The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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I have given my reply to the problem in advance. The prerequisite thereto was the admission of the fact that the type of the Saviour has reached us only in a very distorted form. This distortion in itself is extremely feasible: for many reasons a type of that kind could not be pure, whole, and free from additions. The environment in which this strange figure moved, must have left its mark upon him, and the history, the _destiny_ of the first Christian communities must have done so to a still greater degree. Thanks to that destiny, the type must have been enriched retrospectively with features which can be interpreted only as serving the purposes of war and of propaganda That strange and morbid world into which the gospels lead us—a world which seems to have been drawn from a Russian novel, where the scum and dross of society, diseases of the nerves and “childish” imbecility seem to have given each other rendezvous—must in any case have _coarsened_ the type: the first disciples especially must have translated an existence conceived entirely in symbols and abstractions into their own crudities, in order at least to be able to understand something about it,—for them the type existed only after it had been cast in a more familiar mould....
The prophet, the Messiah, the future judge, the teacher of morals, the thaumaturgist, John the Baptist—all these were but so many opportunities of misunderstanding the type.... Finally, let us not under-rate the _proprium_ of all great and especially sectarian veneration: very often it effaces from the venerated object, all the original and frequently painfully un-familiar traits and idiosyncrasies—_it does not even see them._ It is greatly to be deplored that no Dostoiewsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent,—I mean someone who would have known how to feel the poignant charm of such a mixture of the sublime, the morbid, and the childlike. Finally, the type, as an example of decadence, may actually have been extraordinarily multifarious and contradictory: this, as a possible alternative, is not to be altogether ignored. Albeit, everything seems to point away from it; for, precisely in this case, tradition would necessarily have been particularly true and objective: whereas we have reasons for assuming the reverse.
Meanwhile a yawning chasm of contradiction separates the mountain, lake, and pastoral preacher, who strikes us as a Buddha on a soil only very slightly Hindu, from that combative fanatic, the mortal enemy of theologians and priests, whom Renan’s malice has glorified as “_le grand maître en ironie._” For my part, I do not doubt but what the greater part of this venom (and even of _esprit_) was inoculated into the type of the Master only as the outcome of the agitated condition of Christian propaganda. For we have ample reasons for knowing the unscrupulousness of all sectarians when they wish to contrive their own _apology_ out of the person of their master. When the first Christian community required a discerning, wrangling, quarrelsome, malicious and hair-splitting theologian, to oppose other theologians, it created its “God” according to its needs; just as it did not hesitate to put upon his lips those utterly unevangelical ideas of “his second coming,” the “last judgment,”—ideas with which it could not then dispense,—and every kind of expectation and promise which happened to be current.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.