Nietzsche was perfectly correct to see in the emergence and spread of Christianity a kind of pop Platonism (and, like Freud, sometimes a vindictively perverse or sacrificial one at that). What Nietzsche does not recognize sufficiently, on my reading, is that it is not so much Paul as Paul’s place within an emerging Christian narrative Platonizing intervention that constitutes him as the purveyor of this, as it were, ideal or conceptual stance. In one of his remarkable analyses of Paul (which always need to be pushed just a little further to get where we need to be), this one from Daybreak, the genealogist of the material soul of the West concludes: “This [Paul] is the first Christian, the inventor of Christianness! Before him there were only a few Jewish sectarians.