Faith & Spirit Quote by Peter Jennings

A journalist’s double-take can sometimes do more than a theologian’s treatise. Jennings isn’t marveling at doctrine; he’s marveling at the sheer political physics of history: a condemned dissident becomes, three centuries later, the symbolic engine of an empire. The phrasing "utterly struck" signals an on-air kind of astonishment, the sound of a modern secular observer running into an ancient scale of time. It’s not piety. It’s whiplash.

The subtext is about institutional absorption. Rome didn’t just tolerate Christianity; it nationalized it, turning a persecuted movement into administrative glue. Jennings’ timeline - "300 years after his execution" - compresses martyrdom and bureaucracy into one stunned sentence, inviting the reader to feel the improbable leap from state violence to state endorsement. It’s a reminder that empires don’t only crush ideas; they also adopt and domesticate them when useful, wrapping radical origins in official ritual.

Context matters: as a late-20th-century broadcast journalist, Jennings is speaking from a culture that treats religion as a category of belief, not an instrument of governance. His surprise is partly a mirror held up to the present: we underestimate how quickly narratives can be repurposed once power decides they’re valuable. The line works because it’s less a history fact than a diagnosis of how legitimacy is manufactured - by taking yesterday’s executed outsider and making him the empire’s most effective brand.