David Strauss

And if you look carefully at every single reference that Nietzsche does to the word genealogy, uh, in both the text and all his other extant writings, the term is almost always critical, and, uh, the only exceptions are when he's referring to the title of this work and then there are two neutral uses that I flag elsewhere.

Its very first usage in Nietzsche in, uh, one of his, um, in his essay on, on, uh, David Strauss, uh, he calls, um, he refers to an ap- uh, uh, Strauss as an Apfen Genealogian, so an ape genealogist or a monkey genealogist.

And this is a term pulled out of Christian anti-Darwinist discourse in Nietzsche's own period.

It's like almost as though to say, um, uh, that famous, uh, comment about, I don't know, I forget whether it's Huxley or, or Darwin.

In addition, there were a growing number of critics questioning the historical accuracy of the Gospels.

For example, David Friedrich Strauss and Albert Schweitzer suggested that the Gospels gave us an exaggerated version of Jesus.

They insisted that we must separate the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith.

This is what we call higher biblical criticism.

One of these aids to comprehension is the Phenomenology of Spirit, published in his thirty-seventh year.

It may be going too far to say with David Strauss that it is the alpha and omega of Hegel, and his later writings only extracts from it.

You hear the Pegasus of mind soars free through the untrodden fields of air, and taste the joys of first love and pride of fresh discovery in the quest for truth.

The fire of young enthusiasm has not yet been forced to hide itself and smolder away in apparent calm.

Higher biblical criticism was started in Germany, or really got a foothold in Germany in the late 1800s.

People like David Strauss begin to ruminate on this idea that the Bible's not a historical document.

It's not to be trusted.

It is a metaphor.

by means of which I render a general but elusive and scarcely noticeable evil more apparent.

In this way I attacked David Strauss, or rather the success given to a senile book

by the cultured classes of Germany.

By this means I caught German culture red-handed.

The stir which it created was in every way gorgeous.

I had put my finger on the vulnerable spot of a triumphant nation— I have told it that its victory was not a red-letter day for culture, but perhaps something very different.

The reply rang out from all sides, and certainly not from old friends of David Strauss, whom I had made ridiculous as the type of the German Philistine of culture." and a man of smug self-content in short as the author of that subterranean gospel of his called the old and the new faith the term philistine of culture passed into the current language of germany after the appearance of my book These old friends, whose vanity as Wurtembergians and Swabians I had deeply wounded in regarding their unique animal, their bird of paradise, as a trifle comic, replied to me as ingenuously and as grossly as I could have wished.

The Prussian replies were smarter.

he was against this sort of idea that the Gospels were a historical narrative, which Nietzsche also sort of goes against that in his

critique of David Strauss.

but that we need to

perceive the gospels as an imminent truth, because when we see it as something that just happened long ago, it presents things as if God were, that was Emerson's turn of phrase, which, you know, you can find all sorts of little fun tidbits like that when you look through Nietzsche's influences and look through the, where he might've gotten some of those ideas or what might have sparked those ideas.

I use a personality merely as a magnifying glass, by means of which I render a general but elusive and scarcely noticeable evil more apparent.

In this way, I attacked David Strauss, or rather, the success given to a senile book by the cultured classes of Germany.

By this means, I caught German culture red-handed.

In this way, I attacked Wagner, or rather, the falsity or mongrel instincts of our culture, which confounds the super-refined with the strong and the effete with the great.

I had put my finger on the vulnerable spot of a triumphant nation.

I have told it that its victory was not a red-letter day for culture, but perhaps something very different.

The reply rang out from all sides, and certainly not from old friends of David Strauss, whom I had made ridiculous as the type of the German philistine of culture, and a man of smug self-content, in short, as the author of that subterranean gospel of his called The Old and the New Faith.

The term philistine of culture passed into the current language of Germany after the appearance of my book.