Here is a review of a book with an important theme.
God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism, Jonathan Kirsch,
Alexander the Great and his successors carried Hellenism and all its intellectual and cultural baggage into the land of the Jews. The Hellenic lifestyle was immensely seductive to Jews, as Kirsch explains, but even more insidious was the Hellenic worldview, which offered a rational, flattering and attractive < and still viable < alternative to the Jewish revelation, and later to the Christian and Muslim ones as well. This titanic, and ongoing, struggle between reason and revelation is ...
What Kirsch is really interested in, and it takes up a well-merited two-thirds of his book, is, to put it somewhat baldly, Emperor Constantine's heavy-handed conversion in 313 of Christian monotheistic intolerance into the policy of the Roman empire, antiquity's "first totalitarian state."
