Actually, Nietzsche had deep and abiding admiration for Jesus - it was Christianity he abhorred. In
The Will to Power, he argued that Christians were crassly hypocritical:
"The Christians have never practiced the actions Jesus prescribed them; and the impudent garrulous talk about the "justification by faith" and its supreme and sole significance is only the consequence of the Church's lack of courage and will to profess the works Jesus demanded...In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. . . . What has been called 'evangel' from that moment was actually the opposite of that which he had lived.
One should not confuse Christianity as a historical reality with that one root that its name calls to mind: the other roots from which it has grown up have been far more powerful. It is an unexampled misuse of words when such manifestations of decay and abortions as "Christian church, "Christian faith" and "Christian life" label themselves with that holy name.
What is wrong with Christianity is that it refrains from doing all those things that Christ commanded should be done. The church is precisely that against which Jesus preached and against which he taught his disciples to fight.
What did Christ deny? Everything that is today called Christian.”
The Will to Power, 158
Its true that he derided Jesus's teachings for their exoneration of the weak ("slave morality"). He called Jesus a "
political criminal," fighting against the established order: "
It [Jesus's rebellion] was a rebellion against . . . caste, privilege, order, and formula...to stand all valuations on their head", which in Nietzsche's eyes - as a believer in classical Greek, aristocratic hierarchy ("the Dionysian life-affirming values") and will to power - was an obscenity to the natural order of things.
But still, while he bitterly disagreed with elements of Jesus's ethics, he
admired his dominating personality: "
[T]here was only one Christian, and he died on the cross" (
Nietzsche, AC 39).
Nietzsche believed that Jesus was a rebel teacher who desired to implement actual earthly peace to improve society in the here and now, through "
the exclusion of all aversion and hostility" and a condition of the heart (as opposed to just 'afterlife' bliss). Again in
Antichrist:
"One sees what came to an end with the death on the Cross: a new, an absolutely primary beginning to a Buddhistic peace movement, to an actual and not merely promised happiness on earth...
The incapacity for resistance here becomes morality (‘resist not evil!’: the profoundest saying of the Gospel, its key in a certain sense), blessedness in peace, in gentleness, in the inability for enmity. What are the ‘glad tidings’? True life, eternal life is found — it is not promised, it is here, it is within you: as life lived in love, in love without deduction or exclusion, without distance. Everyone is a child of God — Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone — as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else...
The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart — not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or ‘after death’. The entire concept of natural death is lacking in the Gospel: death is not a bridge, not a transition, it is lacking because it belongs to quite another world, a merely apparent world useful only for the purpose of symbolism. The ‘hour of death’ is not a Christian concept — the ‘hour’, time, physical life and its crises, simply do not exist for the teacher of the ‘glad tidings’. . . . The ‘kingdom of Heaven’ is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ‘in a thousand years’ — it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere . . .
This ‘bringer of glad tidings’ died as he lived, as he taught — not to ‘redeem mankind’ but to demonstrate how one ought to live. What he bequeathed to mankind is his practice: his bearing before the judges, before the guards, before the accusers and every kind of calumny and mockery — his bearing on the Cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his rights, he takes no steps to avert the worst that can happen to him — more, he provokes it. . . . And he entreats, he suffers, he loves with those, in those who are doing evil to him. His words to the thief on the Cross contain the whole Evangel. ‘That was verily a divine man, a child of God!’ — says the thief. ‘If thou feelest this’ — answers the redeemer — ‘thou art in Paradise, thou art a child of God.’ Not to defend oneself, not to grow angry, not to make responsible. . . . But not to resist even the evil man — to love him . . ."
So for Nietzsche - Jesus was a great, fascinating if at times (to him) frustrating guy whose legacy was trashed by those who came after him (putting it in laymen's terms).
