Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bruce Barton was an advertising executive and the author of a best-selling life of Christ, The Man Nobody Knows (1925). Although they were immensely popular, Barton's books are dismissed by scholars today as theologically empty justifications for consumer capitalism. Through an analysis of letters from readers, this essay argues that Barton's work was part of the ''lived religion'' of ordinary Christians, whatever its intellectual or theological failings. First, it filled a vacuum in advice in modern America. Second, it finessed the impersonal scale of urban life by presenting Jesus as a friend. Third, it rendered irrelevant deeply felt contradictions in Protestant America between religion and science, fundamentalism and modernism. I demonstrate a gap between intellectuals and ordinary readers that has implications for our own scholarly practices. Bruce Barton était cadre dans une agence de publicité et est l'auteur d'un best-seller sur la vie du Christ, The Man Nobody Knows (« L'homme que personne ne connaît ») (1925). Bien qu'extrêmement populaires auprès du grand public, les oeuvres de Barton sont ignorées des chercheurs, pour qui elles sont vides de sens théologique et ne constituent que de vaines justifications au capitalisme et á la consommation. Grâce á l'analyse de lettres des lecteurs, cet essai se propose de montrer que l'oeuvre de Barton, quelles que soient ses failles intellectuelles ou théologiques, s'inscrit dans le cadre de la « religion vécue » des Chrétiens ordinaires. D'abord, elle comble un vide de conseils moraux en Amérique moderne. Ensuite, elle humanise certains aspects impersonnels de la vie urbaine en présentant Jésus-Christ comme une sorte d'ami. Enfin, elle neutralise les contradictions, qui marquaient profondément l'Amérique protestante, entre la religion et les sciences, entre le fondamentalisme et le modernisme. L'étude montre qu'il y a une grande différence entre les intellectuels et les lecteurs ordinaires, et que cette différence peut avoir des implications pour nos pratiques de recherche universitaire.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".