“The people who [killed] Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore - on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations [for us] to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him w/ an atmosphere of tedium [and boredom]. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild”, and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. To those who knew him, however, he in no way suggests a milk-and-water person; they objected to him as a dangerous firebrand. True, he was tender to the unfortunate, patient w/ the honest inquirers, and humble before heaven; but he insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites. He referred to King Herod as “that fox”; he went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a “gluttonous man and a [drunkard], a friend of publicans and sinners”; he assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the temple; he drove a coach-and-horses through a number of [“sacred”] and [“holy”] regulations; he cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people’s pigs and property; he showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he [replied] by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had a “daily beauty in his life that made us ugly”, and [the leaders of the day] felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So, they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness.”

— Dorothy Sayers, The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, p4-5