When Does Christianity Become Christianity?
In her fifth Gifford Lecture, Professor Paula Fredriksen investigates the critical inflection points at which early gospel traditions evolved into distinct Christian movements, addressing ethnicity, divinity, and developing theological distinctions.
Prof. Paula Fredriksen delivers the 2026 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled: The Conversions of Christianty. This is the fifth lecture, titled: Israel Abroad: 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.