2025 - 2026

The University of Edinburgh was delighted to host Professor Paula Fredriksen as the 2026 Gifford Lectures speaker.

In May 2026, Professor Paula Fredriksen, one of the world's leading historians of early Christianity, explored how a small Jewish movement became a religion that reshaped the ancient world. Across six lectures, the series offered a fascinating opportunity to engage with big questions about belief, culture and power in the ancient Mediterranean.

The lectures took place in person in Edinburgh and were also live streamed to audiences around the world.

Recordings of all six lectures are now available to watch online for anyone who was unable to attend or would like to revisit the series.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this panel discussion event, Professor Paula Fredriksen examines one of the most significant theological transformations in history.

This event is the annual RSE Gifford Seminar – a deep-dive, conversational event that explores central themes from Professor Fredriksen’s six-part lecture series at the University of Edinburgh.

In its earliest phases, the gospel’s message of impending redemption had been a species of late Second Temple Judaism. At what point do developing traditions about Christ emerge into new, separate movements? With the shift in ethnicities from Jewish to Gentile? With declarations of Jesus’s divinity? With the early second century creation of the term “Christian”? With developing hostility toward Jews and Judaism? With the involvement of formerly pagan intellectuals? With the pagan persecution of gentile Christians? This lecture will trace all these processes of individuation. By the fourth century, ideological individuation seems to have been reached, though at the level of social interaction between communities of pagans, Jews, and Christians, Mediterranean mixing long prevailed.