Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire: Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians. By David Wheeler-Reed
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire: Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians challenges the view that current American sexual mores—ones that sustain heterosexual marriage and family—are “Judeo-Christian” values. Conversely, the sexual morality that guides conservative Americans, argues David Wheeler-Reed, does not reflect that of early Christians, who largely advocated an end to marriage and child-bearing. If conservative Americans want to look for an ancient corollary to their focus on the family, then according to Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire, they should look to the imperialist policies of the Roman Emperor Augustus. Relying on Foucault and Althusser, Wheeler-Reed examines discourses about sexuality, marriage, and procreation in both Roman antiquity and modern America (xv and 105), and asks how these discourses variously operate as ideologies that support the regulation of procreation—and in the case of the Roman state or America, shore up nationalistic interests (xiv). His argument is not that American conservatives have consciously adopted Roman imperial policies, but rather that there are strong structural similarities to their focus on procreative, heterosexual marriage with the Emperor Augustus’s marriage legislation. Moreover, Wheeler-Reed demonstrates that early Christian discourses of sexuality were not “novel” or “unprecedented” in the ancient world, but that what they cultivated over time was the promotion of celibacy, often in opposition to those who championed marriage and family (xvi–xviii).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".