It is Re-Written: Lessons from Chester Brown’s<i>Mary Wept</i>on Biblical Traditions and Biblical Scholarship in the Wild
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chester Brown’s critically acclaimed 2016 graphic novel, Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus: Prostitution and Religious Obedience in the Bible, raises important questions about the right—and the right way—to interpret religious traditions outside sanctuary doors, and Religious Studies outside the Ivory Tower. With the help of generous notes and appendices, which take up a full third of the book, Mary Wept reworks Bible stories and biblical studies for a general audience to create a conspiracy-theory-based Christian apology for sex work. This article provides an introduction to Brown’s book and its relevant book-and-Bible-related contexts, and argues that Mary Wept represents neither Bible adaptation nor popularized biblical scholarship per se. Brown’s book is instead, I argue, best understood as a new species of “rewritten Bible” claiming the authority of scholarship as surrogate religious authority. It is therefore a pop culture weather vane of great interest to Religious Studies scholars, not least as a reminder of our public image and our professional responsibilities.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".