From the free press, this is Honestly and I'm Barry Weiss.
It's Christmas, a holiday celebrated by 2.4 billion people around the world.
A holiday which centers on a 2,000-year-old story about a Jewish man born in Bethlehem who became a rabbi and who died when the Romans executed him in Jerusalem.
But what's hard to remember, and perhaps something that many people don't know,
is that the first people who believed in Jesus didn't think they were starting a new religion.
They were a small group of Jews in Judea who thought of themselves as history's last generation and who believed that Jesus was a descendant of King David and that he was their Messiah.
Of course, as we all know now, history didn't end.
They weren't history's last generation.
Instead, they became remembered as history's first Christians.
How did that happen?
When did Christ's followers begin to see themselves as distinct and separate from Judaism?
These first few centuries are essential for understanding not just Christianity and Judaism,
but the way ideas spread and why and why many of the ideas formed in this period,
the good transformative ones, but also some very bad ones,
how they still persist in our world today.
My guest today, Paula Fredrickson, has spent her career studying this period of history.
She is one of the world's leading scholars of early Christianity and the author of many, many books,
including When Christians Were Jews, the First Generation, Paul,
the Pagan's Apostle, and Ancient Christianities, the first 500 years.
Paula was born in Rhode Island, and she now lives in Jerusalem,