The Gods of Jews and Early Christians | Paula Fredriksen | MythVision

Who is Paula Fredriksen?
Paula Fredriksen (born 1951) is an American historian and scholar of early Christianity. She held the position of William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of Scripture at Boston University from 1990 to 2010. Now emerita, she has been a distinguished visiting professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, since 2009. Fredriksen specializes in the history of Christianity, tracing its development from its roots in an apocalyptic, messianic sect within Second Temple Judaism to its evolution into an extension of the Late Roman imperial government and its strengthening in the post-Roman West, from the 1st to the 7th centuries CE. She works to reconstruct the many ways that various ancient Mediterranean peoples-pagans, Jews and Christians-interacted with the many special social agents (e.g., high Gods, apocalyptic forces, heavenly bodies, godlings, spirits, and divine humans) that populated both the ancient flat-disced Earth and geocentric universe.

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What is Early Christian?
Early Christianity, the period of Christianity preceding the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. This typically divides historically into the Apostolic Age and the Ante-Nicene Period (from the Apostolic Age until Nicea). The first Christians, as described in the first chapters of the Book of Acts, were all Jews either by birth or conversion and historians refer to them as Jewish Christians. The early Gospel message spread orally, probably originally in Aramaic, and later in Greek. The New Testament's Acts of the Apostles and Epistle to the Galatians record that the first Christian community centered on Jerusalem and that its leaders included Peter, James, the brother of Jesus, and John the Apostle.

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Who is Derek Lambert?
MythVision Podcast (MVP) brings you some of the finest information surrounding Mythology. Knowledge from a variety of people in search of a better understanding of ancient text. We discuss mythology, syncretism, astrotheology, gematria, sacred geometry, secret societies, ancient languages, history, prophecy, scholarship, conspiracies, heretical ideas, myth interpretations and much more.

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What is Polytheism?
Polytheism is the worship of or belief in multiple deities, usually as a pantheon of gods and goddesses. In most religions which accept polytheism, the different gods and goddesses are representations of forces of nature or ancestral principles, and can be viewed either as autonomous or as aspects or emanations of a creator deity or transcendental absolute principle (monistic theologies), which manifests immanently in nature (panentheistic and pantheistic theologies). Most of the polytheistic deities of ancient religions, with the notable exceptions of the Ancient Egyptian and Hindu deities, were conceived as having physical bodies. Polytheism is a type of theism. Within theism, it contrasts with monotheism, the belief in a singular God, in most cases transcendent. Important polytheistic religions practiced today include Chinese traditional religion, Hinduism, Japanese Shinto, and various neopagan faiths.

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What is Judaism?
Judaism encompasses the religion, philosophy, culture and way of life of the Jewish people. Judaism is a monotheistic religion, with the Torah as its foundational text (part of the larger text known as the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible), and supplemental oral tradition represented by later texts such as the Midrash and the Talmud. Judaism is considered by religious Jews to be the expression of the covenantal relationship that God established with the Children of Israel. Judaism includes a wide corpus of texts, practices, theological positions, and forms of organization. Within Judaism there are a variety of movements, most of which emerged from Rabbinic Judaism, which holds that God revealed his laws and commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai in the form of both the Written and Oral Torah. The Jews are an ethnoreligious group and include those born Jewish and converts to Judaism. In 2012, the world Jewish population was estimated at about 14 million, or roughly 0.2% of the total world population. About 42% of all Jews reside in Israel and about 42% reside in the United States and Canada, with most of the remainder living in Europe.

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What is Myth?
Mythology refers to a collection of sacred, traditional tales from a specific culture that explain natural phenomena, world origins, and cultural values. This often featuring gods, goddesses, and heroes. It serves as a lens for interpreting shared human experiences through stories, rituals, and art. Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is totally different from the ordinary sense of the term myth, meaning a belief that is not true, as the veracity of a piece of folklore is entirely irrelevant to determining whether it constitutes a myth. Myths are often endorsed by religious and secular authorities, and may be natural or supernatural in character. Many societies group their myths, legends, and history together, considering myths and legends to be factual accounts of their remote past. In particular, creation myths take place in a primordial age when the world had not achieved its later form. Origin myths explain how a society's customs, institutions, and taboos were established and sanctified. National myths are narratives about a nation's past that symbolize the nation's values. There is a complex relationship between recital of myths and the enactment of rituals.

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Who is GOD?
In monotheism and henotheism, God is conceived as the Supreme Being and principal object of faith. The concept of God as described by theologians commonly includes the attributes of omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited power), omnipresence (present everywhere), omnibenevolence (perfect goodness), divine simplicity, and eternal and necessary existence. In theism, God is the creator and sustainer of the universe In deism, God is the creator, but not the sustainer, of the universe Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one God or in the oneness of God In pantheism, God is the universe itself In atheism, God is purported not to exist, while deemed unknown or unknowable within the context of agnosticism.

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