 Yet Strauss was not indifferent to the content of revelation and certainly not to the difference between Jewish and Christian notions of revelation. In fact, Strauss strongly criticizes what he regards as a particularly Christian view of revelation not in order to banish revelation from intellectual conversation once and for all but to suggest that modernity’s intellectual ills stem in large part from the legacy of Christian theology. In a 1952 letter to Gershom Scholem, Strauss rejects his early reading of Maimonides in Philosophy and Law as the “Jewish equivalence of Thomas Aquinas.”  Describing the development of his views on Maimonides, Strauss writes to Scholem that he has “moved, so to speak, contrary to G.’s [Guttmann’s] moderate rationalism…to ‘radical’ rationalism” (GS 3, 728).  Strikingly, it was on the basis of the Islamic, as opposed to the Christian, reception of classical political philosophy that Strauss turned to the possiblity of “radical rationalism” by reconsidering the meanings of philosophy, revelation, and politics.  Strauss’s very attempt to move beyond modern philosophy is predicated on a distinction between the Jewish and Islamic conception of revelation on the one hand, and the Christian conception, on the other hand: