In The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 bestseller by adman Bruce Barton, himself the son of a Methodist preacher, Jesus Christ is depicted, not ironically but with earnest reverence, as an early advertising man and small-business owner, managing his team of disciples who “mastered public attention” and came up with winning slogans such as “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Barton reached even deeper when he wrote that “advertising” was a force “as old as the world…‘Let there be light’ constitutes its charter.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 249