Professor Paula Fredriksen | The Gifford Lectures: Lecture Two - Israel Abroad: Jews among the Gods

Prof. Paula Fredriksen delivers the 2026 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: The Conversions of Christianty. This is the second lecture, titled: Israel Abroad: Jews among the Gods

This second lecture establishes the social, thus religious context for the development of early Christianity, namely, Graeco-Roman Judaism. How did Jews fit themselves into the world after Alexander? This lecture will examine Jewish heterogeneity, the vigorously various expressions of ancient Jewishness that prevailed both in the homeland and in the Greek-speaking Diaspora. We will see how pagan culture accommodated Jewish difference, and how different Jews accommodated themselves to pagan culture. We will consider the many gods of ancient Jewish “monotheism.” We will see how pagans and Jews shared common ideas about ethnicity and what it meant to be a people. We will find Jews in pagan places, especially in that great pagan religious institution, the ancient city; and we will find pagans in Jewish places – in the temple in Jerusalem, and especially in synagogue assemblies throughout the empire. And, finally, we will see how Jewish traditions expressed in Greek enabled the dissemination of religious ideas not only to widely dispersed Jewish populations, but also to interested pagans. Graeco-Roman Judaism laid the groundwork for the spread of Christianity.

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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