-And at once there sprang from the
Gospels the most contemptible of all unfulfillable promises, the
_shameless_ doctrine of personal immortality.... Paul even preached it
as a _reward_....

42.

One now begins to see just _what_ it was that came to an end with the
death on the cross: a new and thoroughly original effort to found a
Buddhistic peace movement, and so establish _happiness on earth_--real,
_not_ merely promised. For this remains--as I have already pointed
out--the essential difference between the two religions of _decadence_:
Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises
everything, but _fulfils nothing_.--Hard upon the heels of the "glad
tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated
the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the
genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred.
_What_, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above
all, the Saviour: he nailed him to _his own_ cross. The life, the
example, the teaching, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of
the whole gospels--nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter
in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely _not_ reality; surely _not_
historical truth!... Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew
perpetrated the same old master crime against history--he simply struck
out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and
_invented his own history of Christian beginnings_. Going further, he
treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it
became a mere prologue to _his_ achievement: all the prophets, it now
appeared, had referred to _his_ "Saviour."... Later on the church even
falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to
Christianity.... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of
life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the consequences of his
death--nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even remote
contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that
whole life to a place _behind_ this existence--in the _lie_ of the
"risen" Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the
Saviour--what he needed was the death on the cross, _and_ something
more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at
the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an
hallucination into a _proof_ of the resurrection of the S