In Hobbes's interpretation, Jesus can be historically understood as a prophet, whereas his salvific mission belongs to the realm of faith and cannot be rationally demonstrated, but only "swallowed". Hobbes initially follows the libertine topos that superimposes Christ on Moses, but ultimately overturns it. In the reading of the learned libertines, Jesus is, like Moses, a Legislator who imposes a new Lex; he is very skilled in using his religious charisma to strengthen a worldly and historical power, and he is one of the three great impostors of the famous legend. Hobbes appropriates this topos while radically transforming it by depoliticizing it at its core. While the libertines greatly emphasise the role of Christ in a political sense, Hobbes, though making him a prophet-man, spiritualises him to the utmost and relegates his political functions to an extra-historical time. Christ will be king in a political sense only after the Second Coming; within history, armed solely with the word, he is a shepherd without coercive power, whose task is to teach and to prepare men and women for the future kingdom. This idealization of Christ as teacher and shepherd reinforces a central Hobbesian thesis: the common function of all religions—arising from human anxieties, fear of unknown causes, and concern for the future—is to render individuals more peaceful and compliant. Religion thus loses its political centrality as the basis of any social coexistence and is relocated to an individual, interior, and psychological sphere. This shift opens the way for an early reflection on freedom of conscience, based on the distinction between public discourse, subject to State authority, and private, internal discourse, which lies beyond political control insofar as it does not affect the public sphere.