Older Than the Cross: Notes on Tom Holland’s Dominion

Historian Tom Holland

Long before Mary, there was Danaë.

In the Greek myth, Zeus comes down from Olympus to a mortal woman locked in a bronze chamber, as a shower of gold, and she bears him a son, the hero Perseus. Zeus did this sort of thing a lot. He came to Europa as a white bull and to Leda as a swan. The Greeks had a whole category for the children of these unions: demigods, half divine and half human.

So the idea of a god fathering a son with a mortal woman was very old by the time the Gospels were written. So were sacrifice, ritual washing, and a king who sees everything.

That observation is where my notes on Tom Holland’s book Dominion begin. I call it older than the cross: much of what we think of as distinctly Christian was already old when Christianity arrived. This page is about what that means, what Holland argues was actually new, and why I think a person can let go of literal Christianity without letting go of what it gave us.

What Holland argues

Tom Holland is a British historian who made his name writing about ancient Greece, Persia and Rome. In Dominion (2019; in the US, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World), he sets out to show how deeply Christianity shaped the Western mind, including the minds of people who think they’ve left it behind.

His argument, roughly, is this. The ancient world honored strength. Crucifixion was a punishment designed to humiliate, reserved for slaves and rebels, and nobody in Rome would have thought a crucified man could be a god. Christianity took that most shameful death and put it at the center of its worship. Over centuries, that reversal changed what Westerners came to see as obvious: that the weak have dignity, that the victim deserves sympathy, that every person has worth. Holland argues that even modern secular values, like human rights, carry that Christian inheritance.

Older than the cross

Reading Dominion, I kept a list of the things that existed before Christianity. Here it is.

  • Sacrifice. Nearly every ancient society practiced it. The temple in Jerusalem was a place of animal sacrifice long before Jesus.
  • An all-seeing king. The idea of a ruler who sees and knows everything existed in the empires of the ancient world before the omnipresent God of Christianity.
  • Crucifixion. It was a torturous, demoralizing form of capital punishment long before it became an icon of faith.
  • Baptism. Ritual washing and immersion were practiced before Christianity. In the Gospels, John is already baptizing when Jesus comes to him.
  • Light and darkness. The idea of a cosmic struggle between light and darkness, order and chaos, was already ancient, a way of grappling with eternity and what happens after death.
  • A divine father and a mortal mother. Danaë, Europa, Leda. Zeus fathered demigods long before Christians spoke of the Son of God.

None of this is a secret. Scholars of religion have written about these parallels for well over a century.

The Latter-day Saint answer

Latter-day Saints have a ready reply, and it’s an interesting one. In our scriptures, the gospel wasn’t invented in the first century. It was on the earth from the beginning. The Book of Moses describes Adam himself being baptized: he “was carried down into the water, and was laid under the water, and was brought forth out of the water” (Moses 6:64). On that view, pagan sacrifice and pagan washings are echoes, corrupted copies of a true gospel that came first.

I want to give that answer its due. It’s internally consistent, and it’s more thoughtful than simply denying the parallels.

But it depends on an Adam who really lived and really taught, and I read Adam as a figure of myth rather than history (see Historicity). Without him, the simpler explanation is the one historians give: people build new religions out of the materials they already have. Christianity grew up in a world full of sacrifice, purification rituals, sons of gods and all-seeing kings, and it used them.

What was new

This is where Holland’s book earns its place on my shelf. Admitting that the parts were old doesn’t mean nothing new was built with them.

Holland’s answer to “what was new?” is the cross itself. A god with a mortal son was old. A god who died the death of a slave was not. In his telling, Christianity took old materials and arranged them into something that turned the ancient world’s values upside down, and whether or not you believe the supernatural claims, that reversal happened and the West still lives inside it.

That matters to me personally. I was raised in a Christian tradition. I’ve concluded that literal Christianity is not tenable. But I don’t think that means throwing out what it taught me. We outgrow our belief in Santa Claus, but not necessarily the principle of him: generosity, surprise, the joy of giving to a child. In the same way, I can stop believing in a literal Eden and a literal resurrection and still value humility, forgiveness, and care for the weak.

I’ll admit an open question here. Holland suggests that even secular people in the West are more Christian than they realize. Is he right? It’s a question I’m still turning over, and I’d rather leave it as a question than pretend I’ve settled it.

Back to Danaë

So go back to Danaë in her bronze room, and the shower of gold.

The first time you notice how much the story of Mary echoes stories like hers, it can feel like a betrayal, as if someone had been passing off old goods as new. I don’t see it that way anymore. The echo doesn’t make the Christmas story worthless. It makes it human. It tells me that people across thousands of years have reached for the same images to say something about the divine meeting the ordinary.

That is roughly how I hold Christianity now: not as literal history, and not as a fraud, but as a human inheritance worth understanding. It still means a great deal to me, as I explain in my letter to family and friends. For more on how old stories carry meaning without being history, read Cosmic Revelations.