You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet.

I'm Pete Ends and I'm Jared Byas.

Love already welcome to this episode of the podcast and our topic is when Christians were Jews

and are a guest is Paul of Frederiksen and she is a scholar who needs no introduction to people who

know all this stuff about New Testament scholarship. She taught at Boston College. She is

Emerita at Boston College and she's also a distinguished visiting professor at Hebrew University

in Jerusalem. She's a widely respected scholar of the origins of Christianity and of Judaism

around the time of Jesus and Paul. And yeah, we talked about this topic of when Christians were Jews

which means the beginning, right?

Well, yeah, it's really making sure that we contextualize the New Testament in a way that's

I think faithful to how this whole thing began. And I know it would have been pretty common in my

tradition to contrast Christians and Jews as these very separate religions and that's a mistake

whenever you look at the New Testament, how it was written out of what was it written and I thought

Paul did a good job explaining that. Yeah, I mean there are different approaches to

understanding the origins of Christianity in the first century with respect to Judaism because

like you said, Jared, you know, it's almost natural, it's wrong, but it's almost natural for

Christians to think, well, you know, Paul and Jesus are Christians and then there's Judaism,

but of course they were Jews. And so in scholarship and the history of thought about this,

sometimes there is a antagonism. So it's Jesus or Paul against Judaism. And then there's

Jesus and Paul or let's forget Jesus, Paul and Judaism. In other words, there are two separate

tracks for how God deals with Jews one way, Gentiles another way. And then there's another view which is

Paul is Jewish and he operates within a Jewish way of thinking. And that affects how we,

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