Nietzsche’s religious readers drew analogies between his philosophy and the original gospel of the historical Jesus. They argued that Nietzsche not only reformulated Jesus’s emphasis on the value of human personality but also wanted belief to be less rule-bound and yet more spiritually demanding. Nietzsche rejected the dogmas, the priests, and the scholasticism for a truer gospel of life, just as Jesus had rejected the formal religion of the Pharisees. Nietzsche’s philosophy thus hoisted Jesus above ecclesiastical Christianity, just as Jesus had himself raised the bar of spirituality above the
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