Abstract

Of the 60,000 scholarly studies of the life of Jesus that appeared in the 19th century, one of the most unusual and fascinating was Friedrich Nietzsche's The Antichrist. Unfortunately, a number of factors combine to virtually ensure that Nietzsche's reflections not only on Jesus, but on St. Paul and the earliest Christian community, have not received the attention they deserve. The vocabulary Nietzsche employs in his treatment of Christianity's principal protagonists is very often so deliberately confrontational as to be off-putting, while his entire methodology is highly unorthodox. He repeatedly announces that what he is advancing is not a traditional philosophical analysis, but the first psychology of Christianity and its key players. While Freud would soon popularize the psychoanalytic psycho-history---where the researcher studies a famous individual's statements and life-experience and advances hypotheses concerning that person's mind and possible motivation---such endeavors were virtually unheard of in the 1880's. ;The objective of the present study is three-fold. First, to bring order to Nietzsche's scattered reflections on the personalities responsible for the birth of Christianity. Second, to look at the intellectual reality behind Nietzsche's deliberately confrontational remarks concerning early Christianity's principal protagonists. And thirdly, to simply take seriously Nietzsche's cardinal claim that what he in fact is advancing is a psychology of Christianity. What we discover is that considered en masse and on their own terms, Nietzsche's reflections on Jesus, Paul, and the first Christians do indeed warrant attention from philosophers. They constitute a sizable portion of an aggressively original, profoundly psychological philosophy of religion. They routinely serve as entrees for discussions of topics traditionally of great interest to philosophers . And lastly, as is the case with his similar treatments of Socrates, Schopenhauer, and Wagner, by studying exactly what it is that Nietzsche celebrates, criticizes, and often identifies with in the life and message of Jesus, and so violently attacks in the case of St. Paul, one is afforded real insight into the mind and the philosophy of one of the 19th century's most original thinkers