Paula Fredriksen is the Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She has published widely on Jewish-pagan-Christian relations in antiquity, concentrating in particular on the historical Jesus (From Jesus to Christ ,1988; 2000; and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, which won the 1999 Jewish National Book Award); on Augustine (Augustine on Romans ,1986; and Augustine and the Jews, 2010); and most recently, interpreting him entirely within his native Judaism, a study of the apostle Paul (Paul, the Pagans’ Apostle, 2017). She is currently completing a book on the first generation of the Christian movement, entitled, When Christians Were Jews.
Bible & Archaeology Fest XX, November 17 – 19, 2017 (Q&A panelist)
How Jewish is God? Divine Ethnicity and Paul’s Theology
In the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, gods often shared in the ethnicities of the peoples who worshiped them. In this regard, the Jewish god was no exception. What was odd, however, was his people’s insistence that their god also represented the ultimate religious destiny of all humanity. This lecture explores the ways that the apostle Paul pursued his cross-ethnic outreach to non-Jews (“gentiles”), to induce them to make an exclusive commitment to the god of Israel.