Exploring the Ethiopic <i>Book of the Cock</i>, An Apocryphal Passion Gospel from Late Antiquity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Mashafa dorho, or Book of the Cock, is an apocryphal passion narrative that survives in an Ethiopic ( ) version, which in turn has clearly been translated from an Arabic Vorlage. The anonymous author describes it as an oral teaching (the terms are dersān, “homily, discourse,” and temhert, “doctrine, instruction”) that he or she received from the apostles themselves. One of the author's main concerns is to relate “in detail” (4:18) “all that has happened” to Jesus (4:8). At the end of the narrative, the author acknowledges his or her debt to John the Evangelist, who was—“in tension with, yet finally in harmony with Peter”—one of the foremost eyewitnesses to the events of the passion. Although a fragment of the Book of the Cock has long been known to Western scholars, and the entire work enjoys to this day a privileged place in the liturgy of the Ethiopian church, the antiquity of the traditions that it preserves has not been recognized; hence the claim to have “newly discovered” an apocryphal text, the origins of which lie in the fifth or sixth century C.E.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".