The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
42.
One now begins to see just _what_ it was that came to an end with the death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish _happiness on earth_--real, _not_ merely promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed out--the essential difference between the two religions of _décadence_: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but _fulfils nothing_.--Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. _What_, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to _his own_ cross. The life, the example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels--nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely _not_ reality; surely _not_ historical truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and _invented his own history of Christian beginnings_.
Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to _his_ achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to _his_ "Saviour."... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his death--nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place _behind_ this existence--in the _lie_ of the "risen" Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour--what he needed was the death on the cross, _and_ something more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a _proof_ of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to believe his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself--this would be a genuine _niaiserie_ in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; _therefore_ he also willed the means.... What he himself didn't believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread _his_ teaching.--What _he_ wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power--he had use only for such concepts, teachings and symbols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. _What_ was the only part of Christianity that Mohammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul--_that is to say, the doctrine of "judgment"_....
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.