A relevance-theoretical perspective on the question of why Jesus never wrote a book
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many reasons have been given for why Jesus never wrote anything. Some have argued that this was because he, or his audience, was illiterate; some that it was because Jewish rabbis only gave oral teaching; others that it was to avoid the idolatrizing of a divinely authored book. Moreover, given the deep reverence among the Jews for the written word found in the Torah, and the fact that Jesus claimed for himself the same authority as that upon which the Torah was based, it would seem legitimate to ask the question: why did he not seek to displace the Torah by a book of an equivalent or greater authority, like that claimed for the Koran in the Islamic tradition? The goal of this paper will be to bring to the table some linguistic arguments for why Jesus never committed any of his teachings to writing based on certain characteristics of natural language that have been highlighted by Relevance Theory, namely the underspecified nature of linguistic meaning and the consequent need for some way of narrowing down the range of possible interpretations of an utterance, as well as on the decontextualized character of written language.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 it