Paul, the "apostle to the gentiles," urges his ex-pagan auditors to observe some Jewish law, but he is not (perhaps especially given his audience) a halakhic thinker: he’s improvising.

Paul is attempting to come up with a program of mitigated Jewish law-observance for non-Jews. He defends this proposition not through legal reasoning, but via his apocalyptic commitments. He’s teaching a kind of Judaism 2.0 for gentiles. This presentation will explore, then, what Paul says and why about Jewish law in the face of his commitment to an imminent end of time.



Paula Fredriksen, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is Aurelio Professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University. In 2009, she became a member of the Department of Comparative Religions at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2018. An historian of ancient Christianity, she also writes on pagan-Jewish-Christian relations in the Roman Empire. Among her publications are Augustine and the Jews (Yale 2010) and Paul. The Pagans’ Apostle (Yale 2017). When Christians Were Jews (Yale 2018) appeared as Hebrew Edition: כשהנוצרים היו יהודים (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2021). Her most recent study, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years, has just been published by Princeton University Press (2024).