The Social Relationships of Gospel Writers: New Insights from Inscriptions Commending Greek Historiographers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholarship traditionally situates the social lives of NT gospel writers exclusively within the Jesus movement and local Christ groups, showing inadequate consideration for how the literary abilities of gospel writers might have provided the basis for social interaction and group formation with Greeks, Romans and Judeans of common occupations and/or cultural interests. In order to provide a fuller portrait of the social and historical setting of gospel literature, this article explores the ranges of social activities practiced, and networks developed, by comparable writers—broadly, Greek historiographers. Data from the epigraphy about the social practices of historiographers help to provide controls for speculations about the setting of NT gospel composition, and raise new questions about this literature possibly emerging from networks and guilds forged between people of similar scribal professions and/or cultural interests that cut through ancient Christianity rather than originating from within the Jesus movement exclusively. Scholarship on the social setting of the Q Gospel (i.e., scribal networks) and the Gospel of Thomas (i.e., philosophical formations) has made arguments in this direction on the basis of other evidence, and that model appears most historically plausible for the narrative gospels, as well.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".