“The refusal of Christians to identify themselves as belonging to one of the familiar peoples of the earth—the Romans, or the Greeks, or the Jews—branded them as rootless.... And yet, for all that, Christians did believe they belonged to a common ethnos: a people.... Never before had there been anything quite like it: a citizenship that was owed not to birth, nor to descent, nor to legal prescriptions, but to belief alone.”
— Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, pp.116-17