This volume attempts to bring order to Nietzsche's scattered reflections on Jesus, St Paul and the birth of Christianity by tracing the development of his ideas and examining the intellectual reality behind his deliberately confrontational remarks concerning early Christianity's key players.

The author, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, was a German philosopher in the late nineteenth century who attacked the basis of Christianity and morality. traditional. He is concerned with enhancing individual and cultural health, and he believes in life, creativity, power, and the reality of the world we live in, rather than what lies beyond. The allusion to the Antichrist is not intended to relate to the biblical Antichrist, but rather to criticize Western Christianity's "slave morality" and indifference. The central contention of Nietzsche is that Christianity is a poison to Western society and a distortion of Jesus' ideas and activities. Nietzsche is strongly critical of established religion and its priestly class, from which he draws, throughout the work. Much of this work is a systematic attack on St. Paul and those who followed his understanding of Christ's words. In the Foreword, Nietzsche claims to have produced a book for a very small audience. To grasp the work, he requires that the reader be intellectually honest to the point of violence, as well as endure my sincerity, my passion. Politics and nationalism must be avoided by the reader.

Combining biography and a careful analysis of Nietzsche's writings from 1844-1900, this book explores Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, Judaism, and antisemitism. The first part of the book is concerned with psychological aspects and biographical elements. Part Two focuses on the ethical and political aspects of Nietzsche's views as presented in his mature writings: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Toward the Genealogy of Morals, and the Antichrist.

The Christian concept of a god-the god as the patron of the sick, the god as a spinner of cobwebs, the god as a spirit-is one of the most corrupt concepts that has ever been set up in the world... In him nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holySee Sharp Press; Tuscon, AZ -from The Anti-Christ He's one of the most debated thinkers of the 19th century: Nietzsche and his works have been by turns vilified, lauded, and subjected to numerous contradictory interpretations, and yet he remains a figure of profound import, and his works a necessary component of a well-rounded education. The Anti-Christ, first published in German in 1895, is absolutely vital to any meaningful understanding of Nietzsche the man and Nietzsche the philosopher. An insightful and entertaining indictment of Christianity, it has enraged and inspired generations of readers, and this 1920 translation, by H. L. Mencken, considered the best available, is almost as controversial as the work itself, highlighting the darkest side of Mencken's cynicism. Also available from Cosimo Classics: Nietzsche's The Use and Abuse of History. German psychologist and philosopher FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) was appointed special professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the precocious age of 24, but soon found himself dissatisfied with academic life and created an alternative intellectual society for himself among friends including composer Richard Wagner, historian Jakob Burckhardt, and theologian Franz Overbeck. Among his philosophical works are Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and Ecce Homo.

This substantially revised second edition of Revelation and Reconciliation, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1995, gives a fresh account of the intellectual breakdown of Christianity in the West. In contrast to the familiar focus on epistemological questions and the collision between reason and revelation, Stephen Williams argues that underlying this collision is a deeper conflict between belief in human moral self-sufficiency and Christian belief in reconciliation in history. Taking issue with thinkers including the philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi, and the theologian, Colin Gunton, the argument proceeds by examining the contributions of Descartes, Locke, Barth and Nietzsche before coming to conclusions on the theological reading of intellectual history and the prospects of revitalising a contemporary Christian belief in reconciliation in history. Students of both theology and the history of modern thought will find in Williams’ analysis an alternative interpretation of the balance of forces in post-Reformation Western thought with implications for how they should be addressed.