Paula Fredriksen

Paula Fredriksen (born January 6, 1951, Kingston, Rhode Island)[1] is an American historian and scholar of early Christianity.

[3] Fredriksen specializes in the history of Christianity in that developmental arc from its stirrings in an apocalyptic messianic sect within Second Temple Judaism to its transformation into an arm of Late Roman imperial government and its empowerment in the post-Roman West (1st through 7th centuries).

She works to reconstruct the many ways that various ancient Mediterranean peoples – pagans, Jews and Christians – interacted with the many special social agents (e.g. high gods, apocalyptic forces, heavenly bodies, godlings, spirits, and divine humans) that populated both the ancient flat-disced Earth and geo-centric universe.

[2] Fredriksen was named distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2009.

[19] For the entire spread of these centuries, Fredriksen says, the vast majority of people worshiped their own particular gods—a great variety of cults and customs lumped together by scholarly convention as "paganism."

[22] Despite the many cultural and social differences distinguishing Jesus and Paul—language (Aramaic/Greek), location (Jewish territories and Jerusalem/Diaspora) and audiences (Jews/pagans)—these two men stood united in a single conviction.

Both taught that the God of Israel would overwhelm evil, raise the dead, and establish his reign of eternal peace and justice within their own lifetimes.

[28] But on what proved to be his final trip to the city for Passover, crowds of the pilgrim-swollen town began proclaiming Jesus as messiah.

"[26] Working in concert with the temple police (John 18.3), Pilate arrested Jesus and crucified him as "King of the Jews," disabusing the crowds of their enthusiasm.

[28] This theory explains as well why the original community could resettle permanently in Jerusalem, largely without incident, for the remaining four decades of the city's lifetime.

[31] Following especially the broad lines of interpretation laid down by Albert Schweitzer and by Krister Stendahl, Fredriksen asserts that Paul believed that he lived and worked in history's final hour.

[31] Some apostles taught that ex-pagan males needed to enter Israel's covenant with God through circumcision, that is, full conversion to Judaism.

Against his circumcising competitors, he argued that the presence of Christ's spirit or of the holy spirit within these gentile communities attested to their "adoption" into God's family: Christ-following ex-pagans, insists Paul, are now Israel's brothers" (adelphoi), adopted via Christ into the family of Abraham.

[31] In this way, Fredriksen shows, Paul's letters became a wellspring for nineteen centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitism.

It was these pagan superhuman powers, taught Paul, whom Christ would defeat when he returned in glory as God's Davidic champion.

"[39] Human moral agency, he now argued, was in a state of diminished capacity, which was the just penalty of Adam's sin, inherited across generations.

[46][47] Fredriksen also brought Augustine into conversation with other ancient theologians: with Tyconius (on Christian millenarianism);[48][49] with Origen (on Paul and Jewish Law; on sin and salvation);[50] and with Isidore of Seville (on Jews).

Dismally negative as his traditional anti-Jewish rhetoric was, his positive ideology, Fredriksen concludes, was original, daring, and unique.

Augustine's singular teaching would survive the collapse of the western Roman Empire, ultimately saving Jewish lives in the course of medieval crusades.

[63][64] In 2012, Fredriksen published Sin: The Early History of an Idea, which explored how views about humanity and about God changed in the centuries between John the Baptist and Augustine of Hippo.

[71][72][73] Christian antisemitism in both its academic forms and in its popular ones led to two of Fredriksen's anthologies, Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament After the Holocaust (with Adele Reinhartz; 2002)[74] and On ‘The Passion of the Christ’ (2004; 2005, on Mel Gibson's film),[60][61] as well as to her appreciation of David Nirenberg's foundational work on the same theme.

[75] Her 2020 Shaffer Lectures at Yale, "Paul's Letters, Christian Identity, and Thinking with Jews," explored the way that anti-Judaism, in various modalities, continues to inflect the work of contemporary scholars of New Testament Studies.