The New Testament Essay Example for Free

The New Testament Essay The New Testament is deeply rooted in what Friedrich Nietzsche called slave morality. Its sense of ethics and the social values it expounds can be described as a downward pull towards a constant affirmation of a shameful human. One can see the New Testament as copying the ideals of the Old Testament, for the entire Judeo-Christian message is simply, echoing Mikhail Bakunin: God is everything, humanity is nothing; God is the master, humanity its slaves. As such, ethics, values and virtues that sprang from the New Testament is and will always be that of a slave race. Knowing that Jesus himself was highly influenced by Judaic tradition, one can say that the New Testament is merely a continuation of the Old Testament. The ethical atmosphere of the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome were different from that of the Judeo-Christian one. The Greeks and the Romans were far more positive in their outlook of life and their civilizations were a mish-mash of what Nietzsche referred to as Apollonian and Dionysian elements. Whereas the Judeo-Christian God rules and controls all, the Greeks and Romans were able to construct a system where Fate controls all including the gods and goddesses themselves. Unlike the Hebrew and Christian â€Å"slave†, the Greek â€Å"human† is not a product of his God but of his passion, his capacity to reason, and his past. There may be gods and goddesses, but they exist as part of a hierarchy in nature. When a man fears a god, it was because of that god’s power (and there were many a variants of such powers). A man therefore fears god because he saw god as a superior; but this does not mean that he saw god as a master. On the contrary, a Greek or a Roman may imagine himself powerful enough to challenge the gods. The gods were feared because of their powers and not in the Christian sense when people fear God in fear of a brutal punishment in the afterlife. Thus, the Greco-Roman ethical atmosphere promotes what Nietzsche called master morality. What was valued more was the capacity of human beings to rise up towards the level of a god (like Homer’s Achilles) and not how much one has knelt before a God. There may be a noble acceptance that the actions of the gods were considered fate (as in Virgil’s Aenied), human actions still determine whether this or that human becomes a master or a god. What is similar between the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian the sense of ethics and sets of values and virtues is their obsession for what is ideal. Greco-Roman values are based on the philosophy of a form and substance, where the form may suffer changes but its substance remain permanent. Changes may extinguish the form but the substance never perishes. Plato’s cave demonstrates this duality in reality. In the Judeo-Christian sense too resides this duality: body and soul. The body may perish but the soul does not. Taking care of the soul is therefore first priority of Judeo-Christian morality while deciphering and understanding the substance is the first priority of Greco-Roman philosophy. This difference is highlighted by the fact that Jesus’s taught his wisdom through verbal parables concentrating on morality, Homer and Virgil through their written vulgar display of the human senses in its struggle against godly intuitions, while Plato in his philosophical tracts that promoted a certain degree of idealism. This difference between Jesus and the classical writers can also be attributed to their audiences: slave morality for Jesus, master morality for the classical writers. Thus, Jesus himself was continuing a tradition deep into the world of the Old Testament â€Å"slaves† and in fashioning himself as the Jewish messiah his teachings were meant to salvage his world the same way as Moses salvaged his. The decadence of Jewish society during the time of Jesus was reminiscent of the Hebrew society before Moses came down with the two tablets in his hands. Jewish society had become a corruption of its former radiance and the teachings of the Christ was supposed to clean away such corruptions. Whereas Homer, Plato and Virgil wrote in attempt to expose the human spirit in its pure and real substance, Jesus spoke of that spirit’s final destination. The New Testament, in this sense, failed to realize that most of the time the journey of the human spirit is more important than its destination.