A relevance-theoretical perspective on the question of why Jesus never wrote a book
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.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.073 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".