6/21/2026
“Paula Fredriksen Interview” Short about Paul. Transcribed by TurboScribe from https://youtu.be/tYcifm-ATGA?si=OtadFRdlAliD5oet, YouTube date: Aug 14, 2012.
We think of Paul as a Christian because we’re standing on top of 20 centuries of the development of Christianity. But if we’re interested as historians in how Paul looked at himself, it’s clear from his own letters that he divides the world roughly into two groups, Israel and everyone else, also called the nations. Our word “conversion”, which is how we habitually think of Paul – Paul the convert I think – is part of our problem when we try to imagine how the ancient people looked at their own lives.
Paul isn’t converting from Judaism to something else. He’s joining a Jewish group within Judaism, but he’s not exiting Judaism because of that. And certainly by speaking to Gentiles, he’s not doing anything that’s novel within Judaism.
The old perspective on Paul is that he became a Christian and that meant something other than being Jewish. It’s captured very nicely in a children’s Christian cartoon I once saw, where Paul is going on the road to Damascus and he has the Jewish male head covering, the kippah, on his head. He gets knocked to his feet, the shining light is on him, Jesus speaks to him, and for the rest of the cartoon he doesn’t have a kippah on anymore.
Finished, he’s Christian. Christianity is so easily imagined as somehow the opposite of Judaism because that’s how Christianity has presented Judaism to itself in the centuries long after Paul. In Paul’s lifetime, Christianity is only understandable as an extreme form of Judaism and Paul himself thinks of himself as a Jew.
What’s really enabled us to stop being cheated of an historically adequate image of Paul is all the work that’s been done in the past half century with Paul’s context, Judaism, and seeing Paul in his Jewish context is what’s enabled historians to understand how this man can be a passionately committed Jew and at the same time be a passionately committed apostle for the message of redemption and Jesus Christ without being confused about the prospect.
Paula Fredriksen – The Paul Puzzle Insight with David Hulme. More of the same interview above.
The extracts below are from the transcription by TurboScribe from https://youtu.be/YOQx4-rU8UM?si=LoRk-4679u0ufXXA
People who loom large in history are very easy to misinterpret precisely because they’re so important culturally. So this is how very naturally Paul can seem to be a Protestant. He doesn’t like all that messy ritual.
This is what Luther thought. He didn’t like the kind of incipient Roman Catholicism of Jewish practice. Seeing Paul in his Jewish context is what’s enabled historians to understand how this man can be a passionately committed Jew and at the same time be a passionately committed apostle for the message of redemption and Jesus Christ without being confused about the prospect. What he’s doing is precisely a radical form of Judaism.
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Under Constantine, what we have is the conversion of Christianity. Christianity under Constantine becomes a form of imperial Roman culture. One Christian denomination is favored with his patronage. They get tax breaks. They get big, beautiful Bible codices copied at public expense. They can use the postal system for free.
They ask Constantine to kick out the other leaders of the other Christian denominations. More Christians are persecuted after the conversion of Constantine than before, precisely because they’re targeted by one particular branch of the church. The type of Christianity that Constantine is patronizing is very different from the type of Christianity that Paul is enunciating.
For one thing, when Eusebius, the official biographer of Constantine, writes about Constantine, he sees the foundation of the Christian Roman Empire as Isaiah’s peace, the messianic peace promised in what is then the Old Testament. When Paul’s thinking about the kingdom of God, he’s certainly not thinking of the Roman emperor as its agent.
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If we think of Paul as an Orthodox Christian, we will only misinterpret him that much more. He’s living in a period where he’s not thinking in a Trinitarian manner. The idea of the Trinity hasn’t been conceived yet.
His letters will have Jesus Christ in them. They will have the God of Israel, God the Father, in them. He will talk about the Spirit of God, and those are the textual origins that will be used to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity. But Paul’s not thinking in a Trinitarian way.
People reading Paul assume that he’s hostile to Judaism because he’s the inventor of Christianity. He’s still imagining himself as Jewish, and he’s presenting Christianity in continuity with Judaism.
