46.
—What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves
before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it
very advisable. One would as little choose “early Christian.”
for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to
them . . . Neither has a pleasant smell.—I have searched the New
Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is
free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make
the first step upward—the instinct for cleanliness is lacking. .
. . Only evil instincts are there, and there is not even the courage
of these evil instincts. It is all cowardice; it is all a shutting of the eyes,
a self-deception. Every other book becomes clean, once one has read the New
Testament: for example, immediately after reading Paul I took up with delight
that most charming and wanton of scoffers, Petronius, of whom one may say what
Domenico Boccaccio wrote of Ceasar Borgia to the Duke of Parma:
”è tutto festo”—immortally
healthy, immortally cheerful and sound. . . .These petty bigots make a
capital miscalculation. They attack, but everything they attack is thereby
distinguished. Whoever is attacked by an “early Christian”
is surely not befouled . . . On the contrary, it is an honour to
have an “early Christian” as an opponent. 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?”. . .