A Jew in Celsus' True Doctrine? An examination of Jewish Anti-Christian polemic in the second century C.E
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the major obstacles to presenting a more balanced assessment of Jewish-Christian relations in the 2nd century C.E. is the virtual absence of Jewish literary sources for the period. Though Jews figure prominently in the writings of the 2nd century Church Fathers and later Christian Apologists, it is becoming increasingly evident in scholarship that these texts portray Jews in a tendentious manner, often reveal more about Christian self-definition than they do about either Jews or Judaism, and tend to talk at Jews more than they talk with Jews. Nevertheless, there is one oft-neglected work that might help to remedy these problems and contribute to a better understanding of Jewish perceptions of Christianity in the 2nd century. There is reason to believe that embedded within Celsus' True Doctrine are authentic Jewish arguments against Christianity. This article presents a source-critical analysis of Celsus, analyzing the nature of Celsus' debt to 2nd-century Jewish sources and their significance for Jewish-Christian relations at that time.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 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".