There are episodes in history that never quite end. One occurred around the Mediterranean in the middle of the first century CE, when the first followers of Jesus emerged from Judea with a powerful story about their charismatic teacher, his execution by Roman authorities in Jerusalem, and his resurrection.
Members of this small group of Jews believed they held the key to understanding God’s plan and that they must spread the news fast because time itself was about to end. Their ideas and furious arguments, conducted in person and in letters that crisscrossed the Roman world, continue to shape our own.
It’s impossible to understand our era—not just religious life but the content of TikTok and YouTube, the speeches at a memorial for Charlie Kirk, a campus protest against Israel—without understanding this small number of people struggling through a few decades of turmoil 2,000 years ago.
Paula Fredriksen splits her time between the first and 21st centuries. Few scholars have more sharply or accessibly described the electric moment of the birth of what became Christianity, and the pained and incomplete process by which believers left Judaism behind. In books such as When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation; Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle; and Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years, and in scholarly work at Boston University and Hebrew University, Fredriksen sketches a startling portrait of this moment of spiritual eruption. Her readers find themselves in Jerusalem; Antioch, Turkey; or Damascus, Syria, as this new community burns with urgent faith, “racing on the edge of the end of time.”
Fredriksen, 74, was born in Rhode Island. Today she lives in Jerusalem, where I met her with the hope of better understanding the era that she studies and the one we all live in now. We sat in her quiet living room, that’s just a 20-minute drive from Golgotha.
Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
