Professor Paula Fredriksen | The Gifford Lectures: Lecture Three - From Jesus to Christ

Prof. Paula Fredriksen delivers the 2026 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: The Conversions of Christianty. This is the third lecture, titled: Israel Abroad: From Jesus to Christ

Jesus left no writings. His native language was Aramaic. His ambit was the villages of Galilee and Judaea. His hearers were predominately fellow Jews. The core of his message was that the Kingdom of God was at hand. The earliest evidence we have from his mission and message, however, comes out of the western Diaspora, from the letters of the apostle Paul. Paul’s first language was Greek. His ambit was the great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor. His hearers were primarily Gentiles – which is to say, pagans. And a strong element of his teaching was the message that Jesus, as the Davidic messiah (Christos), was about to return to defeat pagan gods and to establish God’s kingdom. This lecture seeks to fill in the gap between Jesus’s mission and that of Paul by situating Paul’s letters and the material available in the gospels within the traditions of late Second Temple apocalyptic expectation. It is these traditions that explain why Jesus was crucified, but his followers were not; why the honorific “messiah” – Greek christos – attached to him so early; why his first followers experienced him as raised from the dead; why that community settled in Jerusalem so shortly after Jesus’s death; and why this very Jewish message – the coming resurrection of the dead and the impending establishment of God’s kingdom – so readily sponsored outreach to Gentiles.

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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