28.
As to whether he himself was conscious of this contradiction—whether,
in fact, this was the only contradiction he was cognizant of—that is
quite another question. Here, for the first time, I touch upon the problem
of the psychology of the Saviour.—I confess, to begin with,
that there are very few books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels.
My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned
curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs.
It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the
sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable
Strauss.[1] At that time I was twenty years old: now
I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions
of “traditions”? How can any one call pious legends “traditions”.
The histories of saints present the most dubious variety of literature in
existence; to examine them by the scientific method, in the entire absence
of corroborative documents, seems to me to condemn the whole inquiry from
the start—it is simply learned idling.
Footnotes
[1]
. David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of
“Das Leben Jesu” (1835-6), a
very famous work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.
