Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parable interpretation is currently dominated by the view that Jesus' parables had a dynamic and life-changing effect on his audiences. This article challenges that view, arguing that it arises from an inappropriate application of the theological view of parables as 'language-events' to historical research. Using J.L. Austin's concept of 'perforrnative language' as a starting point, examples are adduced of instances in which stories and other cultural productions are described as 'doing things' to audiences. These include D. Freedberg's work on the power of images, examples from ancient writers (Plutarch, Augustine) and evidence from traditional (West African) culture where words are attributed with power. An attempt to reconstruct the cultural milieu ('performance arena') of Jesus' parabolic speech is made using K.E. Bailey's work with contemporary Middle Eastern villagers and A. Luria's psychological research on Uzbek peasants in the 1930s; both of which suggest that Jesus' 'Mediterranean Jewish peasant' audiences would have experienced the parables as opaque, rather than as 'earth-shattering'. W.R. Herzog's hypothesis that the parables were used by Jesus in a 'pedagogy of the oppressed' is presented as one plausible 'performance arena', and an alternative model is developed using studies of Eastern European Jewish folklore where parables are used to ameliorate 'problematic social situations'. The Parable of the Wicked Tenants (Mk 12.1-9) is used as a case study of a parable that might have been used for irenic, rather than provocative, purposes.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".