Fredriksen, Paula

Paula Fredriksen (born January 6, 1951, Kingston, Rhode Island) is an American historian and scholar of early Christianity. She held the position of William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University from 1990 to 2010. Now emerita, she has been distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since 2009. Fredriksen specializes in the history of Christianity in that developmental arc from its stirrings in an apocalyptic messianic sect within Second Temple Judaism to its transformation into an arm of Late Roman imperial government and its empowerment in the post-Roman West (1st through 7th centuries). She works to reconstruct the many ways that various ancient Mediterranean peoples – pagans, Jews and Christians – interacted with the many special social agents (e.g. high gods, apocalyptic forces, heavenly bodies, godlings, spirits, and divine humans) that populated both the ancient flat-disced Earth and geo-centric universe. Fredriksen served as an historical consultant and featured speaker in many media, including for the BBC production The Lives of Jesus (1996) and for U.S. News & World Report's "The Life and Times of Jesus". Fredriksen's book From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the Early Images of Jesus served as a template for the Frontline documentary From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians. Fredriksen was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. She is a former Catholic who converted to Judaism.