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Late 1966. “It took Hopkins a while to adjust to the idea of a Vaishnava temple replete with a printing operation in the middle of the Lower East Side of New York City. “It’s an astonishing story,” he reflected. “If someone told you a story like this, you wouldn’t believe it. Here’s this person, seventy years old, coming to a country where he’s never been before. He doesn’t know anybody, he has no money, no contacts, none of the things you would say make for success. He’s going to recruit people not on any systematic basis but just picking up whomever he comes across—and he’s going to give them responsibility for organizing a worldwide movement? You’d say, ‘What kind of program is that?’ There are precedents perhaps. Jesus of Nazareth went around saying, ‘Come follow me. Drop your nets, leave your tax collecting, and be my disciple.’ But in Jesus’s case, he wasn’t an old man in a strange society dealing with people whose backgrounds were totally different from his own. He was dealing with his own community. Bhaktivedanta Swami’s achievement, then, must be seen as unique.”
From the book Swami In A Strange Land: How Krishna Came To The West