Professor Paula Fredriksen | The Gifford Lectures: Lecture Four - The End, and New Beginnings

Prof. Paula Fredriksen delivers the 2026 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: The Conversions of Christianty. This is the fourth lecture, titled: Israel Abroad: The End, and New Beginnings.

We are back in the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora, with the apostle Paul. And we are back in the world of Jewish apocalyptic traditions, which problematized the normal paganism of Gentiles. What place for non-Jews in God’s kingdom did such traditions hold? We will see how Paul’s message was shaped by the conventions of ancient ethnography, which held that different ethnic groups were as they were “by nature” (Paul’s phrasing). We will see how Paul envisaged pagans becoming ex-pagans by altering their nature (physis) through the infusion of Christ’s spirit (pneuma), in preparation for final redemption. We will see how and why such a mission to Gentiles to turn them to Israel’s god was an improvised response to the experience of the risen Christ. And we will explore the various responses that developing Christianities had to the delay of the Kingdom’s coming.

***

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