“Yet the idea sown by this one small voice would eventually spread throughout the Roman Empire, even outlasting it, so that Christ’s ideas remain central to our entire western culture and spiritual outlook, whether one believes in his god or not. It was the idea that survived, as ineradicable as the genes of the Phoenicians.”
Paul Strathern, Ten Cities that Led the World
As the book closed, and the final remark was made about that city, “the unknown unknown” to lead the world and “determine the future of the human or partly artificial race,” there was an unmistakable allusion to a New Jerusalem and yet there was also an ironically mixed metaphor.