real, true world is an inner experience of the heart in which all things are blessedly transfigured (verklärung), eternalized, and perfected. The apparent world, however, is only a collection of psychological symbols, signs, and metaphors. These symbols are expressed in terms of space, time, history, and nature. Examples of these mere symbols are the concepts of "God as a person," "the son of man," "the hour of death," and "the kingdom of heaven." Jesus did not want to redeem anyone. He wanted to show how to live. His legacy was his bearing and behavior. He did not resist evildoers. He loved evildoers. Nietzsche has Jesus tell the thief on the cross that he is in Paradise now if he recognizes the divinity of Jesus' comportment. History of Christianity Opposite development Nietzsche sees a world–historical irony in the way that the Christian Church developed in antithetical opposition to the Evangel and the Gospel of early Christianity. The fable of Christ as miracle worker and redeemer is not the origin of Christianity. The beginnings of Christianity is not in the "crude fable of the wonder-worker and Saviour." Rather, such is a "progressively clumsier misunderstanding of an original symbolism:" the death on the cross. Christianity became more diseased, base, morbid, vulgar, low, barbaric and crude: 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.Nietzsche expresses contempt for his contemporaries because they mendaciously call themselves Christians but do not act like true Christians. Modern people act with worldly egoism, pride, and will to power in opposition to Christianity's denial of the world. Nietzsche considers this falseness to be indecent. Unlike past ages, his contemporaries know that sham and unnatural concepts such as "God," "moral world–order," "sinner," "Redeemer," "free will," "beyond," "Last Judgment," and "immortal soul" are consciously employed to provide power to the church and its priests. "The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding," Nietzsche explains:[A]t bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.... It is an error amounting to nonsensicality to see in "faith", and particularly in faith in salvation through Christ, the distinguishing mark of the Christian: only the Christian way of life, the life lived by him who died on the cross, is ChristianThereafter, the opposite kind