Nietzsche argued that early Jews and Greeks were fundamentally “attached to life” and paid little attention to ideas of a personal afterlife or postmortem rewards and punishments. In his 1881 work Daybreak (specifically Section 72), Nietzsche contrasts the early Jewish and Greek mindset with that of Christianity and later mystery religions:

Priority of Life over Death: He characterized both peoples as being so “firmly attached to life” that they did not require the “all-too-human” need for personal immortality.

Sufficiency of This-Worldly Justice: For the early Jews, Nietzsche argued that “definitive death” served as a sufficient threat for sinners, making complex doctrines of eternal hell unnecessary.

Contrast with Christianity: Nietzsche viewed the focus on an afterlife as a later development—associated with a “decline” in culture—that moved focus away from the “earthly” reality toward a manufactured “ideal world”.

While he acknowledged that some late Hebrew scriptures alluded to personal immortality, he maintained that the core of early Judaism focused on national restoration and this-worldly retribution rather than an eternal soul. Similarly, he saw the early Greeks as embracing a “tragic” vision of life that did not seek comfort in a happy afterlife

Nietzsche implied this in several works, particularly when contrasting the life-affirming attitudes of ancient cultures with the later “decadent” developments in Judaism and Christianity that invented other-worldly concepts like a rewarding afterlife or immortality of the soul.  In The Antichrist, he describes early Judaism (during the monarchy) as having a “natural attitude” focused on this-worldly power, victory, and justice through their god Jahveh, without doctrines of reward, punishment, or an “other world.” This changed later due to misfortune and ressentiment, leading to the invention of an unnatural, other-worldly causation where acceptance of life became abominable.

He also notes that the original Gospel concept of the “kingdom of heaven” was a present state of the heart, not something anticipated “beyond the world” or “after death,” with natural death absent as a bridge to an afterlife.

In The Will to Power, Nietzsche portrays the ancient Greeks as affirming earthly existence through art, tragedy, and the Dionysian spirit, without anticipating an afterlife or immortality. They imagined a lesser “region of shadows” beside real existence but did not treat it as a goal or focus, rejecting other-worldliness as a slander of life. In contrast, he critiques Jewish and Christian views for positing the immortal soul and afterlife as compensatory fictions rooted in decadence and resentment.  Similarly, in The Birth of Tragedy, the Greeks are shown overcoming life’s terrors through this-worldly aesthetic justification and Dionysian ecstasy, affirming the indestructibility of the will without posthumous hope or an anticipated other world.  He indirectly contrasts this with Semitic myths (implying early Jewish influences) that tie evil to moral guilt, fostering other-worldly orientations later developed in Christianity.

Derrida notes Heidegger’s analysis of death in Being and Time depends on the Christian interpretation of Death (Derrida, Aporias, 55; 80).  It makes little sense on an early Greek or Jewish conception.  As I mentioned before, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:32: “If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.'”  This idea suggests that if the dead are not raised, we might as well be gluttons and drunks.  Of course, Paul believed in the resurrection, and so he writes in 1 Corinthians 10:31: “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”  This was intimately woven for Paul with having the resurrected Jesus inside you to combat the power of Sin, and so the Apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:16–17: “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.” Paul was convinced the dead were raised because he thinks he saw the risen Jesus.  He writes in 1 Corinthians 15:20: “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” The surrounding verses (21–23) connect this to the general resurrection of believers at Christ’s coming, which is Paul’s understanding that he was living during the eschaton, Paul’s interpretation of the general end-time resurrection taught by the pharisees.  This formed a base for Paul’s principle of living as crucifying the flesh/worldly.  This is Paul’s whole life being lived according to his self-placement on the spectrum of being-toward-death (the finite spectrum from hedonism at the left pole, mellowing into tranquil carpe diem and epicureanism of a good meal and friends, past the middle to memento mori and stoicism, and ultimately at the far-right pole rigid asceticism), Paul being from Tarsus, the birthplace of the Stoic enlightenment.  Derrida gives the example in Oedipus the King that true happiness is only attained when death releases you from suffering.

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, section 42, he critiques the Apostle Paul for distorting the original message of Jesus by inventing doctrines centered on the afterlife, including the resurrection / and emphasizing belief (“If righteousness comes through the law Christ died for nothing”). The Corinthian Creed, if it is pre-Pauline, suggests as Ehrman notes that shortly after Jesus’s death the doctrine of the atonement and the other-worldly elements became central, the historical Jesus on the contrary preaching good works and repentance so God can forgive. As I said, for Paul this was thoroughly grounded in the evidence of the resurrection. However, Stoic philosophy which is foundational for interpreting Paul strongly emphasized rationalism, skepticism toward superstitions, and the idea that many perceived phenomena could stem from faulty impressions or fears rather than reality. This aligns with Nietzsche’s implication in The Antichrist that, in the context of “Stoical enlightenment,” visions like Paul’s alleged hallucination of the risen Christ would be dismissed as non-veridical rather than taken as proof. For example, the appearance to the 500 Paul relates may just have been hallucination like the Fatima sky miracle.

Today, as average Christians don’t usually have full blown “appearances” of Jesus to base their faith on, anxiety undergirds faith because you are basing your life on something lacking in evidence. For example, the Gospel of John says the disciples believed because of the Cana wine miracle (John 2:1-11) and the miracles were related so people would believe (John, chapter 20, verses 30-31. The disciples believed because they saw it all happen – but as for everyone else blessed are those who have not seen but still believe (Gospel of John, chapter 20, verse 29).

Christians today base their whole lives around the bible, but most haven’t had a full-on experience of the risen Jesus like Paul and have to believe without seeing as described in the Gospel of John.

Kierkegaard’s exploration of anxiety—particularly the existential tension from desiring a truth (like the reality of Christ’s resurrection) while grappling with inherent unknowability—directly parallels the situation of modern Christians who commit their lives to biblical teachings without a direct, visionary encounter like Paul’s on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). This mirrors the Gospel of John’s emphasis on believing without seeing (John 20:29), where faith is portrayed not as empirical certainty but as a blessed act amid absence of proof.

The Leap of Faith Amid Uncertainty: Kierkegaard, under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), argues that Christianity isn’t grounded in objective evidence or historical proofs (like miracles witnessed firsthand). Instead, it’s a “paradox” that demands a passionate, subjective “leap” into belief, despite the “objective uncertainty” of eternal truths. For contemporary believers, the Bible serves as the written testimony (as in John 20:30-31, where signs are recorded “so that you may believe”), but without personal sightings of the risen Christ, this creates a forward-living anxiety: you want the resurrection’s promise of eternal life to be true, yet you can’t “know” it backward through direct experience. This dissonance fuels what he calls the “dread” of possibility, where faith emerges not from security but from risking everything on an unprovable conviction.

Anxiety as the Dizziness of Freedom: In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), Kierkegaard (as Vigilius Haufniensis) describes anxiety as arising from the “possibility of possibility”—the human confrontation with infinite choices and unknowns, including spiritual ones. Modern Christians, basing life on scripture’s claims (e.g., the Corinthian Creed’s resurrection assertions in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7), often experience this as a profound longing for confirmation (like Paul’s hallucinatory vision, critiqued by Nietzsche as a power-driven invention). Yet, as John 20:29 blesses those who believe without seeing, Kierkegaard sees this as the authentic Christian posture: anxiety isn’t a flaw but a catalyst for genuine faith, pushing one beyond rational proofs into relational commitment to God. Wanting the biblical narrative to be “true” (salvation, purpose) while navigating life’s uncertainties without a “full-on experience” embodies this—it’s not blind faith but a deliberate embrace of the absurd, where doubt and desire coexist. This is exemplified by Abraham’s faith in a contradictory God.

Contrast with Paul’s “Certainty”: Kierkegaard implicitly critiques figures like Paul, whose faith stems from a dramatic revelation (a “seen” event). For Kierkegaard, true Christianity involves the “teleological suspension of the ethical” (from Fear and Trembling, 1843), where believers like Abraham act on divine commands without evidential guarantees. Today’s Christians, lacking Paul’s epiphany, must embody this more radically: their anxiety from unknowing heightens the authenticity of faith, making it a lived paradox rather than a historical artifact.

In essence, Kierkegaard would view this modern dynamic not as a deficiency but as the essence of Christian existence—faith thrives in the anxiety of desiring truth without empirical closure, aligning with John’s call to believe unseen. This fosters deeper inwardness, turning scripture from mere doctrine into a personal, risky venture.

Death interrupts the logic of the example/exemplary because we have no intuition that goes with the concept of Death.  Rather, in death Dasein thought in terms of possibility encounters Death as possibility in an exemplary sense (Derrida, Awaiting, 63).  Derrida says

“a mortal can only start from here, from his mortality.  His possible belief in immortality, his irresistible interest in the beyond, in gods and spirits, what makes survival structure every instant in a kind of irreducible torsion, the torsion of a retrospective anticipation that introduces the untimely moment and the posthumous in the most alive of the present living thing, the rearview mirror of a waiting for death at every moment, and the future anterior that precedes even the present , which it only seems to modify, all this stems first from his mortality (Derrida, Awaiting, 55).” 

Life is always too short (Derrida, 65).  We know of a time that flows forward, calendar time, as an infinite procession of nows, but contrarily also time flowing out of the future into the present and then past (Christmas is coming, is here, has gone).  Death is “distinctively impending (67).”  Only man has an apophantic relationship to death, death “as” death, as exemplary possibility.