Paula Fredriksen – författare

How, over the course of five centuries, one particular god and one particular Christianity came to dominate late Roman imperial politics and piety The ancient Mediterranean teemed with gods. For centuries, a practical religious pluralism prevailed. How, then, did one particular god come to dominate the politics and piety of the late Roman Empire? In Ancient Christianities, Paula Fredriksen traces the evolution of early Christianity—or rather, of early Christianities—through five centuries of Empire, mapping its pathways from the hills of Judea to the halls of Rome and Constantinople. It is a story with a sprawling cast of characters: not only theologians, bishops, and emperors, but also gods and demons, angels and magicians, astrologers and ascetics, saints and heretics, aristocratic patrons and millenarian enthusiasts. All played their part in the development of what became and remains an energetically diverse biblical religion.The New Testament, as we know it, represents only a small selection of the many gospels, letters, acts of apostles, and revelations that circulated before the establishment of the imperial church. It tells how the gospel passed from Jesus, to the apostles, thence to Paul. But by using our peripheral vision, by looking to noncanonical and paracanonical texts, by availing ourselves of information derived from papyri, inscriptions, and archaeology, we can see a different, richer, much less linear story emerging. Fredriksen brings together these many sources to reconstruct the lively interactions of pagans, Jews, and Christians, tracing the conversions of Christianity from an energetic form of Jewish messianism to an arm of the late Roman state.

Why the meaning of sin changed radically during the first centuries of ChristianityAncient Christians invoked sin to account for an astonishing range of things, from the death of God''s son to the politics of the Roman Empire that worshipped him. In this book, award-winning historian of religion Paula Fredriksen tells the surprising story of early Christian concepts of sin, exploring the ways that sin came to shape ideas about God no less than about humanity.Long before Christianity, of course, cultures had articulated the idea that human wrongdoing violated relations with the divine. But Sin tells how, in the fevered atmosphere of the four centuries between Jesus and Augustine, singular new Christian ideas about sin emerged in rapid and vigorous variety, including the momentous shift from the belief that sin is something one does to something that one is born into. As the original defining circumstances of their movement quickly collapsed, early Christians were left to debate the causes, manifestations, and remedies of sin. This is a powerful and original account of the early history of an idea that has centrally shaped Christianity and left a deep impression on the secular world as well.

A collaborative project, this work introduces a burgeoning new approach to the study of Paul, which contextualizes the pagans' apostle within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean religion (so-called "paganism"). The anthology assembles cutting-edge essays from both senior and rising scholars, whose contributions collectively demonstrate how Paul's Jewish religious program is native to the ancient Mediterranean. While providing a go-to introductory resource for teachers and scholars of biblical studies, the essays are pitched to be accessible for students (both liberal arts and divinity), in order to invite seminarians and church groups to think in religious-studies ways about Paul's letters.?

This volume explores in particular how Paul positively avails himself of ideas and activities constitutive of his own time and place, such as divination, deification, magic, idols, and a host of other social practices traditionally attributed to pagans and so emphatically denied of Jews and Christians. At the same time, it interrogates how features of Paul's letters traditionally categorized as exclusively Jewish--such as his use of scripture, his claims about faith, his ideas about law, and his focus on foreskin--are themselves evidence of Paul's participation in wider Mediterranean ways of promoting engagement with the numinous. Paul operated "within paganism" even at his supposedly "most Jewish" points.?

Just as the "Paul within Judaism" movement emphasizes Judaism not primarily as the contrast to but rather as the context for and content of Paul's gospel, Paul within Paganism does the same for Paul in relation to wider Greco-Roman culture. Paul and his Judaism emerge here as instances of, not exceptions to, ancient Mediterranean religion.?