<i>Opera Evangelica</i>: A Lost Collection of Christian Apocrypha
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Within the holdings of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto there is a curious, rarely examined handwritten book entitledOpera Evangelica, containing translations of several apocryphal works in English. It opens with a lengthy Preface that provides an antiquarian account of Christian apocrypha along with a justification for translating the texts. Unfortunately, the book's title page gives little indication of its authorship or date of composition, apart from an oblique reference to the translator as ‘I. B.’ But citations in the Preface to contemporary scholarship place the volume around the turn of the eighteenth century, predating the first published English-language compendium of Christian apocrypha inprintby Jeremiah Jones (1726). A second copy of the book has been found in the Cambridge University Library, though its selection of texts and material form diverges from the Toronto volume in some notable respects. This article presentsOpera Evangelicato a modern audience for the first time. It examines various aspects of the work: the material features and history of the two manuscripts; the editions of apocryphal texts that lie behind its translations; the views expressed on Christian apocrypha by its mysterious author; and its place within manuscript publication and English scholarship around the turn of the eighteenth century. Scholars of Christian apocrypha delight in finding ‘lost gospels’ but inOpera Evangelicawe have something truly unique: a long-lost collection of Christian apocrypha.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".