Bibliographic record
Abstract
Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus. Edited by Tom Holmen and Stanley E. Porter. (Leiden: Brill, 2011. 4 vols: I. How to Study the Historical Jesus; II. The Study ofjesus; III. 3 The Historical Jesus; IV. 4 Individual Studies. Pp. xxi, 3652. $1,329.00, cloth.) Jesus' teaching and preaching perhaps was not that clear even to his disciples, leading him to ask Who do people say that I am? There were diverse answers but the Christian tradition accepted Peter's confession, at least until Hermann Samuel Reimarus in the eighteenth century. Since then, no single voice has prevailed in academic circles. Further, academic research has neither reduced the possible answers nor limited the diversity in approaches and methodologies. Consequently, this Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus uses terms such as morass and maze to describe, quite accurately it must also be confessed, the present state of historical Jesus research. Thus in its attempt to provide academic order, this four volume work should perhaps be described as a roadmap as well as an encyclopedia, close study of which will prevent the scholar and student from straying, sinking in details or becoming lost in the footnotes all too characteristic of the myriad of diverse scholarly monographs devoted to this subject. The editors Tom Holmen (Finland) and Stanley E. Porter (Canada) admit, indeed confess, both the multiplicity of methods, diversities of approaches, and, of course, the resultant differing conclusions. These are the reasons for their massive handbook, one which strives for comprehensiveness, but without sacrificing detail or the opposing viewpoint. The results that could slow or confuse research, are instead, taken by the editors as positive signs of both the interest in the historical Jesus as well as the creativity of contemporary scholarship. Indeed this comprehensive handbook includes chapters contributed by over one hundred scholars from about twenty countries. The breadth is also evident when looking at the individual essays. The variety of notable scholars who contributed to this work is commendable: John Dominic Crossan, James D. G. Dunn, Colin Brown, Scot McKnight and Luke Timothy Johnson, to mention a selection. It is notable that two major scholars in the study of the historical Jesus are not contributors: Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright do not have contributions. There is even a chapter by the British scholar J. D. G. Dunn, Remembering Jesus: How the Quest ofjesus Lost its Way (1:183-206) that sets out his disagreements with many of the presuppositions of the modern quest for the historical Jesus. These include questioning the assumption that what defines Jesus is difference or uniqueness, stressing the importance of Jesus' mission and its oral or tradition transmission. Dunn's chapter, like all the contrihutors, is supported hy an absolute wealth of detailed footnotes. This demonstrates the editors' willingness to include as broad a range of views on the subject. The first volume, How to Study the Historical Jesus, is foundational in that it deals with the question of methodology. Not only has the study of the historical Jesus expanded dramatically since the early twentieth century, but the methods and approaches have diverged widely. Often the choice of one methodology will partly determine the results, or even obscure other results. …
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.087 | 0.047 |
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".