Honestly with Bari Weiss · The Free Press

The Birth of Christianity

December 24, 2025·1 hr 10 min·4 clips

Paula Fredriksen explains that 'Jesus was Palestinian' is ahistorical because the word Palestine is a Roman Latinization of Philistine, coined by Rome in 135 CE to erase Judea after the Bar Kokhba revolt — decades after Jesus died.

Christmas is not ornamental here. The episode uses the holiday's huge scale, 2.4 billion people, to work back toward a Jewish man born in Bethlehem and executed by Romans in Jerusalem. The host slows the story down before Christianity has a name. Jesus is placed among Jews in Judea who thought they were living in history's last generation, which changes the question. This is less about who founded Christianity and more about how a messianic Jewish movement became a Gentile identity with its own borders. Paul is the hinge, but not in the flattened version people sometimes inherit. The guest separates Paul's argument to Gentiles from later Christian pressure on Jews to abandon circumcision. That distinction does real work. By the mid-second century, Gentile Christians are building identity from Jewish scriptures in Greek, before any New Testament exists. They do not keep kosher or follow biblical law, yet those same scriptures remain their inheritance. The host names the tension plainly. Christianity needs Judaism and the prophecies of the Hebrew Bible for its claims, while Jewish life continuing after Jesus becomes a problem Christianity cannot quite explain away. The guest sharpens the point: Jewish refusal is not merely annoying to early Christians; it exposes their anxiety. Anger grows out of that dependence. The excerpt then connects second-century literature to the pressure of identity formation, before ending on Judaism's search for justice that is humane and fair.

As heard by us

An origin story about Christianity's break from Judaism, and the tensions that shaped it.

The conversation frames Christianity as an origin problem: how a Jewish movement in Judea, centered on Jesus as Messiah, became distinct from Judaism over the first few centuries.

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Why you'd press play

You want Christianity's origin story with real historical tension.

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