For Christian missionaries who arrived through the ports of eastern states of India such as Calcutta in the 18th- and 19th-centuries, Jagannath was the core of idolatry and the target of an all-out attack. Jagannath, called Juggernaut by the Christian missionary Claudius Buchanan, was through Buchanan's letters the initial introduction in America of Hinduism, which he termed as Hindoo. According to Michael J. Altman, a professor of Religious Studies, Buchanan presented Hinduism to the American audience, through Juggernaut, as a bloody, violent, superstitious and backward religious system that needs to be eliminated and substituted with the Christian gospel. He described Juggernaut with Biblical terminology for his audience, called him the Moloch, and his shrine as Golgatha - the place where Jesus Christ was crucified, but with the difference that the Juggernaut tradition was of endless meaningless bloodshed, fabricating allegations that children were sacrificed in the valley of idolatrous blood shed to false gods. In his letters, states Altman, Buchanan constructed an image of Juggernaut as the diametric opposite of Christianity.