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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction
04:36 The Antichrist
06:46 The Quest for the Historical Jesus
17:23 The Buried Jesus
24:57 The Evasive Jesus
34:02 The traditional view
41:43 Nietzsche’s view
READ: Balthasar Gracian's Pocket Oracle and Art of Worldly Wisdom: https://amzn.to/3CdvRUk
OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I
Nietzsche's The Antichrist is a provocative book in many ways. Among its many controversial and heretical claims, there is one that stands out: Nietzsche says Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who oversaw the trial of Jesus and his crucifixion, is the only character in the New Testament worthy of honor.
Why is that? Because in Nietzsche's view, he enriched the New Testament "with the only saying that has any value"; his famous question to Jesus: "what is truth?"
For Nietzsche, this sentence is at once the destruction of Christianity. And in light of Nietzsche's later philosophy, it is also an indictment of philosophy itself.
First, Nietzsche has an idiosyncratic view of the person of Jesus and the composition of the Gospels. In short, he believes that much of the Gospels consists of additions and mythologizations by the disciples of Jesus, who, in their quest for revenge against those who crucified their Master, ascribed to Jesus attitudes and ideas that were absent in Jesus himself. Most notably, Jesus never speaks in terms of absolute truth but always exists in the strange space between yes and no, such as when he says to render undo Caesar what is Caesar's. But it's with the Apostles that terms like reward, punishment, saved versus damned, sinfulness versus blessedness... truth versus lie come into the fold. It's Nietzsche's conviction that Jesus never intended to start a religion or to relay dogma, but to bequeath to mankind a new way of life. His disciples however, greatly misunderstood him.
Hence Pilate's question, is at once a kind of pre-emptive destruction of what Christianity became under the influence of the Apostles: a new religion was created, with a set of dogmas to follow. Pilate pre-emptively sowed the seeds of its destruction with his quip, asking would-be Christians "what is truth?"
Second, Nietzsche sees in Pilate a fore-runner for himself. Pilate took a local, historical, political quarrel ("should I sentence this Jesus fellow or not?") and turned it into a philosophical quarrel. What is truth? For Nietzsche, this is a deeply profound statement, as Nietzsche more and more starts to question the value of truth itself, just like Pilate seemed to do 2000 years ago. For Nietzsche, the "will to truth" is the last "prejudice of the philosopher", the last unquestioned presupposition that we all uncritically accept as self-evidently true. It's worthwhile to pursue truth, that's what all philosophy tries to do, after all. But Nietzsche asks: is it really? Why do we prefer truth? Why not rather untruth? In this, he sees a kindred spirit in Pilate, who utters the only "philosophical phrase" in the whole New Testament, and for added dramatic effect, he asks the question to the personification of Truth himself: Jesus Christ.
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