"Repetition is the scourge of genius", with apologies to the Brain, could be applied to Nietzsche. Nietzsche's verbal attacks against the morality of Christianity are well known, but less familiar are the titles of his books. Nietzsche, it will be shown, obsessed over the third chapter of Genesis. Surprisingly, the titles of his whole output (minus a couple of other major works-Against Wagner and The Birth of Tragedy) are focused on Genesis chapter three as commentary on the Garden of Eden.
The following columns depict the titles of his works (rearranged according to the Genesis text) and the reason for the placements.
The Dawn Ecce Homo On the Genealogy of Morality The Antichrist The Gay Science Beyond Good and Evil Twilight of the Idols | The first day of Creation "Behold the Man"-Adam Eat this, don't eat that. The serpent as the foe of Jehovah "Happy Knowledge" The will to power to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil Elohim, as Idols, are no longer needed |
"Ecce Homo" describes the creation of Adam from the dust of the ground. Although this statement is applied to Jesus in the New Testament, it can not apply to Jesus when taking all the book titles are analyzed in toto.
"On the Genealogy of Morals", Adam is told what is expected of him in the garden. His consort is created later and only hears about the prohibitions second hand, from Adam. Fred states that Philosophy is a woman. We can understand who this unnamed woman is in light of the Genesis story. The serpent is commonly identified with Satan, the adversary of Jehovah, Therefore, the analogy holds for the Antichrist (Serpent, Satan) as the opposite of Christ (Jehovah, God).
"The Happy Knowledge" is that Adam and his unnamed wife can become as Gods, knowing good and evil.
Adam and his woman are now "Beyond Good and Evil" after consuming the fruit that was forbidden to Adam. The action beyond good and evil is demonstrated by Adam hiding in the garden from the presence of the Lord God. There is no indication in the text that hiding from Jehovah was not forbidden, so it should be allowed.
The will to power, power without conventional morality, leads to no longer needing the idols, the gods of the Elohim. The gods, having created the cosmos, are now superfluous. This statement is confirmed from a careful reading of the text.
Eve and her descendants live without conventional morality for many generations until the laws, no murder or eating of blood, are given to Noah after the flood.
Before the flood, there is no prohibition given against murder, or Cain and the reader would have been aware that murder is condemned. Conventional morality is not fully established until the complete written laws are given to Moses.
The above arrangement of the titles places "The Antichrist" in the middle of the seven titles. The middle sections of "The Antichrist" deals with Saint Paul and his accomplishments. We can now understand that the heart, or middle, of Nietzsche's attacks, and the majority of his writings throughout his career, are not against Jesus (he explicitly states that Jesus and Christianity are not synonymous), but against Saint Paul.
I am always in awestruck that Nietzsche (Fred to his friends) could have conceived and brought to fruition this incredible collection of writings from limited material. When the reader of Nietzsche's writings is confronted with contradictions, "new" ideas or concepts, one must determine which mental steps, which will be few in number, to take in order to return to text of the Garden of Eden.
From the above commentary and analysis, gentle reader, we know that Nietzsche never ventured far from his areas of competency and obsession-philology and the third chapter of Genesis, and not necessarily in that order.