I don’t think that it was accidental that Christianity began in the Greco-Roman culture. I don’t think that Christ would have suffered under Genghis Khan with the same meaning as under Pontius Pilate. The Greeks had invented a medium, the phonetic alphabet, which, as Eric Havelock explains in his book Preface to Plato, made it possible for men to have for the first time in the history a sense of private identity… Christianity was introduced into a matrix of culture in which the individual had enormous significance: this is not characteristic of other world cultures.