Mixing Jesus and Nietzche -- A Dynamite Commentary for Today

Thus Speaks Jesus is a brand new blog which is doing a highly unusual intellectual and spiritual exercise, translating Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra into a new version that could be put into the mouth of Jesus. The work of writer-theologian Stephen Rose it is found at http://thusspeaksjesus.blogspot.com/

(PRWEB) June 11, 2005 -- One of the most original and acerbic commentaries on the Web is a hybrid of two classic texts:

Frederick Nietzsche's major philosiphical work Thus Spoke Zarathustra and the sayings of Jesus in the canonical gospels -- Mark, Matthew and Luke.

Building on these two texts, Stephen C. Rose, author and theologian, has created Thus Speaks Jesus: A Book for All.

http://thusspeaksjesus.blogspot.com/

It presented as a blog.

Rose, on the Web since 1994, has been posting new versions of the Nietzche work on almost a daily basis.

"I take a section of Nietzche's text -- using Walter Kauffman's excellent translation -- and rewrite it in terms that I can imagine Jesus would use if he was speaking today." Rose says.

"It is highly subjective. But I believe it turns out to be an incredibly trenchant analysis of our world. It becomes in some respects more relevant than the original texts and suggests a potential direction for the understanding and use of texts in the future.

"It is also interesting as a comparison of Nietzche's thinking and what can be inferred from the Gospels."

Nietzche is widely known for saying God is dead and criticizing Christianity as a religion of weakness. But Rose argues that he is being consistent with Jesus in much of what he is actually saying.

Noetzche's Thus Spake Zarathustra was written during the 1880s. At the close of that decade, Nietzsche witnessed the beating of a horse, embraced the injured animal, and went mad.

It took more than a half century, following his death in 1900, for a proper English translation, by Walter Kaufmann, to appear.

"Thus Speaks Jesus is not an effort to set Nietzsche right," Rose says. "It does not pretend to rescue him from his misinterpreters. I believe Dr. Kaufmann did both of these things."

In his introduction to the blog, which presently has around 500 visitors daily, Rose says: "This work is a subjective contention that Nietzsche was both a casualty and a mover in an ongoing, necessary effort to wrest the Jesus he intuited and perceived from the grip of superstition, creed and institution.

"Nietzche could not openly allow anything that would suggest any allegiance whatsoever to Christianity, but he is ultimately a witness as surely as have been countless known and unknown persons of courage since the last nail was driven at Golgotha.

"Thus Speaks Jesus: A Book For All takes the tormented ecstatic utterances of Nietzsche in Zarathustra as the matrix into which I pour my own understanding of Jesus. The ecstatic utterance I intuit and perceive in Jesus inhabits the form and substance of Nietzsche's work.

"And yet, no reader of both works will suggest that I have created a copy, save in the sense of music that rearranges music and books and plays that build on books and plays."

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