Paula Fredriksen > Quotes

“Martyrdom” in this view is not an event—the violent death of a Christian—but a form of discourse, a literary genre. These owed much to the depictions of violence against those Jews who resisted forced Hellenization during the Maccabean Revolt of the mid-second century BCE.”
― Paula Fredriksen, Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years

“We have a better sense of how things worked if we imagine the Torah as widely dispersed sheet music: the notes were the notes, but Jews played a lot of improv.”
― Paula Fredriksen, When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation