Enlisting Religion: Franz Overbeck's Criticism of the Socialist and Nationalist Mythmaking on Jesus and Early Christianity

Both the ‘real Jesus’ and ‘true Christianity’ are in the eye of the beholder but some be-holders are more beholders than others. This playful connection between the famous saying about beauty attributed to Margaret Wolfe Hungerford – ‘The Duchess’ – and the famed dictum of the Animal Farm’s Stalin-styled leader, the pig Napoleon, may sum up the insightful viewpoint of Franz C. Overbeck (1837–1905) on the late nineteenth-century German ‘myth-making’ on Jesus and early Christianity. More specifically, this largely unknown Russian-born, German theologian and Church historian, who was a close friend and life-long admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche, will provide my observation point on the public-political use of the early Christian past in a critical space-time for the history of two most influential ‘secular ideologies’ of the century: socialism and nationalism.