Mandatory retirement: Ideas in the study of Christian origins whose time has come to go

Abstract

Historians of ancient Christianity routinely describe its social and religious environment by relying on certain common-sense academic terms. In this essay, the author argues that four of these termis—conversion, nationalism, religio licita ("legit cult") and monotheism—in fact import anachronism and distortion into historical descriptions of the cultural context of Christianity and its origins, in the end obscuring precisely the evidence that they are mobilized to illumine. In making the argument that these terms be dropped, the author also presents a synthetic reconstruction of the ways that Jews, Christians and pagans interacted during the formative centuries of the new movement.

Monotheisme Yahudi Kuno dan Doktrin Trinitas

“…164 Pada tahun 2006, Paula Fredriksen menyerukan agar kita sama sekali tidak boleh lagi menggunakan istilah "monotheisme" untuk menggambarkan mengenai karakter teologis Yudaisme Kuno dan Kekristenan mula-mula. 165 Istilah ini harus "undur diri" dari kosakata studi sejarah mengenai Yudaisme Bait Suci Kedua dan Kekristenan mula-mula. Ia mengklaim bahwa pengertian modern mengenai "monotheisme" sama sekali tidak terdapat dalam benak orang-orang Yahudi kuno dan orang-orang Kristen mula-mula.…”

Interpreting conversion in antiquity (and beyond)

“…Historical critiques of Nock focus on his narrow distinction between “conversion” and “adhesion” (Bøgh, 2014, 2015; Fredriksen, 1986, 2006); nonetheless the framework he laid out 80 years ago remains basic to the phenomenological approach to conversion, even as particular methods and objects of study expand. Conversion is a specific kind of religious experience; its permutations allow scholars to distinguish what’s different about different religious traditions (“conversion in Islam,” “conversion in Buddhism,” etc.)…”

What Christ Does, God Does: Surveying Recent Scholarship on Christological Monotheism

“…Paula Fredriksen has challenged the assertion that a strict, monolithic monotheism existed in ancient Judaism at all. In fact, she calls the assertion of a strict monotheism ‘a large part of the problem’ in understanding early Christology (2007: 35). She writes: Ancient monotheism spoke to the imagined architecture of the cosmos, not to its absolute population.…”