Saturday, October 22, 2005

Pelikan on Jesus

In a work limited to Jesus’ influence in Western culture, the esteemed historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote:

Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?[i]

[i] Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 1.

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