"For believers, he is the hinge of history. But even by secular standards, [he] is the dominant figure of western culture . . . Historians did not record his birth. Nor, for 30 years, did anyone pay him much heed. A Jew from the Galilean hill country with a reputation for teaching and healing, he showed up at the age of 33 in Jerusalem during Passover. In three days, he was arrested, tried and convicted of treason, then executed like the commonest of criminals. His followers said that God raised him from the dead. Except among those who believed in him, the event passed without notice.
Two thousand years later, the centuries themselves are measured from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth . . . By any secular standard, Jesus is the dominant figure of Western culture . . . Much of what we now think of as Western ideas, inventions and values finds its source or inspiration in the religion that worships God in his name. Art and science, the self and society, politics and economics, marriage and the family, right and wrong, body and soul--all have been touched and often radically transformed by Christian influence."
Newsweek. April 5, 1999.
