Exegetical idiocies

1. DAMASCUS AND SILS MARIA
rofessor Bornkamm’s exegetical clumsiness is proverbial. In his Paulus, this
Baron von Campenhausen’s protégée unleashes his acrid resentment against The
Apostle of Gentility, a tradition heralded by one of his fellow citizens, the German
Polish madman Friedrich Nietzsche. Their bombastic accusation goes like this: the
historical Jesus of Nazareth – the purest and most revered invention of the primitive
Christian community, who nobody knows where it can be found till today — was
obliterated, say they, by the Apostle Paul’s subjectively dubious creation, widely known
as Christ. By no means must be allowed any revelatio specialissima to the former
Pharisee Saulus. Quite the contrary, all that travesty episode in his way to Damascus
must be effaced from the Universe. My personal feeling is that Nietzsche, Bornkamm,
and every single German seminarian cannot endure the very fact that Paul’s literary
creation was so overwhelmingly successful and this till today. In spite of Friedrich
Zarathustra got some revelatio specialissima at Sils Maria, his Superman was
swallowed by the darkest oblivion of all. Hence their envious humours. Nothing better
than these De Quincey’s words for closing my scholia
As a past literature, as a literature of inheritance and tradition, the German was
nothing. Ancestral titles it had none; or none comparable to those of England,
Spain, or even Italy.1
Humbly,
your mean, useless, base, even spiteful servant,
Il signore Pecorelli, tuttologo e pittore molto rumoroso
1
Autobiography. German Studies and Kant in Particular.
P