Tom Holland holds an edge over other current authors and intellectuals: the rare coupling of wide erudition and remarkable clarity of mind, two attributes that appear to be negatively correlated, as if the presence of one caused the other one to flee. This confers the ability to spot things other professionals don’t catch immediately, or don’t dare to voice in public. Academic historians concerned about their reputation and standing in their community, fear to stray from the current accounts by more than an inch, even if they know that they are correct, which gives some people an unfair advantage. And these insights, in spite of being hard to detect and communicate, appear obvious, even trivial after the fact. So Holland can be effortlessly ahead of his time: ten years ago, he was savagely attacked by the high priest of late Antiquity, the extremely decorated Glenn Bowersock, for his book on the conditions surrounding the birth of Islam. Then, only half a decade later, Bowersock quietly published a book making similar claims.

So this entire book revolves around one simple, but far-reaching thesis. By a mechanism dubbed the retrospective distortion, we look at history using the rear view mirror and flow values retroactively. So one would be naturally inclined to believe that the ancients, particularly the Greco-Romans, would seem like us, share the same wisdom, preferences, values, concerns, fears, hopes, and outlook, except, of course, without the iPhone, Twitter, and the Japanese automated toilet seat. But, no, no, not at all, Holland is saying. These ancients did not have the same values. In fact, Christianity did stand the entire ancient value system on its head.

The Greco-Romans despised the feeble, the poor, the sick, and the disabled; Christianity glorified the weak, the downtrodden, and the untouchable; and does that all the way to the top of the pecking order. While ancient gods could have their share of travails and difficulties, they remained in that special class of gods. But Jesus was the first ancient deity who suffered the punishment of the slave, the lowest ranking member of the human race. And the sect that succeeded him generalized such glorification of suffering: dying as an inferior is more magnificent than living as the mighty. The Romans were befuddled to see members of that sect use for symbol the cross –the punishment for slaves. It had to be some type of joke in their eyes.

Clearly pagans were not totally heartless –there are records of pagan cities in Asia Minor assisting other communities after a disaster but these are rare enough to confirm the rule[2].

There is also the presence of skin in the game in the new religion. Christianity, by insisting on the Trinity, managed to allow God to suffer like a human, and suffer the worst fate any human can suffer. Thanks to the complicated consubstantial relation between father and son, suffering was not a computer simulation to the Lord but the real, real thing. The argument “I am superior to you because I suffer the consequences of my actions and you don’t” applies within humans and here in the relationship between humans and God. This extends, in Orthodox theology, to the idea that God, by suffering as a human, allowed humans to be closer to Him, and to potentially merge with Him via Theosis.

Once in, Christianity proved impossible to remove, and the Nazarean mindset and its structure directed its opponents, its heresies, and its replacement –starting with Julian and ending with the most recent accretions of secular humanism.

For Christianity had a sweet vindication when Julian The Apostate, falling for the retrospective distortion, decided to replace of the Church of Christianity by the Church of Paganism along similar organizational lines, with bishops and all the rest (what Chateaubriand called the “Levites”). Julian did not realize that paganism was a soup of decentralized and overlapping individual or collective club-like affiliations to gods.

What has been less obvious is that while we are inclined to believe that Christianity descends from Judaism, some of the reverse might be true. For even the mother-daughter relationship between Judaism and Christianity has been, as of late, convincingly challenged. “ If there had been no Paul, there would have been no Rabbi Akiva” claims the theologian Israel Yuval[3] as we can see in Rabbinical Judaism the unmistakable footprints of Christianity.

Further East, Shiite Islam shares many features with Christianity, e.g. the same dodecadic approach, with twelve apostles, the last of whom will be associated with Jesus Christ, plus self-flagellation rituals around the memory of all-familiar martyrdom. These can be possibly attributed to a shared Levantine origin, but the Christian influence wholly accepted by Islamic scholars since Islam is backward compatible[4]. But it is clear that the latest position of Supreme Leader has been largely inspired by the Catholic hierarchy.

The corollary of Holland’s thesis is that many ideas that we attribute today to social progress –including secularism, etc. are direct descendants of Christianity, mostly in its Western branch. This includes, of course, as we will see, atheism. But Christianity has been slow to spread its values from text to execution, and that may be the point of this book. Yes, Christianity glorifies the poor: but it took seventeen centuries from “the eye of the needle” in Matthew 19:24 to the conception of organized communism and various theories of social equality. Likewise, sadly it took more than a millennia for the “neither slave nor free” in Galatians 3:28 to move from epistle to execution.

As to the “neither Greek nor Jew”, alas, we are still waiting for full implementation as we have witnessed with the birth of nationalism in the late 18th C., a moral degradation and a step away from universalism with the modern contraption of the nation state –the murderous nation state. I recall vividly the TV ads in the early 2000s, promoted by Democrats to attack George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq; they kept showing the tragedy that 3,800 people died in the invasion. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis –lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because nationalism establishes clean balance sheets: countries are only responsible for their own citizens.

In the debates between Holland and the representatives of the second wave of self-branded enlightenmentistas such as A.C. Grayling, arguments are of the following type have been supplied: well, the ancients had some type of recommendation to care for their slaves. This is like saying: some of your neighbors treat their dogs in humane manner. This totally misses the point: the ancient’s worldview would have never accepted to put slaves as equal, let alone superior. The ancients may have been charitable; but it was not systematic.

A standard argument is that Christians destroyed the intellectual production of the classical periods while the Arabs preserved some of it, which can fool those who read too much Gibbon but not enough of other sources. Holland correctly busted that myth probably based on some true but not representative anecdote: these “Arab” preservationists were almost all Syriac speaking Syro-Mesopotamian Christians who operated mostly in Bagdad’s Beit al Hikma, The House of Wisdom (such as Ishac ben Honein and Honein ben Ishac) who translated from Greek but also from Aramaic sources. Those who were not Christian had been recently converted. Whatever he got wrong about race and ethnicity, Ernest Renan was correct in claiming that much of the Arab golden age was Greco-Sassanian. The “Greco” in it was Christian.[5]

Let us note that whatever the source of the myth of Christian obscurantism, that the story doesn’t fudge, no matter how we look at it[6]. It might be true that at the beginning, great minds tended to be pagan, such as the formidable Libanius. But later generations were integrated into Christianity. The most erudite people in history were 17th and 18th religious Christians such as the Catholic Bishop Pierre-Daniel Huet, Huguenot figures such as Pierre Bayle, or the great Scaliger (who, among his otherwise rare skills, was ironically able to translate Arabic wisdom into Latin). These put to shame their successors. My personal childhood experience is that Jesuit clergymen were your first stop for anything related to Ancient history and archeological matters, and before the spread of literacy in the Arab world, Levantine Christian priests (whose theological languages were either Aramean or Greek) were the ones to consult for the subtleties of Arabic grammar and the language of the Quran.