Lessing was not a professing Christian – no more than his Nathan was a professing Jew or his Saladin a professing Muslim: “Nathan’s attitude towards all positive religion,” Lessing clarifies, “has all along been my own” (B 9, 665). In his Education treatise and in a fragment written in 1780 about the “religion of Christ”, the question of the divinity of the Jewish itinerant preacher Jesus of Nazareth remains unanswered: “Whether Christ was more than a human being is a problem. That he was a true human being – if he was a human being at all – and that he never ceased to be a human being is not in dispute” (B 10, 223). Jacobi reports in his letters on Spinoza that “with the idea of a personal and absolutely infinite being in the unchanging enjoyment of its supreme perfection”, Lessing had associated “such an impression of infinite boredom that it caused him pain and anxiety” (HS, 95–96).