Background
Paula Fredriksen was born on January 6, 1951, in North Kingston, Rhode Island, United States, to John Wilhelm and Erselia Lucy Fredriksen.
Paula Fredriksen was born on January 6, 1951, in North Kingston, Rhode Island, United States, to John Wilhelm and Erselia Lucy Fredriksen.
In 1973, Paula received a Bachelor in History and Religion from Massachusetts Wellesley College. She also has a Diploma in Theology from Oxford University in England in 1974, and a Doctor of Philosophy in History of Religions from Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1979.
In 1978, Fredriksen began her career in the Department of Religion of Princeton University as a lecturer. From 1979 to 1980 she was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Later, she relocated to the University of California, Berkeley, where from 1980 to 1986 she was an assistant professor in the Department of History. Then, from 1986 to 1989, Paula worked as an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies, of Pittsburgh University.
Later, from 1990 to 2010, Fredriksen held the position of William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University. She also was a Lady Davis Professor at Lady Davis Foundation. Currently, Paula is the William Goodwin Aurelio Chair Emerita of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Paula Fredriksen has published widely on the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity, and on pagan-Jewish-Christian relations in the Roman Empire. Author of Augustine on Romans (1982) and From Jesus to Christ (1988; 2000), her Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, won a 1999 National Jewish Book Award.
More recently, she has explored the development of Christian anti-Judaism, and Augustine’s singular response to it, in Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (2010); and has investigated the shifting conceptions of God and of humanity in Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012). Her latest study, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (2017), places Paul’s Jewish messianic message to gentiles within the wider world of ancient Mediterranean culture.
Paula Fredriksen is known as a prolific author who specializes in the social and intellectual history of ancient Christianity, from the late Second Temple period to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and of pagan-Jewish-Christian relations in the Roman Empire.
In 1999, Paula received a National Jewish Book Award for Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity.
(In this exciting book, Paula Fredriksen explains the vari...)
1988(Paula Fredriksen, renowned historian and author of From C...)
2000(Augustine and the Jews sheds new light on the origins of ...)
2008(Ancient Christians invoked sin to account for an astonish...)
2012Paula was a Roman Catholic, but she later converted to Judaism.
Paula Fredriksen is a member of the North American Patristic Society, Society of Biblical Literature, American Academy of Religion, Boston Theological Institute, Institute of Christian and Jewish Studies, and Phi Beta Kappa.
Fredriksen is married to Alfred I. Tauber, professor of philosophy emeritus and Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine emeritus at Boston University. They have three children: Aliza Rachel, Noa Miriam and Hannah Daniella.
Born in 1947
Alfred I. Tauber is an American philosopher and historian of science, who, from 1993 to 2010, served as Director of the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University.
