Nietzsche seems to have a special admiration for the values and feelings of ancient cultures, two of which he devotes special attention to. The first of these is the Greeks, where he states that “What is amazing about the religiosity of the ancient Greeks is the excessive amount of gratitude that flows out from it; -- it takes a very noble type of person to face nature and life like this! —Later when the rabble gained prominence in Greece, religion became overgrown with fear as well, and Christianity was on the horizon”.  As seen earlier, superstitious or religious fear seems to be an especially horrible thing in Nietzsche’s philosophy. The ancient Greeks are the only figures in the text that Nietzsche attaches such positive modifiers like ‘amazing’ and ‘noble’ to, and perhaps this is because they avoid that aforementioned flaw. Nietzsche again uses the word rabble, a word that he also used in his separation of the faiths, and in his attack on the moderns. In all three contexts where the word has appeared, it seems to be connected to people of low capability or thought, people who seem to be sheep-like in nature from Nietzsche’s perspective. It is the inversion of power dynamics that places the rabble on top, but the use of the word ‘later’ makes it ambiguous who these people might be. The most likely period that Nietzsche is referring to would be the Hellenistic period, Greece’s most decadent period and the one that leads to Roman dominance in the Battle of Corinth. This would explain the connection that Nietzsche draws between this and the birth of Christianity under Roman rule. Which leads to the second text that Nietzsche seems to have admiration for, The Old Testament.
In this section, Nietzsche dedicates a whole subsection to discussing “The Jewish ‘Old Testament’, the book of divine justice, has people, things, and speeches in such grand style that it is without parallel in the written works of Greece and India… the taste for the old testament is a touchstone for the great and small”. It seems strange to say that the backbone of the Christian faith, is a book without parallel in either Greece or India in a chapter focused on the religious character. However, a deeper exploration of the language used here seems to provide an explanation for this allusion. First, he explicitly refers to it as the ‘Jewish old Testament’ phraseology that makes no sense, since from a Jewish perspective it would simply be called the Torah. However, he does so to make the contrasts with “the New Testament, the book of mercy” starker. When he says that pasting these two books together is “the greatest piece of temerity and sin against the spirit that literary Europe has on its conscience” he is attacking the religious character of the New Testament, using the rules established by its predecessor”. Nietzsche’s understanding of the two works, one as a book of divine justice and the other as a book of mercy, is irreconcilable. Whereas the old Testaments seems to embody the spirit of bravery in the face of cruelty that Nietzsche admires about the Greeks, The New Testament embodies the opposite. The moral nature of The New Testament places it more in line with the dogma of the aforementioned modern philosophers, and an example of the religious character that Nietzsche seems to be railing against all throughout this chapter. Nietzsche approaches images in this chapter in a similar way.
