“Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes, and kings. Its measure was the power to torture one's enemies, not to suffer it oneself; to nail them to the rocks of a mountain, or to turn them into spiders, or to blind and crucify them after conquering the world. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.

No more shocking a reversal of their most devoutly held assumptions could possibly have been imagined. Not merely blasphemy, it was madness.” - Tom Holland, Dominion, Page 6

"Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was ... [Christianity] is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian." - Tom Holland

“It was not just the extremes of callousness [of Romans] that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value.

Why did I find this disturbing?

Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian. For a millennium and more, the civilisation into which I had been born was Christendom.

Assumptions that I had grown up with - about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold - were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’, but very distinctively of that civilisation’s Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view.”

“Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the world.” - Tom Holland, page pg 541

“None, though, was neutral; none was anything other than the fruit of Christian history. To imagine otherwise, to imagine that the values of secularism might indeed be timeless, was ironically enough- the surest evidence of just how deeply Christian they were.”

“Nietzsche valued the ancients for the pleasure they had taken in inflicting suffering; for knowing that punishment might be festive; for demonstrating that, in the days before mankind grew ashamed of its cru; elty, before pessimists existed, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now?”

page 465

“'do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable: Such was the principle of 'agnosticism', a word that Huxley had come up with himself and which he cast as the essential requirement for anyone who wished to practise science. It was, he flatly declared, ‘the only method by which truth could be ascertained’. Everyone reading him knew his target. Truth that could be neither demonstrated nor proven, truth that was dependent for its claims on a purportedly supernatural revelation, was not truth at all. Science as a practitioner of the fashionable new art of photography might have put it-was defined by its negative: religion.”

“The passages in the Bible that appeared to sanction slavery remained. Plantation owners both in the West Indies and in the southern United States did not hesitate to quote them.” - Tom Holland, Page 410

“The true division in society lay not between friends and enemies of the people, but between those who were naturally masters and those who were naturally slaves. Only when this was appreciated and acted upon would the taint of Christianity finally be eradicated, and humanity live as Nature prescribed.” Page 408

“The Greeks, when they captured a city, had licensed rape as a reward for valour, The Romans had stocked their households with young boys and girls, and used them as they pleased, Everyone in antiquity had taken for granted that infanticide was perfectly legitimate; that to turn the other cheek was folly; that 'Nature has given the weak to be slaves'?”

“That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy than to the Bible:” -Tom Holland