Myth and the Christian Nation: A Social Theory of Religion. By Burton L
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is neither the first nor the last book in which Burton L. Mack has brought his scholarly expertise as a New Testament scholar, historian of Second Temple Judaism and Christian origins, and theorist of religion to bear upon other matters of very contemporary concern. These other matters are, specifically, the current political situation in the United States with its attendant cultural (de-)formations and preoccupying peculiarities. Thus, I find it helpful to begin this review of the book Myth and the Christian Nation (2008) by placing it within the series of works that both precede and follow it, starting with A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (1988) and ending, most recently, with Christian Mentality: The Entanglements of Power, Violence, and Fear (2011). When taken up in this fashion, a certain intellectual trajectory or line of inquiry becomes apparent in which the present book—Myth and the Christian Nation—would register an important but nonetheless still provisional theoretical way-station.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.003 |
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".