The Apostle of Failure: Queer Refusal, the Corinthian Letters, and Paul’s Unflattering Characterization in the Acts of Thecla
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the Acts of Thecla’s unflattering presentation of the character Paul, as part of the reception of Paul’s Corinthian letters into the second century. Informed by feminist and queer biblical interpretations of the Corinthian exchange, it shows how the Acts of Thecla picks up on tensions over authority with Paul’s teachings on baptism, eschatology, and sexual renunciation in its portrait of Paul. Engaging Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, the article suggests that the Acts of Thecla reads Paul’s letters this way in service of the social critique and queer antagonism that it holds up for its second and third century readers. Where Halberstam claims “queer failure” as resistance to capitalist profit, reproductive futurity, and neoliberal notions of success today, here Thecla’s story is read as a narrative of refusal in its own time. Paul’s muddled encounters with Thecla, steeped in the Corinthian exchange, it concludes, are central to this ancient tale about being, and improbably surviving, outside and at the edges of imperial, civic, and familial frames.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| 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".