ess, 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.[5] 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 "tradition"? 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....

[5] David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74), author of "Das Leben Jesu"
(1835-6), a very famous work in its day. Nietzsche here refers to it.

29.

What concerns _me_ is the psychological type of the Saviour. This type
might be depicted in the Gospels, in however mutilated a form and
however much overladen with extraneous characters--that is, in _spite_
of the Gospels; just as the figure of Francis of Assisi shows itself in
his legends in spite of his legends. It is _not_ a question of mere
truthful evidence as to what he did, what he said and how he actually
died; the question is, whether his type is still conceivable, whether it
has been handed down to us.--All the attempts that I know of to read the
_history_ of a "soul" in the Gospels seem to me to reveal only a
lamentable psychological levity. M. Renan, that mountebank _in
psychologicus_, has contributed the two most _unseemly_ notions to this
business of explaining the type of Jesus: the notion of the _genius_ and
that of the _hero_ ("_heros_"). But if there is anything essentially
unevangelical, it is surely the concept of the hero. What the Gospels
make instinctive is precisely the reverse of all heroic struggle, of
all taste for conflict: the very incapacity for resistance is here
converted into something moral: ("resist not evil!"--the most profound
sentence in the Gospels, perhaps the true key to them), to wit, the
blessedness of peace, of gentleness, the _inability_ to be an enemy.
What is the meaning of "glad tidings"?--The true life, the life eternal
has been found--it is not merely promised, it is