Professor Paula Fredriksen | The Gifford Lectures: Lecture Six - The Conversions of Christianity

Prof. Paula Fredriksen delivers the 2026 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: The Conversions of Christianty. This is the sixth and final lecture, titled: Israel Abroad: The Conversions of Christianity.

This lecture briefly sums up the main themes of the previous ones, while laying out the ways that the fourth century’s progressive Christianization of government and the institutionalization of the church affected the concepts of God, “man,” and the universe. We will consider seven inflection points on the historical arc of these developments, spanning from the second century BCE to the late fourth century CE. We will see how the Christianization of God led to new ways of conceptualizing ancient “monotheism”; how the Christianization of “man” framed new ideals of human achievement; and how the Christianization of the universe sponsored new ways of imagining time and its relation to creation. Yet these novelties were framed by two ancient concepts that well predate the Christian era: the idea that conditions on earth were contingent upon relations with heaven, and the idea that gods and humans formed family groups. These two core convictions undergird the conversions 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