Slandering the Jew: Sexuality and Difference in Early Christian Texts Edited by SusannaDrake. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Pp. 176. Cloth, $55.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drake's compelling work is a welcome addition to scholarship on anti-Judean rhetoric in early Christianity. The monograph is a dense and sophisticated examination of early Christian capitalization on the broader ancient use of sexual slander as a powerful weapon to assert dominance over an opponent, in their case against Jews. Drake identifies the formation of an artificial dichotomy to aid Christians in demarcating themselves from, as well as demonstrating their superiority over, their Jewish counterparts in contexts of a high degree of hybridity. In contrasting their construction of Jews as unable to control carnal desires which contributed to their erroneous literal interpretation of scripture (and vice versa), Christians presented themselves as chaste and spiritually minded, characterizing their distinction as one between flesh and spirit. Drake examines the origins of this strategy in Justin Martyr and the letter of Barnabas, discusses Origen's reinterpretation of Paul in this light, and considers the appropriation and allegorization of the story of Susanna and the Elders, where Susanna represents the chaste church vulnerable to the lecherous advances of Jews. The final chapter examines John Chrysostom's gendered and sexualized invective against Jews and utilization of the prophetic images of animals to present Jews as the subjects of justified violence. Closing remarks observe the impact that this rhetoric had on lived experience and imperial legislation regarding Jews and Christians in the fourth and fifth centuries. The work is highly recommended to scholars interested in early Christian-Jewish polemics and ancient rhetoric regarding gender and sexuality.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".