'Salted With Fire' (Mark 9.42-50): Style, Oracles and (Socio)Rhetorical Gospel Criticism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent rhetorical criticism of the Gospels has tended to focus on formal 'patterns of argumentation' and on their redactional variation in Gospel literary tradition. Partly from fear of backsliding into aesthetic and/or devotional readings, partly from impatience to differentiate specific social movements within early Christianity, New Testament rhetorical criticism has analysed the Gospels essentially from the argumentation-theoretical angle of their presumed displays and specializations of conventional rationalities. Style variation and characterization are treated more as elements in formal argumentation than as persuasive in themselves. The article explores Jesus' strange yet pivotal speech in Mk 9.42-50 to illustrate the inadequacy of an argumentation theory focused on enthymemes and chreias to account for Markan oracular speech ( logia). Mk 9.42-50 is often read as an instance of catchword agglomeration, yet it is one of the Markan Jesus' few major speeches. The speech does have a discernable purpose, not only in the Markan narrative con text, but in itself as a rhetorical unit: Jesus is placing Mark's readers under a curse of office as leaders. Neither Matthew nor Luke found the Markan Jesus' speech sufficiently persuasive in its imprecatory rhetoric to warrant imitation. We must entertain the possibility that here and elsewhere Markan rhetoric demanded too much of either its implied or its historical audiences: Markan rhetorics may have proven too experimental to secure early Christian audiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".