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. A recording of Lecture One - A World Full of Gods This article was published on Thursday 13 August 2026
