The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
46.
One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world," which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of preaching."... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge that the "early Christians" _dared_ to make!--After all, they were the _privileged_, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no other excuse. The "early Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last Christian," _whom I may perhaps live to see_--is a rebel against all privilege by profound instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for "equal rights."... Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or to be a "temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"--then every _other_ criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply "worldly"--_evil in itself_.... Moral: every word that comes from the lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and his every act is instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are noxious, but _whoever_ he hates, _whatever_ he hates, has real _value_.... The Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a _criterion of values_. --Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a _solitary_ figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard a Jewish imbroglio _seriously_--that was quite beyond him. One Jew more or less--what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament with the only saying _that has any value_--and that is at once its criticism and its _destruction_: "What is truth?..."
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