Summary Of Mandatory Proof By Shaun Fredriksen

Paula Fredriksen’s article “Mandatory Retirement: Ideas in the study of Christian origins whose time has come to go” goes into detail on words and ideas that she believes should be cast out of the Christian religion altogether. She talks about how the terms conversion, nationalism, religio licita, and monotheism lead to inaccurately dating and clouding the way we view parts of Christianity and its origins. Throughout this essay I will explain the main points in the article, then go into the article's implications on our studies throughout our class. Fredriksen's essay has many further implications that correlate strongly with our study in ‘Models of the Church’. Fredrikson starts with the first term she believes should be retired: Conversion.

She says that this term can easily cloud our view of ancient religions as a whole, leading them to be viewed much differently than they truly were. The last term Fredriksen wants retired is Monotheism, or the belief in only one god. Early in this section, Fredriksen says “My point, quite simply, is that ancient monotheists were polytheists,” (Fredriksen, 242), clearly stating that the term monotheism is misdiagnosing what these ancient peoples truly were. These people were polytheists and worshiped multiple gods at once, as she says “The ancient world, by contrast, was filled with gods, and the people who lived in it—even members of Jewish and of Christian communities—knew this to be the case,” (Fredriksen, 243). She explains that this was part of their ethnic identity many times, not just a religious decision. The first major implication in this article comes from Fredriksen discussing how the word conversion should be retired. She discusses the debate of those saying he should not be referred to as a convert and also those who say he should be referred to as

Saying Paul did not convert implies there is no basis for a religion here, and there is no ‘Model of the Church’ for Christianity at all. Religio licita brings a very fascinating set of ideas to how we view religions at this time. It can skew our views of both Jewish and Christian culture at this time, which similarly, with various other terms in the article, cloud our views of how these people really were. This is relevant to us and especially our class due to its implications on the church at this time. When learning whether this term means “permitted religion” or “legal religion”, it can change our view of how these religions functioned fundamentally, along with how they were treated. As Fredriksen says, “Apart from (only implicitly) in Tertullian, religio licita is nowhere attested in any ancient source. But its usefulness as a term of historical analysis is compromised not because of this slight attestation, but because of its utter wrong-headedness in obscuring the essential connection in antiquity between cult and ethnicity,” (Fredriksen, 239). Blurring this completely alters our view of the model of the church at this time and how not only Christians, but all people