Cognition and Visualization in Early Christian Interpretation of Psalm 23
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The interpretation of Psalm 23 in early Christianity was remarkably uniform. Christians in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries consistently interpreted this psalm as a proclamation and description of how God, the good shepherd, guides his sheep into his flock, the church. The allusions to “water” in v. 2 and to “table” and “cup” in v. 5 came to be seen as particularly significant for the interpretation of this psalm, linking it to the Christian initiation rites of baptism and the Eucharist. This interpretation, however, is not merely the result of allegorical or figurative exegesis, as is often assumed. Rather, the uniformity across the Christian world suggests that there is a more complex process at work. Drawing on recent developments within socio-rhetorical interpretation, specifically what is known as “visual exegesis,” I argue that patristic interpretation of this psalm is the result of the convergence between scriptural, cultural, and liturgical images in the Christian imagination. By attending to the cognitive dimensions of early Christian interpretation, I suggest, we can better appreciate early Christians’ theological engagement with Scripture.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".