Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This book is a study of the movies made about Jesus, from the earliest silent films through to Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. Its main argument is that these movies fit into the “biopic” (biographical film) genre and they tell the story of Jesus according to the standard biopic template. The Jesus biopics exhibit three principal characteristics. First, they make a claim to historicity or historical authenticity. Second, and at the same time, they undermine that claim in ways that are both subtle and overt. Third, they use the Jesus story as a lens through which to view and to work out contemporary concerns, such as sexuality, ethnic identity, theology, and the relationship between religion and politics. The approach is thematic, and the chapters are organized by character, including the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and God), Jesus' friends and associates (Mary Magdalene and Judas) and his enemies (Pharisees, Caiaphas, and Pilate). Despite the title, the book addresses films made both in the United States and elsewhere. The point is not to overlook the profound differences among the various national cinemas which have produced Jesus movies, but to argue that all bear the imprint of the Hollywood biopic, whether in imitation of its conventions or in conscious resistance to them.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".