from Judaism: the ‘chosen people’ were now viewed as the executioners of the one true Messiah. “[A]s soon as the gap between Jew and Judaeo-Christian appeared, the latter had no choice except to use the same methods of self-preservation dictated by the Jewish instinct against the Jews themselves . . . ” (A 44).
The account of the development thus far is not so far-fetched. Although Nietzsche doesn’t name them, there were several Second-Temple sects in the area whose precepts could have easily bled into the picture of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’: the Jesseans and Nazoreans, for example. Even mainline Jews of the time would have been well versed in Isaiah, Wisdom, Psalms, and other Messianic texts that portray a second-coming justice-wielding conquerer. And they were not, as proven by the Baptist, unaccustomed to shoe-horning contemporary figures into these frameworks. The interpolation of a socialist ressentiment would have been derived especially from Isaiah, which also turns neighbor love into a curse upon the powerful. “He will even judge you rulers and leaders of his own nation. You destroyed his vineyard and filled your houses by robbing the poor” (Isa. 3:14). Indeed, even the Book of Revelation betrays its author’s clear dependence upon the Messianic tradition, along with a fair admixture of astral numerology.24 Therefore, that the image of Jesus came to take on earlier Jewish traits is highly probable—the question is when. For Albert Schweitzer, Jesus himself would have been sufficiently familiar with these sources to incoprorate them into his ministry, therein styling himself as a Messianic savior.25 Contrary to Schweitzer, and in agreement with William Wrede, Nietzsche thinks it must have been an invention of the First Congregation and early Christian writers who first applied the Messianic language, not Jesus himself.26 Contrary to Wrede, however, for Nietzsche the alteration of meaning was not a set of innocent mistakes, but a conscious and systematic hijacking intended to gain power over their rivals.
So, the ‘idiot’ symbolist was transformed by the First Congregation and then the Gospel writers into a Messianic God-Savior. But the damage was not done. Nietzsche’s attention now turns to Paul as the most transformative architect of the Christ myth.27 “Not reality, not the historical truth! . . . And once again, the Jew’s priestly instinct perpetrated the same enormous crime against history—he simply crossed out Christianity’s yesterday, its day before yesterday, he invented for himself a history of the first Christianity” (A 42). Paul’s writings focus on the resurrection of Jesus and eschew any sort of narrative account of the life of Jesus. Paul does this, per Nietzsche, because he wants to deify everything originally human about Jesus and transcendentalize his naturalistic values. He substitutes a supranatural theology for the wandering moralist, and consequently supranatural requirements for lawful and moral obedience. Deeds on earth mean nothing in comparison to faith in the resurrection.28 Thus was Paul not only divergent from Jesus, but in fact the antithesis of Nietzsche’s portrayed Jesus. “The type of the redeemer, the doctrine, the practice, the death, the meaning of his death, even the aftermath of his death—nothing was left untouched, nothing was left bearing any resemblance to reality. Paul simply shifted the emphasis of this whole being, putting it behind this being—into the lie of Jesus’ ‘resurrection.’ Basically, he had no use whatsoever for the life of the redeemer—he needed the death on the cross and something else besides” (A 42).
What motivated Paul to turn Jesus into the enemy, not simply of Judea or Rome, but of the natural world itself? Nietzsche writes, “The ‘God’ that Paul invented for himself, a God who ‘confounds all worldly wisdom’ [. . .] is in truth just Paul’s firm decision to do it himself: to call his own will ‘God’, Torah—that is Jewish to the core. Paul wants to confound all ‘wisdom’ of the world” (A 47). In this twisting passage, Nietzsche identifies three motivations. First, Paul rejected Jesus’s message of innocence in order to double-down on the Jewish notion of inherent guilt. The same Jesus who encouraged his followers to “offer the other cheek,” the same quiet lamb who allowed himself to be killed, is transformed into a “sacrifice” who now sits in final judgment of those who fail to properly obey the divine commands. This is a manifestation of Paul’s will, Nietzsche tells us, which in its apotheosis expresses the quintessentially Jewish ressentiment against the mighty on earth. Second, Paul rejected Jesus’s emphasis on earthly well-being in order to make the value of all agency relative to a supra-earthly ideal. The life of Jesus is only the precondition for the far more important event: his resurrection, which of itself proves that all genuine value lay only in the metaphysical realm. “And in one fell swoop, the evangel becomes the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the outrageous doctrine of personal immortality. . . . Paul himself still taught it as a reward!. . . ” (A 41).
Related to this is the third of Paul’s motivations. By placing all value in a beyond, he undercuts the value of any earthly success, indeed to the point where earthly success is regarded as evil. Doing so inculcates two intertwined dangers. Nihilism, on the one hand, follows from the presumption that there is no point in striving in this earthly life: “What is the point of public spirit, of being grateful for your lineage or for your ancestors, what is the point of working together, of confidence, of working towards any sort of common goal or even keeping one in mind?” (A 43). Egalitarian socialism, on the other hand—and all the problems Nietzsche believes stem from it—follows from believing everyone is equal in the only way that really matters: in the eyes of God. “[E]veryone is on the same level as everyone else, that in the commonality of all beings, the ‘salvation’ of each individual lays claim to an eternal significance . . . ” (A 43). Paul invited both consequences with his hatred of earthly success and happiness, and so invented a divine redeemer to guarantee their millennia-long endurance.
Seemingly all characters in Nietzsche’s histories act out of power: either the direct and natural power of the ‘masters’ or the tortuously subversive spiritual power of the “priests.” It is clear on which side Paul stands. “What he needed was power; with Paul, the priests wanted to return to power—he could only use ideas, doctrines, symbols that would tyrannize the masses and form the herds” (A 42). Just as with the priestly revaluation of values in GM, Paul resents earthly power, subverts others’ earthly power by means of appeal to spiritual power, and does so in order to gain his own earthly power. And Paul, by and large, got what he wanted. The ground of the empire was dry enough that such a match like Paul’s Messiah began a wildfire. Soon all the lower-classes and disenfranchised among the wider empire began to see in Paul’s ressentiment the possibility of expressing their own. The wider the seeds were flung, the more savage it became (A 22). And so Europe was gradually Christianized as the expression of priestly power. “The ‘law,’ the ‘will of God,’ the ‘holy book,’ ‘inspiration’—All these are just words for the conditions under which priests come to power and maintain power” (A 55).
As was the case with the first two stages of falsification, Nietzsche’s third is a central motif of the contemporary “questers.”29 That Paul reframed and even altered what may have been the historical Jesus is today doubted by few. William Wrede claimed in 1904, “[h]e of whom Paul professed himself the disciple and servant was not the historical human being Jesus.”30 Wrede goes on to confirm Nietzsche’s claim that the biggest difference between Paul and the previous developments involved Paul’s disavowal of Jesus’s naturally lived existence. “One single event was important to [Paul]: the end of life, the death [of Jesus]. For him, however, even this is not the moral action of a man; indeed it is not an historical fact at all for him, but a supra-historical fact, an event of the supersensible world.”31 Arthur Drews goes further to argue that Paul had no knowledge of Jesus whatsoever, but used the name Jesus as merely the incarnation of his metaphysical ideals.32 “But that he never appeals to any distinctive acts of ‘the Lord,’ that he never quotes the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels as such, and never applies them, even where the words and conduct of Jesus would be most useful for strengthening his own views and deductions . . . all this is for us a certain proof that Paul knew nothing of Jesus.”33
If Nietzsche is consistent with the ‘Questers’ that Paul was largely responsible for turning the historical Jesus into Christ, then he certainly is not with respect to why. Nietzsche’s attribution of Paul’s motivations is—absent any evidence external to the texts themselves—entirely speculative. It relies upon a wildly exaggerated psychologism. And it is in no small measure racist: Paul, as a typical Jew, would necessarily have been consumed by ressentiment. More sober historians, and even Drews to some degree, resist psychologizing Paul precisely because there is so little evidence about Paul outside his own writings. Worse, Nietzsche fails to distinguish between the seven canonical Pauline and six likely pseudo-epigraphic epistles. This is detrimental to Nietzsche’s thesis about Paul insofar as, first, relying on the texts of other authors forces Nietzsche to have to expand his psychological analysis beyond a single author into a number of otherwise unknown authors; and, second, if the epigraphic letters are consistent in message it evidences against Nietzsche’s depiction of Paul as a singular radical. Further, it is easy to explain the different foci in Paul and the Gospel writers without resorting to psychologism. If the Epistles and Acts fail to accurately depict the life of Jesus, then it may have been that Paul wanted to cover what the Gospels do not, lest they be redundant. (Nietzsche doesn’t seem to know that Paul most likely wrote before the Gospels.) A believer might well claim that the Epistles articulate only truths revealed to St. Paul—and thus should not be expected to know the mundane details of Jesus’s life. Whatever the case, the transformation Nietzsche rightly demarcates in the tradition in no way requires the sort of villanous charalatan he uses to explain it.
3 The Antichrist as history
There is a pattern in the strategies Nietzsche uses for A’s two main theses. Just as with his critical deconstructions and speculative attributions to the character of the historical Jesus in the first section of this chapter, so in the previous section did Nietzsche treat the textual tradition in both a deconstructive (that the text we have received must have been altered in three phases) and a positive or attributive way (why the First Congregation, early Christians, and Paul would have been motivated to do so). And here, too, the negative thesis is consistent with the ‘historical quest,’ while the positive attribution is wildly divergent from it. This brings us to the question of Nietzsche’s historical form.
Were one to make the barest comparison between the methods of ‘Historical Questers’ and Nietzsche, one would be presented a mountain of textual and archaeological evidence, critico-linguistic analysis in the original Hebrew and Greek, and the rest of the historian’s tools on one side, and spewed vitriol intermingled with groundless speculation on the other.34 Even if his negative conclusions are consistent with it, Nietzsche’s methods could not be farther from conventional historiography. Granted, a ‘curse,’ which is what Nietzsche tells us his Antichrist is, should not be held to the same professional standards as a piece of academic historiography. And Nietzsche admits the non-scholarly nature of his project often enough. In contrast to the methods of D. F. Strauss, for example, he writes, “. . . to apply scientific method to [the lives of saints] in the absence of any other records seems to me like a project that is doomed from the start—just scholars wasting time. . .” (A 28).
But the efficacy of his curse does seem to depend significantly upon a meaningful historical account—why else turn to Christianity’s past at all in decrying its contemporary effects? Furthermore, a portion of his criticism of contemporary Judeo-Christian culture is that they failed to understand their own past properly. “Our age is proud of its historical sense: so how could it convince itself of this piece of nonsense [. . .]? To the contrary: the history of Christianity—starting, in fact, with the death on the cross—is the story of the progressively cruder misunderstanding of an original symbolism” (A 37). Presumably his Antichrist is meant to redress that historical nonsense. Nietzsche even claims to present the historical past correctly. “I will come back, I will tell the true history of Christianity” (A 39).
Nietzsche therefore seems to claim some historical standing for his attributive portrait of the historical Jesus, but nowhere claims to be doing—or even to respect—the kinds of ‘scientific’ historiography that all other ‘historical questers’ presume to be history as such. A principle of charity would suggest that there is some other road Nietzsche sees himself as walking. The latter chapters of Der Antichrist suggest where that road lies.
Nietzsche’s historiographical method draws a distinction between true demonstration and conviction-force, and holds that the latter rarely depends upon the former.35 Why human beings are convinced of a historical account has more to do with satisfying power aims than with demonstrating their interpretations correspond to reality. “Christianity knows that it is a matter of complete indifference whether or not something is true, but it is of supreme importance that people have faith in its truth” (A 23). The ‘historical questers’’ complaint that early Christian chronicles of Jesus are ‘untrue’ is thus quite far removed from Nietzsche’s meta-historical requirement of convincing accounts. Even if their claims cannot be adjudicated by the light of conventional historiography, it is inarguable that the First Congregation, the early Christians, and Paul successfully satisfied the power aims of huge swathes of human beings over the past two thousand years.
The problem Nietzsche sees instead is that Christian history is a ‘lie,’ though in a peculiar sense.
Every conviction has its history, its pre-formations, its ventures and its mistakes: it becomes a conviction after not being one for a long time, after barely being one for even longer. What? Could lies be among these embryonic forms of convictions too? Sometimes all you need is a change of characters: what were lies for the father are convictions for the son. I call lies not wanting to see what you see, not wanting to see it the way you do. . . (A 55)
Nietzsche actually has two implicit definitions of ‘lie’ in this passage: a misrepresentation of reality and the delusion of not wanting to see what in fact one does see. The priestly interpretation of Jesus’s life isn’t a ‘lie’ in the first sense of an intentional disjunction between their account and a past reality as it really was. “[P]riests do not lie—there simply is no room for lying about ‘truth’ or ‘untruth’ in the sorts of issues priests talk about” (A 55). That is, since the absolute, correspondential-realist ‘truth’ of Jesus’s life is something beyond the human ability to discern, one cannot intentionally misrepresent it: “[Y]ou cannot lie unless you can decide what is true. And this is impossible for human beings to do. . .” (A 55).
But while the priests cannot lie in that first sense, they most certainly do lie in the second. This second type of “lie” is an interpretation that stands antagonistically to the “way one sees,” namely, one’s perspective. The lies of Christianity are its proclamation of a single otherworldly God, a lowly carpenter raised to the status of God, a God killed and resurrected, a man whose death allegedly conquers death, a man who preached life turned against natural life. The persecuted deluded themselves into creating an almighty from out of the weakest. With their own distinct personal values, they demanded a universal set of values, a single set of truths held over the most multifarious swathes of perspectives that would come to constitute Christian Europe. “‘The truth is there’: wherever you hear this, it means that the priest is lying . . . ” (A 55). The historical tradition of Jesus as Christ is a lie not because it fails to adequate reality, but because it amounts to ‘not wanting to see the way you see’: a subjective desire for nonsubjective values and an attempt to conquer in the name of weak, an attempt to flee reality for metaphysical realm. Christian historiography was a lie to itself, a self-delusion. The First Congregation is guilty of this lie, as are the early Christians, as is Paul especially.
If Christian historiography is ultimately problematic for its self-delusion rather than its lack of correspondential truth, it seems Nietzsche must by contrast locate the viability of his own account in its intrinsic probity. And he does suggest this: “—In the end, it comes down to the purpose the lie is supposed to serve. The fact that ‘holy’ purposes are lacking in Christianity is my objection to its means” (A 56). He repeats this at the start of Section 58: “In fact, it makes a difference why you are lying: whether you are lying in order to sustain or to destroy.” Nietzsche’s attributive revaluation of Jesus, as an interpretation that imprints upon a real past his own will rather an attempt at conventional correspondential realism, is at least in this structural way not all that different from Paul’s and the other historiographers’ lie. But he claims here that his purpose in lying is nobler. And there appear two ways in which Nietzsche believes that to be so.
First, Nietzsche’s history of Jesus is not, as it was for the ‘Questers,’ merely an attempt to ‘destroy’ the tradition of values that derive from the historically rendered Christ. His negative strategy was meant to deconstruct the historical tradition of interpretation of Jesus. But that was not where Nietzsche stopped. His attributive attempts to construct a ‘new’ Jesus—an Antichrist—as a simple human being with sagacious advice for living well, avoiding ressentiment, speaking symbolically from inner convictions, disregarding moral authority, are themselves instantiations of new values, what Nietzsche considers life-engendering values. That image of Christ is not coincidentally the kind of reader he seeks as well: “Respect for yourself; love for yourself; an unconditional freedom over yourself . . . well then! These are my only readers, my true readers, my predestined readers: and who cares about the rest of them? The rest are just humanity” (A P). So while Nietzsche’s fails to correspond to some absolute reality, his purpose in lying is nobler than Paul and the ‘historical questers’ for its affirmation of natural life.
The second way Nietzsche’s account avoids the self-deluded lie, presaged above, is that his interpretation is not meant to be the single, absolute account of Jesus or the historiographical tradition. In fact, he begins his book by delimiting the scope of his audience to precisely those who even have a prospect of being convinced. “This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps none of them are even alive yet. Maybe they are the ones who will understand my Zarathustra. There are ears to hear some people—but how could I ever think there are ears to hear me?” (A P). Paul’s attempt to force the universal valuation of his own values with a divine guarantee echoes nearly two thousand years later in the attempt by the ‘historical questers’ to force the universal valuation of their interpretations with a scientific guarantee: a drive for universal objective values paradoxically free of one’s of own drives. And with the death of God, Nietzsche thinks, must follow the death of a belief in a single set of values, a single set of truths, a single historical interpretation that everyone must hold. His account is more honest in its admission of its perspectival fundament, its status as a ‘curse’ and not some absolute truth allegedly detached from his perspective. The historical quest, in the end, denied the sanctity of Christ but maintained the sanctity of historical truth and the self-delusion of objectivity. Nietzsche’s interpretation—if not ‘truer’ in a superficial sense—is more honest in admitting its status as interpretation intent on convincing only selective perspectives.
Notes
1 Bruno Bauer ironically agreed with Strauss’s main thesis, while nevertheless waging a decades-long diatribe against Strauss’s credentials as a Hegelian, going so far as to enlist a young Nietzsche as his de-facto lieutenant.
2 Dawes (2001), 77f.
3 Wilke (1838).
4 For an Anglophone popularization, see Streeter (1924).
5 Most scholarship on the question divides the Quest into three periods: the Old Quest (1778–1909), the Interim Period (1909–53), and the New Quest (1953–). Since this chapter is chiefly about Nietzsche’s framework, it will focus on the context of only the Old Quest.
6 Drews (1912), 307. Rhetorically more restrained versions of Drews’s position can be found in the works of Albert Kalthoff, William Benjamin Smith, J. M. Robertson, and Thomas Whittaker.
7 For the history of Elizabeth’s publication of Der Antichrist, see Schaberg (1995), 179.
8 A comprehensive reckoning of the sources of The Antichrist is Sommer (2000). Another fine recent analysis is Detering (2010).
9 There are important intersections between Drews and Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Drews was influenced by Bauer’s criticism of both Christian fundamentalists and David Friedrich Strauss. Like at least the young Nietzsche, Drews was a strong proponent of both Schopenhauer and Wagner, even contributing a significant monograph on the latter. See Drews (1898). But for whatever loose similarities, Drews became one of Nietzsche’s most strident early critics. His motivation was in large part a defense of his teacher, Nietzsche’s own enemy, Eduard von Hartmann. See Drews (1906). Drews remained, well into the Nazi period, an avowed Hartmannian, even trying to entwine a non-Christian religion of pantheistic unconscious or “World Spirit” with the Völkish movement as a quintessentially German religion. See Drews (1935). It was the combination of his antipathy toward Hartmann, his eventual rejection of Wagner’s nationalism, and his commitment to the individual over the masses that made Nietzsche the target of Drews’s vitriol in several books and papers. See Drews (1904, 1919, 1922, 1931). One of the most striking critiques Drews levels is in fact against the Nazis for their favoring Nietzsche over Hartmann. For Drews, Nietzsche’s commitment to individualism meant he wasn’t Nazi enough! See Drews (1934).
10 The position has returned at least somewhat to the vogue with Price (2000).
11 Whether Jesus could be considered a moral philosopher of sorts was decisively rejected by Schneider (1910), 478ff. Decades before, Strauss’s argument was slightly different: if Jesus was in fact a moral philosopher, his philosophy would have been insufficiently original or valuable to have been worth much his fame. See Strauss (1875), 48–60.
12 For a reading of Jesus as a sort of Cynic sage, see Funk (1996), 166ff.
13 Nietzsche read Vie de Jesu (1863) first in 1877 and again in preparation for the several works of 1888.
14 Intentionally or otherwise, Nietzsche fails to mention several of Renan’s key theses. Among them, that the Gospels’ accounts of miracles and supranatural happenings were malicious interpolations by later editors, that Jesus would have greater integrity as a man than as a claimant divinity, and finally, that Jesus intentionally purged any Jewish influences from his teaching in order to rise above the petty spirit of revenge—all of these, of course, are strikingly Nietzschean.
15 Nietzsche associates his usage with Dostoyevsky’s eponymous novel. For an insightful discussion of Nietzsche’s relation to the Russian novelist, see Stellino (2015).
16 A substantial problem with Nietzsche’s argument is that he already provided reasons for not trusting the recorded sayings of Jesus. If he is right, then he cannot assert that Jesus’s actual way of speaking would have been akin to the form the Gospels record. Drews (1912), 287f is more consistent insofar as he remains agnostic as to Jesus’s way of speaking due to the unreliability of the Gospels.
17 Wundt (1904), II/3, 528. See also Schneider (1910), 465.
18 Weiss (1909), 159.
19 Drews (1912), 217ff.
20 Drews (1912), 169–79 lays out the case convincingly for the influence of these three texts.
21 These and a wealth of others can be found in Schreiber (1877).
22 For a summary evaluation of contemporary instantiations, see Ehrman (2012).
23 On Nietzsche’s relation to Paul see Havemann (2002) and Azzam (2015). The latter especially has a commendable interpretation of their respective attempts to construct myths.
24 Drews (1912), 223–30 claims it was written without either knowledge or even concern for the historical Jesus. Isaiah is the much more important figure for Christianity, as he was the most important source on whom both the Gospels and Paul drew.
25 Schweitzer (1925), 61–80.
26 See generally Wrede (1901).
27 Although Nietzsche’s depiction is highly original, there are at least some similarities with a text he borrowed from Overbeck, namely, Lüdemann (1872).
28 The so-called ‘New Perspective on Paul’ movement of recent years attempts to stress Paul’s emphasis on worldly deeds, contrary to Nietzsche’s interpretation here. Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s depiction of Pauline theology as requiring faith in the divine Christ as sufficient for salvation was consistent with the reigning thesis of his time.
29 Theologians, though few historians, would continue to maintain the comprehensive accuracy of Paul about the life of an historical Jesus, though without much critical evidence. Weinel (1904), 16f would even assert that Paul was quoting Jesus directly. See also Feine (1902).
30 Wrede (1904), 85.
31 Ibid.
32 Drews (1912), 102.
33 Drews (1912), 100. Drews would further claim that the Epistles themselves were not written by Paul, on the grounds that their writer appears far more Greek than Jewish. Ibid., 117f.
34 This difference would lead Andreas Urs Sommer to call the entire Antichrist a ‘satyrisches Maskenspiel,’ Sommer (2000), 65.
35 See Jensen (2013), Ch. 5.
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