2025/2026: Professor Paula Fredriksen - The Conversions of Christianity Register to attend (in person or online) In a world teeming with gods, how did one come to dominate an empire? Professor Paula Fredriksen Paula Fredriksen is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University. She is also Distinguished Visiting Professor emerita in the Department of Comparative Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2018.Educated at Wellesley College, Oxford University, and Princeton University, Fredriksen is a leading historian of ancient Christianity and the Roman world. Her work focuses on the social and intellectual history of early Christianity and on pagan–Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire.She is the author of influential books including From Jesus to Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (winner of the 1999 National Jewish Book Award), Augustine and the Jews, SIN: The Early History of an Idea, and Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, which won the 2018 Prose Award from the American Publishers’ Association. Her most recent book, When Christians Were Jews, places the Jesus movement within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean culture and power. 2026 Gifford Lecture: 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 reconceptualizations of the ideas of God, of “man,” and of the universe. Lecture abstractsMonday 4th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 1: A World Full of GodsThis 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.There will be an opening drinks reception to celebrate the opening lecture in the 2026 series from 7pm - 8pm. All attendees are welcome to join.Tuesday 5th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 2: Israel Abroad: Jews among the GodsThis 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.Thursday 7th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 3: From Jesus to ChristJesus 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.Monday 11th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 4: The End, and New BeginningsWe 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.Tuesday 12th May | 6pmRSE Gifford SeminarThis seminar takes place in-person at the RSE and involves an in-depth panel discussion on Professor Paula Fredriksen's 2026 Gifford Lecture series on The Conversions of Christianity.Further details on this seminar and how to book will follow shortly.Wednesday 13th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 5: When does Christianity become Christianity?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.Thursday 14th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 6: The Conversions of ChristianityThis 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.There will be a closing drinks reception following the final lecture in the 2026 series from 7pm - 8pm. All attendees are welcome to join.For any questions, please contact GiffordLectures@ed.ac.uk. Secure Your Spot May 04 2026 17.00 - May 14 2026 20.00 2025/2026: Professor Paula Fredriksen - The Conversions of Christianity The University of Edinburgh are delighted to host Professor Paula Fredriksen as our 2026 Gifford Lectures speaker. Join us this May as Professor Paula Fredriksen, one of the world’s leading historians of early Christianity, will explore how a small Jewish movement became a religion that reshaped the ancient world. Across six lectures, this series offers a rare opportunity to engage with big questions about belief, culture, and power in the ancient Mediterranean. Lectures will take place in person in Edinburgh and will also be available via live stream for those unable to attend. Attendance is free, but registration is required for both in-person and online access. Informatics Forum 10 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9AB Google Maps Secure your spot
2025/2026: Professor Paula Fredriksen - The Conversions of Christianity Register to attend (in person or online) In a world teeming with gods, how did one come to dominate an empire? Professor Paula Fredriksen Paula Fredriksen is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University. She is also Distinguished Visiting Professor emerita in the Department of Comparative Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2018.Educated at Wellesley College, Oxford University, and Princeton University, Fredriksen is a leading historian of ancient Christianity and the Roman world. Her work focuses on the social and intellectual history of early Christianity and on pagan–Jewish–Christian relations in the Roman Empire.She is the author of influential books including From Jesus to Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (winner of the 1999 National Jewish Book Award), Augustine and the Jews, SIN: The Early History of an Idea, and Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle, which won the 2018 Prose Award from the American Publishers’ Association. Her most recent book, When Christians Were Jews, places the Jesus movement within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean culture and power. 2026 Gifford Lecture: 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 reconceptualizations of the ideas of God, of “man,” and of the universe. Lecture abstractsMonday 4th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 1: A World Full of GodsThis 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.There will be an opening drinks reception to celebrate the opening lecture in the 2026 series from 7pm - 8pm. All attendees are welcome to join.Tuesday 5th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 2: Israel Abroad: Jews among the GodsThis 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.Thursday 7th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 3: From Jesus to ChristJesus 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.Monday 11th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 4: The End, and New BeginningsWe 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.Tuesday 12th May | 6pmRSE Gifford SeminarThis seminar takes place in-person at the RSE and involves an in-depth panel discussion on Professor Paula Fredriksen's 2026 Gifford Lecture series on The Conversions of Christianity.Further details on this seminar and how to book will follow shortly.Wednesday 13th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 5: When does Christianity become Christianity?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.Thursday 14th May | 5pm - 7pmLecture 6: The Conversions of ChristianityThis 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.There will be a closing drinks reception following the final lecture in the 2026 series from 7pm - 8pm. All attendees are welcome to join.For any questions, please contact GiffordLectures@ed.ac.uk. Secure Your Spot May 04 2026 17.00 - May 14 2026 20.00 2025/2026: Professor Paula Fredriksen - The Conversions of Christianity The University of Edinburgh are delighted to host Professor Paula Fredriksen as our 2026 Gifford Lectures speaker. Join us this May as Professor Paula Fredriksen, one of the world’s leading historians of early Christianity, will explore how a small Jewish movement became a religion that reshaped the ancient world. Across six lectures, this series offers a rare opportunity to engage with big questions about belief, culture, and power in the ancient Mediterranean. Lectures will take place in person in Edinburgh and will also be available via live stream for those unable to attend. Attendance is free, but registration is required for both in-person and online access. Informatics Forum 10 Crichton Street Edinburgh EH8 9AB Google Maps Secure your spot
May 04 2026 17.00 - May 14 2026 20.00 2025/2026: Professor Paula Fredriksen - The Conversions of Christianity The University of Edinburgh are delighted to host Professor Paula Fredriksen as our 2026 Gifford Lectures speaker. Join us this May as Professor Paula Fredriksen, one of the world’s leading historians of early Christianity, will explore how a small Jewish movement became a religion that reshaped the ancient world. Across six lectures, this series offers a rare opportunity to engage with big questions about belief, culture, and power in the ancient Mediterranean. Lectures will take place in person in Edinburgh and will also be available via live stream for those unable to attend. Attendance is free, but registration is required for both in-person and online access.
