Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

You are about to hear a free preview of this week's episode. To hear the full episode,

and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at quillette.com and click the

subscribe button. And this week on the podcast, we're going to be getting into the Christmas

spirit early, and in the most festive way imaginable, with a deep

dive into the theology and liturgy of the first Christian communities.

With me to discuss this subject is Paula Fredrickson, formerly the William Goodwin-Orelio,

Professor of Scripture at Boston University, and more recently a distinguished visiting professor

in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her new book,

published by Princeton University Press, is titled Ancient Christianity's, the first 500 years.

As she'll discuss the plural noun in that title,

Christianity,

encapsulates her thesis,

which is that the religion we call Christianity

was practiced and expressed in many different forms

prior to the 4th century AD,

which is when the Roman emperor established the faith as the imperial creed.

When that happened, 1700 years ago, all those varied Christian and proto-Christian communities

around the Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East came under imperial pressure to conform to the official version of the faith

that would emerge at the First Council of Nicaea.

As we all know, that didn't stop rival sex and movements from emerging,

...