  Judah seeks to accomplish at least two things with passages such as this. First, he claims, polemically, that the Jewish tradition, especially its mythopoeic tradition, is the source of all subsequent literary and philosophical streams of western civilization.  Secondly (and this is less evident in the above passage than in other ones), he tries to wrest Christian-centric interpretations of biblical passages (e.g., the Garden of Eden and the concept of original sin), including those offered by thinkers such as Ficino and Pico della  Mirandola,[18]  away  from what he considers to be the original intentionality of the text. Rather, he claims that the Jewish version or interpretation of such texts is actually more in keeping with the spirit of the Renaissance than those offered by Christians. The corollary of this is that any individual, Jewish or Gentile, should quite easily be able to accept equally the truths of Judaism and those of  philosophy.[19]