Professor Paula Fredriksen | The Gifford Lectures - Lecture One: A World Full of Gods

Prof. Paula Fredriksen delivers the 2026 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: The Conversions of Christianity. This is the first lecture, titled: A World Full of Gods.

This first lecture establishes the broad lines of ancient Mediterranean constructions of God, humanity, and the universe, which will set the framework for our exploration of the birth and evolution of the very various forms of ancient Christianities. We will begin by locating ourselves in time, place, and space: time, the period between Alexander the Great (d. 323 BCE) and the fifth-century late Roman Empire; place, the world of the ancient Mediterranean, especially its cities; space, the geocentric universe of antiquity, whose very structure expressed ideas about the divine. We will examine the interactions of the two principle populations of ancient empire: gods and humans. We will see how gods and humans were imagined as forming family groups, linked by cosmic kinship, which anchored the ancestral customs specific to each ethnicity. And we will see how ethnic heterogeneity, the hallmark of empire, sponsored a widespread and long-lived practical religious pluralism.

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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

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