The Trouble of Interpretation

As part of the research for my upcoming book, The Initiation of Nietzsche, I’ve been revisiting the works of the philosopher and the broader cultural background of the 19th century in which they emerged. It’s something that we take for granted nowadays, but one of the big cultural shifts that occurred at that time was, in Nietzschean language, the freedom of interpretation, especially in relation to the Bible.

This trend had begun with the Reformation but we have to remember that the main instigators of that movement were all university scholars. Their rebellion against the Catholic Church was born out of their ability to read the Bible and especially their belief that the Church’s official translation, the Vulgate, was incorrect. It must be remembered that, at that time, the average person in Europe was illiterate and there were no vernacular translations of the Bible anyway. Thus, the average person was not free to make their own interpretation even if they wanted to. One of the main achievements of the Reformation was to make the Bible available to the general public in their own language.

But just having Bibles in vernacular translation was not enough. People needed to be literate in order to read them. In Protestant lands in the aftermath of the Reformation, there was a massive push for literacy among the general public so that people could read the Bible for themselves. Teaching literacy was mostly carried out by the various Protestant churches. As a result, literacy in the Protestant lands was much higher on average than in Catholic ones, although the Reformation also sparked a Catholic response which resulted in more emphasis on education.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see what would happen once everybody was able to form their own opinions on the holy book. Luther himself had spent hundreds and hundreds of pages discussing the finer points of scripture with Erasmus. If you’ve ever seen a long internet thread where two people are arguing past each other and never coming to an agreement, you have some idea of what the correspondence between Luther and Erasmus is like. It’s no surprise, then, that Protestantism gave rise to thousands of different sects all claiming a slightly different interpretation of the holy book.

At that time, most people saw the Bible as being infallible and any misunderstandings were the fault of the reader. However, the inconsistencies in the text perhaps inevitably gave rise to a new idea that took root among scholars and philosophers. The Protestants had noticed problems with the text, but they had blamed the Church for its sloppy scholarship. They never doubted that the text itself came from God. The scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, eventually got round to the notion that the text itself was not the direct word of God. That opened the way for a whole new set of interpretations.

Eventually, we get to philosophers and scholars such as Feuerbach or Renan, who no longer interpreted the Bible as the word of God or Jesus as the son of God but rather treated it all as the work of man. Feuerbach claimed that all theology was really just a projection of human psychology. Meanwhile, Renan claimed that Jesus was a teacher and reformer, rather than the son of God.

This was all fine and there was some interesting work done by these thinkers. Nevertheless, there was a big a problem with their analysis, one that was intolerable to Nietzsche. Now, because Nietzsche framed his critique in terms of logic and science, he has been placed in the same camp as modern atheists who come from the positivist or similar schools of thought. In fact, Nietzsche couldn’t abide the scholarly approach to the subject precisely because he could see the power behind the religious viewpoint. The lukewarm approach of the scholars watered down both the logical and religious viewpoints into a paltry compromise.

Nietzsche set out to highlight the tension that existed between the logical and religious viewopints by engaging in a new method of interpretation. He no longer reserves the right to reinterpret the gospels according to a different overarching framework of understanding; he proclaims the right also to call the authors of the text into question. Thus, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche, in his usual bombastic and belligerent fashion, proclaims the writers of the gospels as bigots and madmen. From there it follows that the actual text itself cannot be taken at face value and this gives Nietzsche the licence to reverse engineer the story. Jesus becomes an “idiot”. His unwillingness to fight back against crucifixion follows from this fact. The whole rest of the gospel is just a fiction born out of the desire of the disciples to turn a farce into a heroic quest with a happy ending.

This extreme degree of reinterpretation follows from genuine problems in how we understand the text. For example, nobody these days can believe the parts of the gospel where Jesus miraculously heals the sick, brings a woman back from the dead with the touch of his hand, or walks on water. But if we simply ignore or reinterpret those parts of the story, then how do we argue against others who might want to ignore another section of the text? If everybody is ignoring different parts of the text, then everybody will actually be telling a different story and we’re no longer even talking about the same thing. The grounds for a shared interpretation then break down.

Moreover, if we can’t believe in the miracle cure part of the story, then we can’t just ignore it. We need an explanation for why it was put in. That explanation has to come back to the writers and their audience. Did they really believe it? Were they just following the literary convention associated with stories about prophets? Either way, we’re no longer worried about the story itself but the writers and broader cultural context in which it was written. Nietzsche’s seemingly ad hominem analysis is correct in principle, even if we disagree with his deliberately inflammatory opinion.

One of the larger points that Nietzsche was making was that once you allow for freedom of interpretation, you also open the way for radically divergent takes on a story. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jesus goes from being a hero to being an idiot. Such inversions are something we have to live with in our time. For example, some people think Trump is going to save the USA, others think he’s going to destroy it. It’s the same man. Only the interpretations differ. But interpretations are how we make sense of the world. Therefore, in some sense, we’re not even living in the same world when we can’t agree on the basic facts of reality.

Nietzsche foresaw these problems, and that’s why later in his life he came to see the Reformation as a disaster. While the sacred text was in the safe hands of the church leaders, all the little inconsistencies could be quietly left out of the discussion. This is a variation of what Socrates called the noble lie. It might sound like a good idea to open the discussion of “truth” to everybody, but then you just get endless bickering.

It should be clear that this process of simply leaving out the inconsistencies in order to create a sensible narrative is exactly what governments do all the time. We all just lived through possibly one of the most extreme examples of that in history with the corona debacle, which was so absurd that the only way to deal with it is to never speak of it again and pretend it never happened. But that’s the point that Nietzsche was making with his re-interpretation of the gospel. An idiot and a group of madmen came up with a story that was a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, that story changed the world. From a cause and effect point of view, it makes no sense. We need another way to understand it.

The other way that Nietzsche laid the groundwork for and which Freud and Jung refined was psychological. Even if the gospels are complete fabrications, they still constitute one of the greatest stories ever told. The fact that the story has all kinds of logical contradictions is only a problem if you think the world runs on logic. And that ended up being one of the central points that came out of the whole episode. What if the world doesn’t run on logic? Or, what if “nature” runs on logic but there is a higher force that is beyond logic? The illogicality of the story then becomes a feature, not a bug.

Perhaps ironically, the situation we face now is very similar to that in the Levant during the time of Jesus, where there was a seemingly endless string of saviours and prophets all competing for attention while the Jewish religious authorities struggled to maintain control of the narrative. The fact that John the Baptist and Jesus were both put to death is evidence for how threatened those authorities were. Socrates met the same fate in large part due to the tumult in Athens in the 4th century. It seems hard to believe, but the current ferment is exactly the kind of milieu that could give rise to a new messiah in our time.