Do as I Say, Not as They Do: Social Construction in the Epistle of Barnabas Through Canonical Interpretation and Ritual
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Scholars have not yet expounded on the importance and rationale of a key metaphor found in the Epistle of Barnabas: the circumcision of hearing (Barn. 9.1–3). In part, that is because the significance of this metaphor does not directly contribute to the theological outlook or background of Barnabas, which are topics that have largely preoccupied Barnabas scholarship. Yet, not only is this metaphor significant, but its significance lies in its social and communal implications. To explore these implications, I draw upon interdisciplinary research on canon and ritual. Research in these areas has independently demonstrated that canon and ritual are fundamental elements of any group, and I employ theoretical tools from these research areas to explain how Barnabas attempts to create and/or sustain his group by offering a new canon (or canonical interpretation) that could only be understood through the circumcision of hearing. Owing to the theoretical richness of canon and ritual, my study can also serve as a methodological template to examine the dynamics of other communal groups.
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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 | 0.001 | 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) | 0.009 | 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".