Professor Paula Fredriksen Lecture Five: When does Christianity become Christianity?

Prof. Paula Fredriksen delivers the 2026 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: The Conversions of Christianty. This is the fifth lecture, titled: Israel Abroad: When does Christianity become Christianity?

In its earliest phases, the gospel’s message of impending redemption had been a species of late Second Temple Judaism. At what point do developing traditions about Christ emerge into new, separate movements? With the shift in ethnicities from Jewish to Gentile? With declarations of Jesus’s divinity? With the early second century creation of the term “Christian”? With developing hostility toward Jews and Judaism? With the involvement of formerly pagan intellectuals? With the pagan persecution of gentile Christians? This lecture will trace all these processes of individuation. By the fourth century, ideological individuation seems to have been reached, though at the level of social interaction between communities of pagans, Jews, and Christians, Mediterranean mixing long prevailed.

***

The 2026 Gifford Lecture series, The Conversions of Christianity

In its earliest phases, the message of the impending Kingdom of God was a species of late Second Temple Judaism. How, in the course of very few generations, did it form into movements that were predominantly Gentile? How did the idea of “orthodoxy” emerge, and what were its ultimate political and social consequences? How, in a culture and a cosmos teeming with gods, did one god come to dominate the piety and politics of an empire? How did a tiny movement of radical Jewish messianism transmute, over the course of five centuries, into an arm of the late Roman state? How, in brief, are we to trace the conversions of Christianity? 

Professor Paula Fredriksen will do so by situating us in the world of the ancient Mediterranean: its urban cultures, its ethnic communities, its speculative sciences, its contesting philosophies. Her Lectures will see how prophetic forms of Jewish tradition interacted with and affected the lives of pagans as well as of Jews. We will investigate the ways that imperial government, both pre and post-Constantine, impacted various communities of pagans, Jews, and Christians.

And, finally, we will see how the conversions of Christianity led to reconceptualisations of the ideas of God, of “man,” and of the universe.

The prestigious Gifford Lectureships, held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, have been delivered annually since 1888 by a succession of distinguished international scholars. The Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God’, and have enabled a most notable field of scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological thought.

Read more about the Gifford Lectures: https://cahss.ed.ac.uk/news-events/lectures/gifford-lectures