YouSaid · the spoken record

Tom Holland

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-03-22
most recent: 2023-03-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I am carrying on with my impodcast, the rest is history, as I said. We've just done three episodes on the Cathars. We have various episodes coming up, some definitely an American bent. So we're doing some episodes on Ronald Reagan. We've got the fall of Saigon to come. So all kinds of things like that. And I'm able to do that and to devote myself to that because I've just finished a third book in the series of books that I've written on Roman history. So the first Rubicon was about the fall of the Roman Republic. Mentioned that. The second dynasty was dynasty, I guess I should say, was about the family of Augustus ending with the death of Nero. And this new book, Pax, is about the heyday of the Roman Empire. So it runs from the death of Nero up to the time of Hadrian. So it covers the year of the four emperors, the sack of Jerusalem, Pompeii, the Colosseum, Hadrian's Wall, say lots of great stuff. And that is out in America in October.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you may remember in Jurassic Park, the two paleontologists are in the Jeep, they're being taken by Richard Attenborough, and suddenly they kind of hear a bellow and they look round and there's kind of famous sequence where Sam Neal takes his hat off and kind of goes like that. And I hadn't yet seen any of the CGI dinosaurs. And when they showed the brachiosaur coming up out of the lake and kind of leaning up and feeding from the tree, the sense of wonder that Sam Neal was of the Sam Neil's character was obviously feeling, I felt that sense of wonder. I was so moved. I was moved almost to tears. And I think, you know, as a film, I've just watched it over and over and over again because that sense of wonder has never entirely left me.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Millions of times, but I'll tell you why I love Jurassic Park. So as a child, before I got into the Romans, before I got into the Greeks, I was obsessed by dinosaurs. I was one of those kind of boys. And I was a child at an age where there wasn't very much about dinosaurs. We weren't on the television very often. I remember there was an open university course on paleontology done by professors, so not at all aimed at children. And they had one about dinosaurs. and it was the most exciting program that I watched through the entire span of my childhood. Anything about dinosaurs, I was obsessed by. And the films that were shown then were kind of the dinosaurs in them were not very good. They were kind of slow, ponderous. You could see that they'd been, you know, that kind of Ray Harryhausen type models. So when CGI enabled Spielberg to recreate dinosaurs in the way that he did in Jurassic Park, for me, it was a wonderful, wonderful.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lust for gold where Tuko the ugly is running round the cemetery trying to find a grave where supposedly gold has been buried, and I would always play that when I was writing about Crassus, who is the great billionaire. And then when I was writing about the triumvirate, kind of the standoff between the great warlords, I would play the brilliant music at the end of the good, the bad and the ugly when there's a kind of seven-minute shoot-off between the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I would always feel better going up to work having listened to that. And from that point on, I've always tried to find pieces of music. It will keep me in the mood of the world in which I'm writing about, but will also remind me that I'm writing for people who may know nothing about it and I have to make it interesting and accessible.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My most unusual, successful work habit. When I write history, I will go to libraries, I will immerse myself in academic texts, academic study, I will read texts and books that are often kind of very demanding, written in very academic prose, but I write for the general audience. And so there are times where I feel that I have to emancipate myself from that. And I remember when I was writing my first book, Rubicon, which was about the collapse of the Roman Republic, the great kind of the warlords of the late Republic at Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, I would come back from the library and I'd sometimes feel covered in the dust of the libraries in which I'd been sitting. And before starting work, I would play any Morakoni's music from the good, the bad and the ugly, as I was making myself a cup of tea. And I would particularly play two tracks. One is the kind of”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The things that animals would depend upon, then that's not good for humans either. The Cascade effect, you know, we never know when it might suddenly ripple through.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's partly because they are an inherently appealing animal. They're kind of snuffling the way that they run. It looks as if they're lifting up skirts to do so. But it's also because I remember the garden of my childhood where there would be hedgehogs, you know, you'd see hedgehogs all the time. I don't think my children have ever seen the hedgehog. I was driving through the country in late summer last year and ahead of me on the road I saw a hedgehog. And it was the first time I seen a hedgehog for a long time. And it really paints me. And I feel we have a responsibility not to allow an animal like the hedgehog to go extinct. And I think more than that, if you want to talk in terms of human self-interest, a world in which biodiversity collapses. And one of the reasons why hedgehogs are going extinct is because there aren't enough insects for them to eat. And insects, of course, are much less charismatic than hedgehogs. And so people tend not to get upset about them. But if we don't have insects, if we don't have...”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm aware of the argument. I mean, I find it intriguing that the two areas of Europe that have the highest population density are also the two areas that first became capitalist And so that sets up for us a very painful decision about what matters more, economic growth, economic success, the wealth, the employment that that gives people, or the sustaining of the countryside and all those creatures that depend on the countryside. And my feeling is, and it's an entirely romantic one, that I would not want to argue before a professor of economics, but I'm going to is that For me I feel that the humans who live on the island that I live on, we're not the only species that inhabit this island, that there are lots of animals and birds and insects and plants and trees that are bred of this island too, and that we have a kind of responsibility for them. And I hate the impoverishment of our wildlife, of our biodiversity. If I particularly campaign for the hedgehog,”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think because people don't feel strongly about the Church of England either way, by and large people are happy for it to stay where it is, rather than the way that people don't particularly want to, you know, people may not be going to a large church in the middle of a town, but that doesn't mean that they want to remove it and build a supermarket there.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They quite liked the sense of the weird that those two weeks opened up, the body of a queen who's a lineal descendant of Alpha the Great and Odin and Adam if her line of descent is to be trusted lying in state in a parliament, you know, in the great hall built by the son of William the Conqueror, the great ceremony in Westminster Abbey built by Edward the Confessor, the transfer of the body laid to state in the chapel at Windsor, where Henry VIII and Charles I bodies lie, that this sense of communion with the Christian past, the royal past, even Republicans quite enjoyed it. And I think the fact that only saved, I don't know, I don't even know if it's 5%. I mean, you were quoting me probably, I'm sure you got the figure right. I'm surprised it's actually that high going to church.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“largely that this is a problem for Christians in Britain and maybe in America as well that in a way they've won too comprehensively people don't need Christianity anymore to do all kinds of things by and large you know it was the Church of England that was responsible for education often for healthcare often for the provision of charity in Britain all those have basically been nationalized you know we have the state now organizes education, healthcare benefits. So what's the church for? That's an existential problem for the church. However, I think that it's kind of clarified for me by the experience of the Queen's death and funeral and the mourning period for her that I think suddenly not everyone, there were lots of people who were very annoyed by it but lots of people were surprised by how moved they were by those whole two strange weeks and actually quite liked it.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the religious, this is a legacy specifically of Christianity, and so Muslims living in Britain, to that extent are secularized. Of course there are Muslims who resent this. These are Muslims who tend to be categorized as extremists, as people who reject this idea that Islam should be just a religion, who want to see the whole of Britain become subject to an Islamic state. But these are a tiny minority. Most Muslims have internalized the idea of the secular in exactly the way that Jews have done or Hindus have done, or indeed Catholics have done, or Protestants have done. And so to that extent, I think that Muslims have been radically Protestantized. Now, it may be that this is precisely the problem for the Church of England, that everything that made it distinctive, everything that kind of made it the foundation stone of the English and then British state that it became no longer necessary. You don't need the Church of England for it. And I think you could say more.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, so first of all, I mean, Islam is in no way the most influential religion in Britain. Islam is being radically Christianized in Britain. Muslims like Jews, like Hindus, like Christians indeed, have freedom of religion. But what that means is that they are essentially obliged to see themselves as belonging to a religion. In the case of Muslims as belonging to a religion called Islam. Classically, that is not how Muslims understood what Islam was. Islam was an entire way of life. Islam was not something to be kind of siphoned off from something called the secular and kind of ghettoized in that way. Au contradict it was something that saturated everything. This is the legacy of that little acorn that I was talking about when I said, I was talking about Jesus saying, render unto Caesar. This idea that there are two dimensions, a dimension that today we call the secular and”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's often cast as though there's a kind of inevitability. And if that is what people in Northern Ireland want, then that is absolutely what people in Northern Irelanders have. But I think it's less inevitable than the kind of the way in which the Protestant population is in decline. The Catholic population is growing. I don't think it necessarily follows quite to the degree that I would say that anything about it is inevitable.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I think that the complexities of cephology in Ireland and specifically Northern Ireland is way beyond my pay grade. It is incredibly complicated. And my understanding is that as sectarian identity, so the proportion of people in Northern Ireland who identify as either Catholic or Protestant fades. It doesn't translate automatically into a desire necessarily to remain in the Union or to join a united island, but that there is a solid core nevertheless that prefers remaining in the UK to joining Ireland. And I think that that is further complicated by the fact that in Ireland, Northern Ireland is now much poorer than Ireland itself. I think that, as I say, I'm not an expert on the cephology of this, but my hunch is that there would be nervousness on the part of photos in Ireland as well as in Northern Ireland about the cost, the challenges, the problems of doing it. I agree.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm all in favour of devolution. I think that Britain before the Second World War was a state in which power was devolved to Scotland, to Wales, to Northern Ireland, but also to the great cities of England as well, to Birmingham. So Joseph Chamberlain.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“as the emperors and the elites of the classical world see it, keeping the lower orders busy. And what will happen if they're not kept busy? It's a kind of Luddite perspective, perhaps. So I don't want to imply that I have studied this in any great or specific detail, but my sense is that there is a strain of Ludditism in the classical world that makes them suspicious of anything that might lead to what might seem to be labor-saving. Which of course you see in the earliest of the Industrial Revolution in Britain as well, that's where Luddites are, people breaking mills and all kinds of things like that. And it's an anxiety that continues into the present day. Of course. Large language model.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be tested, it's shown that this glass is indeed unbreakable and the inventor is delighted and thinks that Tiberius is going to reward him au contraire. Tiberius hasn't put to death. And the secret buried. And the justification for that is that if glass is unbreakable, then what will that do for glassmakers? You know, it's very bad. There's another story that's told of the Emperor Vespasian that somebody approaches him and says when they're trying to rebuild the Capitoline Temple that's been destroyed in the Great Fire in AD 69 that I mentioned earlier, I've developed this brilliant crane. It's an excellent labor-saving device. And again, it is said Vespasian refuses to use it because it will put the common people of Rome out of work. I mean, I don't think either of those stories are likely to be true, but the fact that they are told clearly articulates a suspicion of technology as being the enemy of basically keeping”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who are developing all kinds of things, but there does also seem to be on the part of the Roman elites, and this is true of the Greeks as well before that, a nervousness about allowing technology to go too far. So in Alexandria, Hellenistic Alexandria, famously the steam engine is invented. What do the Alexandrians use it for? They don't use it to develop steam engines. So Arnold Toynbee and his kind of panoramic history of the world envisages this counterfactual in which Macedonian soldiers are on steam trains, kind of chugging across Mesopotamia, taking out Parthian rebels and so on. That doesn't happen. Instead, they use it to power temple kind of gimmicks so that people will go in and they'll use steam and the statue of a god will move or something like that. There's a story told of the emperor Tiberius that somebody approaches him and says, look, I've made unbreakable glass and Tiberius is very interested as for it.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would in no way claim to be a specialist in the history of ancient technology. I think the hugely interesting question is basically not how advanced were, say, the Greeks or the Romans, but why did they not industrialize? So moving on from the Greeks or the Persians and looking at the Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD, this was an incredibly economically advanced society. It had a vast internal market. It was starting to reckon that the scale of the market enabled people to become richer and richer, that more and more resources could be brought together. It's been estimated that people in the Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD probably no society was as rich until, say, the Netherlands, the Dutch Republic in the late 16th, early 17th century. So it's a very, very successful economically successful, prosperous society. And, you know, there are brilliant people.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zoroastrianism of the Sasanian Empire, but the Christian Empire of Constantine, the Muslim Caliphate, and has absolutely passed into the present. We are in that sense completely the heirs of the Achaemenid Empire.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Empire, but because he sees it, Athens and Sparta are terrorist states. They are states in which demons have laid siege to the Acropolis and to the temples of Sparta and taken possession of it. And so therefore they must be smoked out. I wrote about this in Persian fire, my book about the Persian wars. And I was writing against the backdrop of the NATO attempt to stabilize Afghanistan, which, you know, from the view of the West was a remote and mountainous backwater occupied by terrorists. And I realized that basically, you know, that's how the Persians saw the Greeks. And we in the West have the conceit that we are the heirs of Athens, but we are at least as much the heirs of the Persian kings as we are of the Athenians. And that idea that power can be moralized, you know, it passes into the bloodstream not just of Zoroastrianism.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's so influential about the Persian Empire is that they moralize their own imperialism, and this is hugely influential because when the Persian king, so Darius would be the person who most potently expresses this, he says that he is the chosen one of Ahuramasda, the great god, the good Lord, and that truth and order are embodied in Ahuramazda and that Darius is his deputy, therefore the realm that he rules also is the dimension of truth and order. And the corollary of that is that those who opposed Darius are agents of the lie and of anarchy. And therefore, they must be crushed not just as enemies of the Persian king, but as enemies of what is good, and when Xerxes leads his campaign against the rebellious cities of Athens and Sparta, he is doing this not just to expand his”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if we ruled that out, it They completely did, and it was one of the most influential intellectual, spiritual traditions that's ever existed, because I'm reluctant to call it Zoroastrianism. It comes to be institutionalized as what today we might call Zoroastrianism in the third, the fourth, the 5th centuries AD under a new Persian Empire, the empire that's governed by a family called the Sasanians. But the Sasanian kings, who are institutionalizing Zoroastrianism rather in the way that Constantine institutionalizes Christianity in the Roman Empire, they are clearly drawing on traditions that were very, very current in the earliest Persian Empire, the Achaemenid Empire. And these traditions are essentially dualist. It's the idea that the world can be moralized, that it can be understood as being divided between rival spheres of good and evil, of light and dark, of truth and the lie.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that all these scholars have, I think, achieved that. They have kind of to a degree performed an act of resurrectionism. They have brought us to an understanding of the Persian Empire that is better.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's happened over the past few decades, however, is that scholars have basically teamed up to try and go beyond that, to try and go beyond the kind of the fact that we lack Persian accounts to try and see beyond what the Greeks and the Jews wrote. And this has required basically pooling every conceivable source of information that we have. So such Persian inscriptions as we do have, archaeology, the insights of areas of the Persian Empire that perhaps hadn't previously been tapped, be that Egypt or Babylonia or wherever, whether again there are sources, trying to put the Persian Empire as it functioned in the 6th, the 5th, the 4th centuries BC into some kind of understanding that is true to the functioning of the empire in that period rather than, say, sources that were written much later. And this is a really, really difficult, challenging, complicated process. And it's been one of the great feats of the field of ancient history.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who burn their parents when they've died throw their hands up in horror and say nothing we would never do that and then Darius turns to the Indian tribe and these are a people who eat their parents when they've died as a mark of their utmost respect and Darius says to them what would I have to do to persuade you to burn your parents when they're dead and likewise the Indian tribesmen throw their hands up in horror and Herodotus says This shows to me that custom is king you know that everybody believes that their own customs are best and he understands that he understands that he gets that and so when he's writing about the Persians he is trying to do his best to kind of portray them as they see themselves and not just to kind of do them down. Now of course it doesn't work and the problem with the Persians is that we don't have a Persian Herodotus nor do we have indeed a Persian Isaiah. The Jews also write about the Persians and so our sense of the Persians has been mediated through the Bible and through the Greek historians.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we know a lot about Greece because Herodotus was Greek and he writes about the Persian wars and so inevitably we see the world through Greek eyes because Herodotus was Greek. However, one of the wonderful things about Herodotus, one of the many wonderful things is that he does try to see the world through Persian eyes. And so he tells a remarkable story that I just think is astonishing. So he imagines Darius the Great, who's the Persian king who sends the expedition to Marathon that gets defeated at Marathon. It's a great enemy of the Athenians. Herodotus imagines himself in Darius' high-heeled shoes, the high-heeled boots that the Persian kings are said to have worn. And Darius summons Greeks an Indian tribe. And these are the two people who exist on the western and eastern margins of his empire respectively. And he says to the Greeks, what would it take me to do? You know, what would I have to pay you to persuade you to eat your parents once they've died? And the Greeks...”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“it is that we can know everything that we do and that we have access to all the sources of information that we have. And it's a wonderful, wonderful thing, an incredible privilege of being alive in 2023.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the first person to be doing this? He was the first person to be pursuing the infinite curiosity he felt about the vast expanse of everything to its absolute limits, and so of course he got things wrong. You know, we would. He didn't have the internet. He didn't have an example of Herodotus. Herodotus didn't exist. There was no Herodotus before Herodotus. He's doing it for the first time. But I think that the sense of curiosity that the modern world is all about, we have access to more knowledge than is beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations and we can follow it wherever we want. And Herodotus for me stands at the head of that tradition, the head of that fascination with the fastness, the infinitude of the world and the universe that we inhabit. I look at modernity and Herodotus sharpens for me a sense of how extraordinary and one”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He says that this is his aim, but he's not exclusively writing about the past. He's writing about wild animals. He's writing about rivers. He's writing about wonders in different lands. He's writing about how Egyptian men squat to go to the toilet and Egyptian women stand up and how Scythians get stoned on bongs and all kinds of extraordinary mad, weird, fascinating stuff. And he was called in antiquity the father of lies because there were lots of people who felt that he was just making it all up. I think that's incredibly harsh. Often many of the things that he was doubted for, he's been vindicated. And I think what I found, I was translating Herodotus and I was able to use the internet as I was doing it if there were kind of subjects, you know, a name or something, I wouldn't have to go to a book to look it up. I could look it up online. And I realized it brought home to me how arrogant it is for us to sit in judgment on him.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it wasn't one page a day, so the books of Herodotus, there are nine books, and each book is divided up into chapters, and this happened in antiquity. And so I would set myself the challenge of translating one of those kind of chunks every day, because otherwise I don't think I would ever have finished it. What I learnt about modernity from Herodotus is that I think the quality about Herodotus that I have always loved, he's always been my favourite writer, not just my favorite ancient writer, but my favorite writer. It was the first classic writer I read. I've reread him. I've kind of reinterpreted him. I've translated him. And I realize as I was writing it, what I loved was the infinite curiosity that he has about everything. His writings are called hysteria, which in Greek basically means researches, inquiries. It doesn't mean history in the sense that we have. And he's not just writing about the...”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Malign demiurge, but are created by God and therefore are good. I find that a much more positive message than the kind of Gnosticism that I found so appealing when I was 21 and much in the throes of love, which may have confused and blurred my thought patterns.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I remember going to San Francisco. She wasn't my wife then. She became my wife. She got a one-year place at Stanford. And I was very, very upset about this that she'd gone. And so I went out and it was my first time to America, went to San Francisco. I'm so excited to go to San Francisco because for me it was kind of a city of flower power and hippies and everything. And so I went to Haight Ashbury and just kind of went toward all the hippie bookshops and got a whole load of books on the Gnostics there. and kind of read them up and I was very into all that kind of stuff but I now absolutely repudiate that. I don't think that the Gnostics somehow were hippies, were in any way progressive. I think that they were kind of deep, dark, pessimists. And what I like in Christianity actually is the message of hope that it offers, the message of salvation, and the message that matter is not evil, that our human bodies and the world around us are not creations of some”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The big dig and a big dig, I would guess, is much easier to do in a kind of, you know, I don't know, Vegas or Houston than in Boston, because Boston is just a very old city in exactly the way that Manchester is in Britain or Lyon or somewhere. I mean, they're not quite as old as Lyon, but it is always easier to develop technology, I think, in areas where you don't have stuff already there. And that's one of the reasons why over the course of the 19th century, you know, the industrial lead moves from Britain to America and to Germany. Doubtless all kinds of sociological reasons that I'm not qualified to opine about. But one of the reasons must be that Britain enters the industrial revolution first. And so it's industrial infrastructure by definition is older than that that comes to be developed by the Americans or say the Germans.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. But one of the things that always strikes me when I go to New York is actually it's an old city in Europe. We're accustomed to thinking of America as, you know, modern and new, but New York is not a modern city. Boston, not modern cities. I remember going to Boston, I'd go for maybe over 10 years. And every time I'd go, there'd be this massive great hole in the middle of Boston. And they were kind of trying, I think, trying to develop a subway system. Every time I go, it got bigger.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. I think there are generally religious reasons for almost everything in America. But I suspect that it's more to do with the fact that it is easy to bring home improvements into a house that's just been built than it is to do home improvements in a house that's 500 years old. European states, if you imagine them as kind of houses, they're very old. They have all kinds of dodgy wiring, bodge jobs. And everyone knows that the worst kind of DIY is when you yourself have bodged it over many, many years. It makes it much harder to do. It's much easier just to kind of rip everything out and put it back in again. And I think that that is the kind of attitude that people in America tend to have. I mean, I don't know. I have no stats on this, but I would guess that it would be easier to import wholesale technology into a house on the outskirts of Houston than it would be in downtown Manhattan.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Claims sure Sure. I mean, if you want to go that productive, then Moses clearly almost certainly didn't exist. I mean, he seems the most ahistorical figure. But the claim is, and it's clearly believed by the people who are writing these texts or constructing them or stitching them together to form what today we think of as those books. For them, this is something awesome and holy. As the Quran is for Muslims, it's something that you approach with extreme care, extreme nervousness to tamper with the word of God is to tamper with God and you don't want to do that because the Bible is full of examples of what happens to people who do that. In a way, it's the kind of, it's the molten heart of what Christians call the Old Testament. It's literally the Word of God.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think this reflects the way in which what we call today the Bible, it's an accretion of texts. There often seem to be two versions of stories stitched together. There are two versions of the creation of mankind, for instance. Very obviously, you know, you have the book of Kings and you have the Book of Chronicles. They're essentially telling the same stories and kind of duplicating each other. And I think that the construction of what comes to be called the Pentateuke, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, because they're so foundational, because they're so kind of important doctrinely to a sense of Jews and Christian sense of themselves, they were the most rewritten and the most contested. And the idea that you get in the Quran very obviously, that this is literally the Word of God. It's not being mediated by humans. With the Ten Commandments, you get that as well. This isn't being mediated by Isaiah or St. Matthew.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the truth is, I have no idea. I don't know. I've often kind of worried about it. You mentioned Byron at the beginning of the show, and Byron wrote a play called Kane, and Cain, of course, is the first eldest son, and he kills his younger brother, and the mark of Cain is laid upon him, and he becomes a great wanderer, and in Byron's play, Cain becomes the representative of a free thinker, someone who dares to defy the tyrannical almighty, and Satan who appears to him is very much in the tradition of Milton Satan, as understood by the romantic poets, Satan is someone who is saying that actually knowledge is found by defying God. And I think because I was the eldest son, that's another reason why I found Byron's poetry when I was, you know, in my teens, so powerful and so effective. And it's part of what led me away from kind of Christian belief really, a kind of feeling that all the cool kids were hanging out with Cain and especially all the cool elder sons.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My brother is younger, and it's a question on which I've often pondered since I was going to church. And what do you expect from”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the spirit, blowing in the wind, as it were, animates not just the civil rights movement but all kinds of other movements as well. So in due course, movements that may seem very opposed to doctrinal Christianity, feminism, gay rights, and so on. So I think that the civil rights movement is incomprehensible without that heritage. It's absolutely animated by it.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the fifties and the sixties, when there are campaigns starting to develop calling for civil rights, calling for the rejection of repressive laws in the South, this inheritance is an obvious one to draw on, and that's why Martin Luther King is such a potent spokesman for it, because when he tells white American Christians that Black American Christians are their brothers and sisters, he is going with the grain of everything that American Protestantism, radical Protestantism, has been about since the very beginning. And he can articulate the power of the Exodus story and the power of Scripture as mediated by people upon whom the Spirit has descended, and he can do so in a way that reverberates beyond the Black Churches into the white churches and secularized throughout the sixties, it's this great movement, I think, that”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of Protestants, and these are Protestants who often emigrate from England to the New World because their understanding of what the Bible teaches is seen as being too radical, too hot to handle back in England. And they bring with them this notion that the Bible can only be understood if mediated by the Spirit. So it's not what the Bible says in black and white. It's what the Spirit makes you understand. And it's this in due course that enables Quakers and evangelicals, for instance, to argue that slavery as an institution is evil, even though notoriously and nowhere in the Bible is that ever said. For evangelicals, for Quakers, for radical Protestants, that's an irrelevance. The spirit has descended on them and it has enabled them to understand that.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my feeling about this is that the civil rights movement is one of a succession of great awakenings in American Protestantism and indeed in Anglo-American Protestantism. So let that be my sanction for talking about this. This idea that reverberates throughout Anglo-American history that people need to be awakened to a sense of their sin and therefore to a sense of the potential for salvation. African Americans are the heirs of that as well. They inherit the Protestantism and often the evangelical Protestantism of the white Americans. And the figure of Martin Luther King is emblematic of that. He is the Reverend Martin Luther King. He is absolutely situated in the tradition of radical Protestantism, which the Baptists are kind of, you know, he's a Baptist minister. He is heir to these traditions that go back to the 17th century and the 16th century and perspectives that are often incredibly radical. And the more radical phrase...”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I hesitate as an Englishman to kind of in any way pontificate about American history, but with that caveat, I will rush in.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the great centres of the cult of Augustus, and so I think that when Paul is writing to the Galatians, he is very, very conscious that the God that he is talking about exists in the context of a world in which the fastest growing cult is the cult of Caesar.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Given a coin and he says, Whose head is on this? And the people who are talking to him say the head of Caesar and Jesus famously says, we'll render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and render unto God what is God's. That is, again, another of these depth charges, another of these acorns from which mighty oaks will grow, because it's there that you get the idea actually in the long run of there being kind of something that is secular. Jesus, I think, is all about separating the divine from the earthly. And that is an incredibly potent insight and it's one that is as hostile to the claims of Caesar as to the claims of the temple authorities. And I think Paul is completely the heir of that. And I think Paul understands that. And there's a huge sense in which his letters, his understanding of Jesus, the way that he portrays that, serves as a kind of parody of the cult of Augustus. So I mentioned the letter to the Galatians. Galatia is one of the...”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the Raymond's also, it's often cast a day that the Jews are religious and by Jesus going before Pontius Pilate is somehow being handed over to the secular authorities. But the Romans are no less secular than the Judean authorities. The Romans too are absolutely implicated in a sense that their power is interfused with an understanding of the divine. Pontius Pilate's main base is in the city of Caesarea, which is named after Caesar Augustus, and Augustus is a god. The Romans also, like the Jews, have a great temple in their city, the Capitoline Temple, the Temple of the Capitoline Jupiter, which Ironically will be incinerated a few months before the Jerusalem Temple is incinerated by the Romans in AD 70. And I think that Jesus in that kind of incredibly potent episode where people come up to him and they say, should we be paying taxes to the Romans? And Jesus asks for a coin.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that Jesus is very radically anti state, and by state I mean specifically the notion that both in Jerusalem and in Rome power is interfused with those who claim a mandate to interpret the divine. This is clearly the case in the Jerusalem Temple. The gospel writers, and we don't know the sayings of Jesus are mediated through the gospel writers and the degree to which they correspond to what a historical Jesus might have said is obviously hugely contested. But insofar as we have a record of what the historical Jesus might have said in the Gospels, he seems hostile to the Jerusalem temple authorities. And I think that what he is hostile to is summed up in that the attack on the money changers and the idea that in some way what is God's can be implicated in the churn of the earthly. And I think he also feels that about Rome.”
2023-03-22 · Conversations with Tyler · Tom Holland on History, Christianity, and the Value of the Countryside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source