More popular than Jesus Cleave's article mentioned that Lennon was "reading extensively about religion", and quoted a comment he made: Cleave's interview with Lennon was published in the "Evening Standard" in March 1966 and provoked no public reaction in the UK. Church attendance there was in decline and the Christian churches were making no secret of the need to transform their image into something more relevant to modern times. Music historian Jonathan Gould wrote, "The satire comedians had had a field day with the increasingly desperate attempts of the Church to make itself seem more relevant ('Don't call me vicar, call me "Dick" ...')."
Jesus in the Talmud descriptions of Jesus in the Talmud, and which would become the basis of much anti-Semitic literature in later centuries such as "The Talmud Unmasked" written in 1892 by Justinas Bonaventure Pranaitis. Starting in the 20th century the topic of Jesus in Judaic literature became subject to more unbiased, scholarly research, such as "Das Leben Jesu nach jüdischen Quellen" written in 1902 by Samuel Krauss, which was the first scholarly analysis of the Judaic anti-Christian polemic "Toledot Yeshu" ("The Biography of Jesus"). In 1903, Unitarian scholar R. Travers Herford wrote "Christianity in Talmud and Midrash", which became the standard work on