I don't like when all non-Jews and non-Christians are put in one category: Pagan There were a lot of different religions within the Roman Empire, from Celtic rites in Gaul, the Germanic believes within and immediately outside of Roman borders, Dacic/Thracian believes - including their non-traditional reformed cults like Zalmoxis, than the many Greek philosophic schools that sometimes also had the character of a religion, the Egyptian religion, Oriental religions in Syria and Mesopotamia, African believes in rural North Africa and many more. When the Empire came under political, military and economic pressure, they needed some kind of ideology that could keep the many different ethnic groups together ... and Christianity was one of the few non-ethnocentric religions that could offer such a uniting ideology. That was the main advantage of Christianity, maybe the only one.
Thank you for all your work. I have greater hope of resolving many personal issues that I think arose and were compounded (over 74 years) because of the lack of inter/intra-cultural context for Paul’s apparently random or selective Judaising tendency… especially morally. I am also interested in John 8 where ethnicity as sacred authority (lineage) is the theme… Abraham, the Devil, illegitimate, the Father and their various significances are discussed. The contextless moralising of my various Christian traditions has done a Romans 7 job on me (counter productive in puritan(-iical) terms, also rendering me rather irrelevant but for the fact that this burdensome version of poorly contextualised moralising is so widespread. I realised long ago that “us/we” often is an ethnic use (we Jews), not a Gentile believer reference. It is “interesting” living as neither Jew nor “Greek”, bond or free, Catholic or Reformed. Thanks again for your work and for sharing it widely.
In 44:19... What contributed to the spread of Christianity? economic, social, politics ? What? The good professor said " I don't know " , to try to answer that question you have to bring the God factor on behalf of Christianity...
Christianity promised eternal afterlife. Christianity had good social services. Constantine needed soldiers badly, so he relaxed prohibitions to Catholicism, now he had Catholics who were fecund, produced soldiers who fought to the death. Paul had a very prolific imaginative pen, promising resurrection.
Prof. Frederiksen, What is the evidence as to whether the Christian Bible references to the Jewish scripture came from the Septaguint or vice versa. Usually I hear commentators say the CB quotes come from the Septaguint. But Rabbi Tovia Singer, who is very bright, but not a historian, afaik, says the current Septaguint was written to match the Christian Bible.
[Gentiles attended open sessions of Jewish religious meetings] *Could that be where people like Paul learned about Judaism?* Paul seems to know general themes and several details about the Hebrew Bible, but still has fundamental misunderstandings and his citations are not from directly the Hebrew Bible, but correspond to the Septaguint.
