# Quote — Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

> What was ridiculous about Christianity, from the perspective of a cultivated pagan, was not only its language—the crude style of the Gospels’ Greek resting on the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic—but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with an arrogant triumphalism.

- Author: [Stephen Greenblatt](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-greenblatt.md)
- Book: [The Swerve](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-greenblatt/the-swerve.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stephen_Greenblatt#The_Swerve_(2011)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-greenblatt/the-swerve/what-was-ridiculous

## More from this book

> The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-greenblatt/the-swerve/the-exercise-of-reason.md)

> Something happened in the Renaissance, something that surged up against the constraints that centuries had constructed around curiosity, desire, individuality, sustained attention to the material world, the claims of the body. The cultural shift is notoriously difficult to define, and its significance has been fiercely contested. But it can be intuited easily enough when you look in Siena at Duccio’s painting of the enthroned Virgin, the Maestà, and then in Florence at Botticelli’s Primavera.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-greenblatt/the-swerve/something-happened-in-the.md)

> The quintessential emblem of religion—and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core—is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/stephen-greenblatt/the-swerve/the-quintessential-emblem.md)