[1] Although the work was written in 1888, its content made Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz delay its publication, along with Ecce Homo.

To understand the book, he asserts that the reader "must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of hardness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion".

What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases—that resistance is overcome.Nietzsche follows this passage with provocative and shocking language:[4]The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity.

What is more harmful than any vice?—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity....This is an example of Nietzsche's reaction against Schopenhauer, who had based all morality on compassion.

Nietzsche claims that, prior to his time, the scientific method of searching for truth and knowledge was met with scorn and derision.

[12] He maintains that the traditional "pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism" supports "all the instincts of décadence, all the cowardices and wearinesses of the soul find their sanction!

"[12] Although he criticizes both Christianity and Buddhism, Nietzsche considers the latter to be more realistic as it poses objective problems and does not use the concept of God.

Nietzsche claims that Buddhism is "beyond good and evil" because it has developed past the "self-deception that lies in moral concepts".

Their "instincts of ressentiment" against those who were well–constituted led them to "invent an other world in which the acceptance of life appeared as the most evil and abominable thing imaginable".

[15] However, "they have simply been forced into appearing" as decadents, to "put themselves at the head of all décadent movements (—for example, the Christianity of Paul—), and so make of them something stronger than any party frankly saying Yes to life".

[14] From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the sacrifice' (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it.

Christianity then negated the Jewish church and its holy, chosen people, according to Nietzsche:[15]The phenomenon is of the first order of importance: the small insurrectionary movement which took the name of Jesus of Nazareth is simply the Jewish instinct redivivus—in other words, it is the priestly instinct come to such a pass that it can no longer endure the priest as a fact; it is the discovery of a state of existence even more fantastic than any before it, of a vision of life even more unreal than that necessary to an ecclesiastical organization.The Jewish church and the Jewish nation received this rebellion as a threat to its existence:[15]This saintly anarchist, who aroused the people of the abyss, the outcasts and "sinners," the Chandala of Judaism, to rise in revolt against the established order of things...this man was certainly a political criminal....

He died for his own sins... Nietzsche criticizes Ernest Renan's attribution of the concepts genius and hero to Jesus.

There is no Judaic concern for sin, prayers, rituals, forgiveness, repentance, guilt, punishment, or faith:[19][H]e knew that it was only by a way of life that one could feel one's self 'divine,' 'blessed,' 'evangelical,' a 'child of God.'

[20]A sickly barbarism finally lifts itself to power as the church—the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty, to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all spontaneous and kindly humanity.—Christian values—noble values.The apostles claimed that Jesus' death was a sacrifice of an innocent man for the sins of the guilty.

[22] This changed Christianity from a peace movement that achieves actual happiness into a religion whose final judgment offers possible resurrection and eternal life.

"The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct—henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion".

The 'law,' the 'will of God,' the 'holy book,' and 'inspiration'—all these things are merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and with which he maintains his power... Nietzsche concludes his work with the insistence that Christianity "turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.... [I]t lives by distress; it creates distress to make itself immortal".

[26] "To breed out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-pollution, a will to lie at any price, an aversion and contempt for all good and honest instincts", in Nietzsche's view, is the spirit of Christianity.

[26] Nietzsche suggests that time be calculated from "today", the date of this book, whereby 'Year One' would begin on 30 September 1888—"The transvaluation of all values!

Kaufmann considers The Antichrist the more appropriate way to render the German: "[a] translation of the title as 'The Antichristian' [...] overlooks that Nietzsche plainly means to be as provocative as possible".

However, as one scholar notes, "the Antichrist is unrelievedly vituperative, and would indeed sound insane were it not informed in its polemic by a structure of analysis and a theory of morality and religion worked out elsewhere".

Mit der Strenge des Physiologen gesprochen, wäre hier ein ganz andres Wort eher noch am Platz: das Wort Idiot Our whole concept, our cultural concept 'spirit' had no meaning whatever in the world Jesus lived in.

[ii][37] The full passage reads:[34] Die Worte zum Schächer am Kreuz enthalten das ganze Evangelium.

[34] The full passage reads:[34] Ein junger Fürst, an der Spitze seiner Regimenter, prachtvoll als Ausdruck der Selbstsucht und Selbstüberhebung seines Volks, — aber, ohne jede Scham, sich als Christen bekennend!

A young prince at the head of his regiments, splendid as the expression of his people's egoism and presumption – but without any shame professing himself a Christian!

[38] This part consists of seven propositions that can be summarised as such:[39] "When even the criminal undergoing a painful death declares: 'the way this Jesus suffers and dies, without rebelling, without enmity, graciously, resignedly, is the only right way,' he has affirmed the gospel: and with that he is in Paradise—"